http://www.freep.com/…

Dr. 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.