Tag: DPS

With a state budget $1.8 billion in the red and federal stimulus cash disappearing faster than Vanilla Ice (and leaving just as unpleasant a memory) I'm willing to listen to just about any kind of plan to shake up the status quo in Lansing.  

When the Michigan Education Association lambasted Dillon I was that much more prone to agree with the man.  When Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Cox several days ago supportively praised Dillon's concept I became that much more encouraged by the possibility of bipartisan cooperation and real "change."

This morning, personally, I'm chalking up one more notch on the PRO side of the ledger... spite.  Pure, unadulterated, spite.  

Booth Newspapers reported late yesterday that Governor Jennifer Granholm hates Dillon's idea because, apparently, it is a difficult political issue.  And if that doesn't make you want to find the nearest Granholm apologist and shake him firmly you're a better, more balanced person than me.

"The concern that I have is that this plan is not something that would save money in the budget year we are negotiating or the budget year afterward," Granholm said. "The timing of this is challenging."

Um, hello?  McFly?  McFlyyyy?  Anybody home McFly?  A $1.8 billion CHRONIC budget deficit, a nation's worst 15.2 percent unemployment rate and already a half-million one-time-residents exported to other states... those issues are challenging.  "Timing" has got freaking nothing on the economy the Governor, her number two John Cherry and Dillon himself have done their best over the last half-decade to permanently cripple.  

The "timing is challenging?"  Are you kidding me?  Madame Governor... look around this state!  You're worried that the timing is challenging?  The timing is challenging.  Lamest excuses in the history of lame excuses.  Add that one to the lame excuse hall of fame right alongside "the dog ate my homework" and "I have to wash my hair."

Read on...

Yesterday while the President was turning a long-planned town hall meeting with Macomb County moms and dads into an invitation only speech for Democratic Party donors and big-wigs about Community Colleges a little dose of that "yes we can" attitude was force-fed into the southeast Michigan atmosphere.

If only it'd filtered south a few miles and made it's way into the D, where Robert Bobb has been waging a one-man war with the entrenched Democratic Party education bureaucracy in an effort to turn around one of the most maligned public school districts in the nation.  And the man has been getting things done.

His reward from the all-Dem Detroit Public School board?  A lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop him in his tracks.  The Detroit News:

"We have no problem working with him, but we have a problem with him working around us, (said board President Carla Scott). You can't do something without discussing it with us. You don't have a right to set the policy."

Last week, Gov. Jennifer Granholm's spokeswoman said Bobb, whom the governor appointed earlier this year, is not overstepping his role with the district. Granholm gave him a very difficult job of turning around the district, and he doesn't need to be micromanaged, Liz Boyd said.

Apparently Ms. Scott and the rest of the board (which voted unanimously to take the man to court) didn't get Ms. Boyd's message.  And while I fully understand there is ZERO chance the Governor will actually defend her appointee against elected Democrats in public, at least we've got last week's statement to keep us warm at night.

Not that I wouldn't trade those warm fuzzies for a bit of common sense at DPS.  Let the man do his job cleaning up your mess, Madame Chairwoman.

Read on...

Let's start with the "municipality" and work out way up, shall we?

We learn today that the Detroit Public Schools, long a paragon of Lefty administrative virtue, have 257 "ghosts" on the payroll.  According to the Ivory Tower these are folks who are pulling down major bank but aren't even supposed to be on the payroll.  The local public school bureaucracy is so wasteful of taxpayer dollars they don't even demand a lick of work to get them.  

There were 37 unclaimed paychecks and 220 unclaimed direct-deposit slips totaling about $208,000, said Odell Bailey, DPS' auditor general. He added that the recipients are not on approved leave.

Robert Bobb, DPS' state-appointed emergency financial manager, also said an audit has begun to determine if employees have unapproved health care  dependents that are running up costs.

Probably important, too, that we don't blame this entirely on the bureaucracy. That means there are 257 individuals who at one time or another were entrusted with the education of Detroit kids whose integrity was so poor they continued cashing the checks they knew they hadn't earned.  

DPS might want to audit their character assessment and their hiring practices next.  And they're not the only ones.  As frustrating as a chronically bungled payroll can be it isn't nearly as dangerous as the mistake the Granholm-Cherry administration made this week when they took a convicted murderer who'd wracked up 124 "major misconducts" since entering prison, took him out of jail and dropped him off at his grandfather's house without medication.  

Because that sounds like a safe thing to do.

Read on...

And while the Green and White make their way to Ford Field,Jay Cutler won't be, which is also good news, because now I won't have to hate the Lions like I suddenly hate the Bears.  (Kyle Orton and a couple of mediocre draft picks?  Seriously?)

That's the good news, and folks from out-of-state who stumbled onto this website in advance of your trip to the big game should just skip ahead to the next story on the page.  Because to whatever extent the rest of Detroit remains a secret to the average non-Michigander, we'd probably all be better served to preserve that naiveté.

The rest of the picture isn't pretty and it just keeps getting creepier.  Worse, uglier, sure, between the record shattering unemployment, the stubborn refusal to vote for change and the mayoral candidates who sound like everyone else from the last fifty years there are a lot of adjectives we could use, but "creepy" fits this morning's news best.

Read on...

This is a non-shocking shocking story from the annals of the Detroit Public School System. A system, mind you, that puts politics ahead of the kids. I wrote a post a few days ago that had this snippet:

Duncan (Education Secretary) also criticized the area's leaders for putting politics ahead of kids

She signed up to serve in Teach for America in Detroit, a voluntary program that is dramatically improving the teaching quality in some of America's poorest classrooms. These teachers are trained to raise their students' achievement levels to suburban school levels. Detroit, one of America's worst school districts, welcomed her with flowers and hugs, right?

The Detroit Public Schools' response was: We don't want you.

But if I took two things away from the speech, the second would be that the Gov's fancy new programs each have disaster written all over them.  Now, a day or two after delivering the critically panned performance she's back to the drawing board offering even more suggestions the people of Michigan would be better off ignoring.

Lets start, though, with the originals and head over to the Ivory Tower which investigates the woman's populist assertion that universities should freeze tuition, lest they incur her unending wrath.  Turns out, those kinds of threats really won't do much to help the relatively few Michigan students sticking around after high school.

...Beware, say national experts and Michigan university officials. Granholm's plan is certain to trigger resistance from the universities, and it's not clear how much it would really save students.

A short-term freeze, they also note, would not address long-term problems such as rising health care costs that fuel the rising cost of a degree.

"The reality is that tuition freezes are not permanent," said Sandy Baum, a senior economist with the College Board, a national group that manages standardized testing and analyzes issues related to higher education. "If tuition is frozen one year, you're going to have to make up for it two or three years later."

In other words, the woman is passing the buck.  If you sit down and think about it for a moment, it's a masterful move and makes perfect sense based on her track record.  The woman has made a career, literally, out of criticizing John Engler and moves that created the top economy in the United States for much of the 1990s.  Somehow every problem she encountered for the first six years in office were THAT man's fault, not hers.

It was always HIS administration.  HIS policies.  HIS legacy.  She was just fighting upstream and incapable of overcoming what he'd done.  Never mind the tacit admission that one Governor, Engler, was somehow powerful and able enough to create policy that altered the state of the economy for decades while another, Granholm herself, remains entirely devoid of any skill, power or ability to do so much as dent her predecessor's momentum... that's beside the point and far too nuanced for the random political observer.  It was HIS fault.  That's all that matters.

Now, with fewer than two years left before riding off into that Hollywood / Lobbyist sunset that so clearly calls to her, she's attempting to plant legislative landmines that will only be tripped after she leaves office.  Try to make things a little less ugly while she's stuck with us and then wait for the next guy to blow himself up on her hidden time bombs.  HIS fault, not hers.

Read on...