Your Opinion: Detroit public school failure

Dear Editor:

A recent article noted the abysmal performance of the Detroit public school system.

In 2013 Detroit, a city that had been controlled by Democrats for generations, declared bankruptcy. Detroit's leaders had managed to run up a debt of $18.5 billion. Michigan taxpayers, and to a lesser extent US taxpayers were forced to bailout the city. Those who had provided Detroit with services, materials, loans, etc. were forced to settle for as little as 10 cents for every dollar the city owed them. Bear in mind that a few years before the bankruptcy taxpayers were forced to bailout GM and Chrysler, both of whom have headquarters in the Detroit metro area. That bailout cost US taxpayers $10-17 billion, depending on which government bureaucracies figures you use.

Last year Michigan politicians rewarded the incompetent, but duly elected, Detroit school board members with a $617 million bailout package.

A 2016 CNN article about the school system shutdown caused by a teacher sickout, stated that the average salary for a Detroit school teacher is $67,716.

I graduated from Coldwater High School, it is located in Branch county, MI. The population of the entire county is currently less than 50,000. The Coldwater High School system currently manages to provide its students with a reasonable level of education at a cost of $9,177/student ($2,613 local, $6,156 state and $344 federal). The Detroit school system is unable to provide its students with even close to an acceptable level of education at a cost of $14,708/student ($2,223 local, $9,031 state & $2,972 federal). The typical government answer to every problem is to throw more money at the problem. That will not solve the problem.

74 percent of Detroit's households are headed by a single parent. During the 2014-15 school year 64.8 percent of DPS students were chronically absent. Teachers can't be expected to provide an education when students aren't even in the classroom.

It is the parent's job to make sure their children show up for school. It is the parent's job to teach their children to extend basic courtesies to others and to make sure their children show up for school clean and rested. It is the teacher's job to teach the children language, math, history and science. It is not the taxpayers job to pay people to parent others' children.

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