Government schooling at its best
Posted on June 24th, 2008 by bile Tags: budget deficit, Citizens Against Government Waste, Connie Calloway, Detroit, education, Federal Bureau of Investigation, government schools, high schools, incompetence, schooling, UncategorizedDr. Connie Calloway, the new superintendent who has spent her first year digging through dirt and incompetence and traditions that don’t make sense, revealed some startling news two weeks ago during an interview:
She confirmed what critics have known for some time, that DPS is not graduating nearly two-thirds of its students.
She confirmed that 22 of the city’s 27 high schools did not make required annual yearly progress — required progress.
She confirmed that DPS has been rife with such incompetence that students did not receive textbooks at the start of the year for 19 years.
She confirmed that the FBI investigation into DPS is not over.
And she confirmed that the district’s budget is about the same as it was eight years ago, even though the number of employees and students has dropped by a third. In 2000, the district spent $1.2 billion to pay 21,203 employees to serve 154,648 students. Last school year, the district spent the same amount of money to pay 15,535 employees and serve 105,000 students. What is being done with the extra money?
After those revelations, parents did not march, teachers did not rally, and Detroit legislators did not hold news conferences to say enough is enough.
But when district officials announced that there might be teacher layoffs to offset a budget deficit that is $400 million counting this year and next, folks jumped up then. The teachers aren’t wrong to protest. The district has so much fat and gristle it can cut plenty before it gets to teachers, including administrators — especially administrators.
As if the teachers don’t deserve to be shit canned? The whole lot of them appears to be pretty useless to me. They make up a super majority of the employees which make up the school system and they have a powerful union. If these people gave a shit about education and the children they are supposed to be serving this situation would not have occured. No privately run school could have ever gotten into this shape.
6 Responses to “Government schooling at its best”
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June 24th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Ha! Privately run schools get themselves into terrible shape all the time. Only difference is they usually don’t have enough money to dig themselves in this deep and they typically go belly up shortly after.
June 24th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Uh yeah. That was the point of the comment. No private school can just steal more from the individuals in the society to continue their failed business strategy.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
They still fail and die and the students get screwed. The majority of private schools are parochial and they receive funds from the church to continue to operate. They couldn’t exist otherwise. Many major private schools receive money from the state so they can break even. Schooling does not fit well into a typical hierarchal business model.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
They don’t because they have competition from a unionized monopoly which uses the threat of violence to get funds in order to operate. Historically they did fine. They provided a service people wanted or failed just like every other business. Even church funded schools have to obey normal market forces. And even after all the bullshit they educate far more efficiently then government schools.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Wait, do you mean “They fail because…” or am I just missing the meaning of the “They don’t because…” in the first line of your response?
June 24th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
It was meant as a continuation of “Schooling does not fit well into a typical herachal business model.”