The Loudest Cricket

Forget Harvard, or for that matter, U of M.  Like elementary through high school, these and many other colleges are not doing the job that their paid to do.  At $38,000 in tuition alone, is Harvard providing a good product at that price?  Probably not.  You’re better of at Lamar instead of Harvard.  Or MSU [...]

It sounds like Leonard Pitts is talking about rewarding teachers based on merit, and the other side of the coin – getting rid of bad teachers.  There is a “groundswell building here.”  One big enough that liberal journalists like Pitts cannot ignore it.  But the unions won’t give up without a fight.  From the comments:
Should [...]

Detroit has tried so many different ideas to prop up their collapsing school system, perhaps it would be best to let it completely fail and start over.  Bing is busy with running the rest of the city and the council, even with the new blood, seems to be stuck in “give us more time” mode.  [...]

After their multiple endorsements of Kwame, I’m a little nervous about the Freep’s call for Bing to run the DPS.  And it’s funny how they don’t want the state to interfere with the city until things are completely out of control.  What they really want is more money from the state to sink into a [...]

The unions and their enables, the Democrats, wreak havoc wherever they have complete control.  The city of Detroit is a fine example of Democratic policies that have been in effect for 40 years, without much opposition.  Schools are another instance of union failures.  Put them together and you get the disaster that is the DPS:
There’s [...]

Instead of giving teachers a bundle of money to retire, how about we given them an incentive to keep their jobs.  For example, if your 90% of your students cannot pass a standardized test, then you’re fired.  Some may quit over that, which would produce the same result as the proposed incentive.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm should push the Legislature to pass a bill this week giving Robert Bobb control of all areas of the Detroit Public Schools, including academics.
While I believe that Robert Bobb is doing great work in turning around the Detroit Public School system, it would be dangerous to give one person complete [...]

The Freep wonders where the DPS accountants were while the school system was being bilked for millions of dollars in the latest in a long string of abuses.  I wonder where the Freep has been for the last forty years while the city and schools have deteriorated under Democratic control.  Oh right, they’ve been fiddling.

The concept of Social Promotion is as Orwellian double-speak as you can get.  Sending a kid onto the next grade when he hasn’t learned anything is not a promotion, it’s a free pass.  The DPS has failed to do its job and tried to hide the fact by just pushing kids through the system.  And [...]

The Freep thinks that teenage pregnancies is everyone’s fault except for the teenagers themselves.  But then, the editors are getting their information from the young women themselves:
Last week, girls attending Detroit’s Catherine Ferguson Academy, an alternative high school for pregnant teenagers and young mothers, told a Free Press editorial writer that a lack of after-school [...]