PolicyGuy

Wednesday, October 27, 2004


Revisiting Detroit School Reform.
John Engler, former Michigan governor, chats with the Detroit News about school reform in Michigan's largest city. Engler gained notoriety for advocating a state takeover of the perennially dysfunctional schools.

Looking back five years after the fact, he says "It was stunning there was such a passive acceptance of a lousy school system by the community leadership. In fact, there was more interest in a few union jobs and a few people with positions and titles than the 160,000 kids that were in the district."

If you want to know why school performance isn't matching the high level of spending (over $10,000 per student in many school districts), it may be that the money isn't really going to higher the best teachers. Or teachers, period. Says Engler: "Detroit is one of the very few districts around where less than half of the money spent on schools ever got to the classroom."

And finally, my favorite zinger from the interview: "In the case of the city of Detroit schools, we arguably were in violation of the Constitution because what we were providing was free and public but it wasn't under any stretch of the imagination called education."

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"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve

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