Kasia September 4th, 2007
Don’t get me wrong - he’s a Michigan Democrat, so he’s almost certainly bad on life issues. (A few aren’t, but it’s very uncommon.) However, Hansen Clarke used to be my state senator, and every encounter I’ve had with him and his office has been unequivocally positive. I hope I’m wrong about his stance on life issues, but I’m not in his district any more anyway.
The first time I had any exposure to him was at a League of Women Voters event, where many of the then-candidates for Detroit City Council were invited to answer questions and such. At the time, he struck me as basically honest, decent, smart, and about the only non-incumbent there who seemed like he had a chance of winning. He didn’t win. But a couple of years later he ran successfully for the state senate.
I called his office for some information on library funding. The aide I dealt with was friendly, helpful and competent. It was a very positive experience.
Clarke later supported an “Art Walk” that I did that raised money for a lot of causes, including the Detroit Radio Information Service, with which I was then associated as a volunteer.
And then I met him at a legislative reception/meet and greet in May. Again, he seemed (especially for a politician) honest and sincere.
Now he’s calling for an independent audit of the Detroit Public Schools before the Legislature considers a bond request. Some guy called into WWJ this morning complaining about it, saying there had been 12 million dollars in cuts to his district already and now some legislator is talking about trimming fat, blah blah blah.
Look. I am about as pro-public education as you get. Not to say that private schools are evil, or that no one should homeschool - I think private schools are fine as long as they’re not the only viable alternative, and that homeschooling is a necessary right of parents to ensure that their children are safely and effectively educated, particularly when public schools fall short (as they often do these days). I’m not slagging private education or homeschooling. However, I think that a viable, effective public education system is a big part of how we got to be a great country to begin with, and it’s crucial to our future.
Having said that, the Detroit public schools have been a national disgrace for years. They’ve been a pathetically unfunny joke as long as I’ve known anything about them, and I grew up in Detroit (though mercifully not at true Detroit public schools). Last I heard, the Detroit public schools had a graduation rate of less than 50%. That is horrific.
Yes, there are other factors going on. It isn’t just the schools. I realize that. But the schools have been a disaster since at least the late sixties when my mother was teaching in them. I remember her telling me a heartbreaking story about her first year teaching. She taught first grade, and quite a few of her students were in first grade for the second, third, possibly even fourth time. So she sat down with them at the beginning of the year and said “You want to move up to second grade? OK. You need to meet these benchmarks: you need to read at this level, you need to do math at this level, yadda yadda. If you meet these goals by the end of the year, you’ll move up to second grade.” So the end of the year came around, and she submitted her paperwork to promote the appropriate children (which was nearly all of them). The principal called her down to his office and said “You can’t promote all of these kids. There isn’t room for them all in the second grade. You have to hold some of them back.“
Now, that may well have been a lack of money. But an independent audit finds out about things like that. It does (or at least should) discover how effectively you’re using the resources you have, whether you need more in certain areas, and whether you are spending too much on, oh, say, overpaid administrators or secretaries who refuse to take a message. (Yes, I dealt with one such secretary in the DPS.)
Public schools are funded with public monies. They need to be accountable to the public they are supposed to serve. Senator Clarke is dead on the right track with this. And if the DPS really are justified in crying poverty, then the audit should bear that out.
