The following comment was written in response to an earlier post about the decision by Roy Roberts, the emergency manager of Detroit’s schools, to close many more more schools.
I would like to hear what readers think of this issue.
My own take is that Governor Rick Snyder is antagonistic towards public schools, that he gets his policy ideas from rightwing think tanks that are antagonistic towards the public sector in general, and that he would–if he could–privatize public education in every jurisdiction. I think one need look only at Muskegon Heights and Highland Park to see districts where the governor sent in a viceroy to oversee the privatization of the public schools. No effort was made to develop a fiscal recovery plan, no help was forthcoming from the state.
Is Detroit shrinking or is there a purposeful plan to open privately managed charters to accelerate the collapse and privatization of the public school system?
This reader disagrees with my analysis.
While a lot of what is happening in Michigan is disturbing right now, one important factor to keep in mind is that the open enrollment movement (either formally implemented by districts opening up to open enrollment or informally by an ongoing number of Detroit kids who use a relative’s address to attend schools outside of Detroit) is shifting public school kids from Detroit to other public schools outside of Detroit, too, not just sending them to charters within the city limits. Additionally, part of what is happening in Detroit — and throughout the recession-pummeled state — is that the population numbers are down significantly and, as a result, the infrastructure is not right-sized for the number of enrolled students. Even suburban districts not competing with charters have closed schools in the past 15 years. Michigan is losing population (and seats in Congress), so we have fewer kids in schools and quite possibly don’t need as many school buildings, something we might need to learn more about before we blame Snyder.
The Free Press article you reference identifies the sharp decline in enrollment — note that reality vs. the projection for this year was off by about 12,000 kids.
As an example, compare these DPS enrollment numbers:
2007: 104,000
Spring 2011: 74,000
Fall 2011: 65,971 (Crain’s estimated an additional 3K in pre-K programs and 4K in district charters)
Fall 2012: 50,000
Any district that has lost half its students in five years necessarily needs fewer facilities with which to serve them. Any district that is taking that kind of loss and NOT reducing its operating costs would be spreading its resources too thin instead of concentrating them on the remaining children.
The city is dropping population, too — from around 900,000 in 2000 to about 715,000 in 2011 (per Huffington Post). A population drop that drastic is going to be felt in public school enrollment.
The Detroit deficit puts kids at a disadvantage. Reducing expenditures is one way we could actually strengthen the public schools instead of leaving them vulnerable to takeover. I would argue that before we hurry to demonize administrators for this, we consider how these closures might actually reduce waste and overhead, historic DPS problems.
A key question we should consider before we rail on Snyder (and believe me, there are things to rail about!), “What is the current capacity in each DPS school versus its enrollment? Is the balance between staff and kids just right? How might school closures help DPS do a better job of concentrating resources and supporting kids so they are more satisfied with their public schools and less vulnerable to — or interested in — charters and privatization?”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/22/detroits-population-drops_n_839225.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know anything about Detroit, but I’ve learned from Chicago to be wary of the “we have to close schools because of declining population” argument. The Raise Your Hand Coalition in Chicago has shown that CPS is using all kinds of Enron accounting to determine which schools are “underutilized”. As one example among many they listed, some of the schools on the to-be-closed list have classes in excess of 35 students, but because of how classrooms are utilized, the school is deemed “underutilized”.
The capacity vs. enrollment analysis the blogger suggests works on spreadsheets but doesn’t necessarily work well in the real world. Closing “under-utilized” schools requires the re-drawing of boundary lines and the resultant “involuntary transfer” of hundreds of students and dismissal of staff will pack school auditoriums. Everyone wants to save money but no one wants it to be at the expense of jobs or cause the movement of their child out of their neighborhood or town school…. This can result in gridlock when Boards yield to pressures. Too many urban boards waited too long to address this issue and that opened the door for the anti-democratic business approach that MI is witnessing now.
The correct answer is that Snyder is antagonistic to public schools and that Detroit is shrinking. Snyder is exploiting the situation to create an excuse to do what he thinks is correct. As a political leader, he is undeniably weak. The hard right legislature eats him for breakfast. He is also limited in that he can only see things through the lens of a business leader. He has no other perspective and it’s agonizing to listen to him approach everything with a business mindset. Snyder is weakening the status of teachers and seems to enjoy it.
That being said, I teach in a suburban high school about 15 minutes from the Detroit border. (I’m out today with a vicious case of the flu.) I have been at the same school for 16 years. Our demographic make-up has shifted significantly over that time, especially in the last five years. We are getting more and more kids from Detroit schools, both public and charter. We run a trimester system so we get lots of new kids in January, March and November. Many of these kids have residencies set up in the area but are unlikely to be living there.
We’ve had an influx of students who get free and reduced lunch and openly discuss their experiences before arriving at our school. The Detroit students we do get are typically conscientious because we are getting kids from homes where education is enough of a priority that relatives have set up a residency.
I will not, however, that if kids first enter our district in 9th grade, there’s an obvious difference between them and the students who have been enrolled in our district prior to high school.
The premise of this post is difficult to comprehend. There is no doubt that Detroit is shrinking as a city. It’s been shrinking for half a century. It was shrinking before the riots, it kept shrinking for the two decades under Coleman Young, and it’s kept shrinking since then. The population has fallen to less than half of what it was at its peak. Do we really think that a city can lose half its population — and most of its tax base — without having any schools close? It’s sad, and it’s not fair to the residents of Detroit, but this process can be understood without reference to right-wing think tanks.
It’s been decades since I hung around Detroit, and even then I was struck by the population decline. Parts of the city are almost rural in appearance and population density. No need to use the sidewalk when you can go from point A to point B across open land. If I were Czar of the internet, I’d know who is buying up property and holding it till the population gets so low that they can just come in and start a new city. Detroit does have a fantastic location, location location. The fact that it is currently a huge fixer upper is of no consequence. No clue as to when the land rush might start in earnest.
Uh, I know exactly what is happening in Detroit. There are many things acting in concert. The city is losing population. Unemployment in the actual city of Detroit is extremely high. Meanwhile, crime is worse than ever because the city police have been cut to the bone. I believe the closing of public schools, the opening of charters along with the repeated negative stories on local news about DPS have led to the greater exodus of students. The neighborhoods are weakened by the closing of neighborhood schools. I would like to know why Governor Snyder admonished the state about “shared sacrifice”. He told schools to consolidate services. He cut the education budget and gave the money to businesses. At the same time, he fought to lift the cap on charters. How can a state that is broke afford to spread money for education even thinner? What possible sense would it make to help for-profit schools spread while other public districts are given tight budgets with larger class sizes. Why? He wants to help destroy public ed and payback right wing cronies- DeVos and others. “Choice” in Detroit is a joke. People “choose” schools nearby. CEOs and thier families are making tons of money while charter schools are devoid of entire depts. (fine arts, no band, arts, graphics, tech classes) Who is served by all this? CEOs. Now, go read Jalen Rose’s bs that he just posted on Huff Post. A joke. Go look for the real story. It will protray something entirely different. Why does a professional athlete get to put a propaganda page on a news site? I could go on and on. Minority children are being ripped off. Also, I know someone who worked for a time at Highland Park after the takeover and I heard it was awful.
The minority population is growing at a 0.9 rate, not enough to sustain itself over a long time.
Yes, Detroit is losing population, including students. Michigan as a whole has lost population, and some urban school districts (Flint, for example), are mere shadows of what they once were.
However, a large portion of the DPS enrollment loss has come because of charters and competition for students among local districts driven by the state’s school funding system. Recent articles attest to the fact that less than half of the 100,000 school-age children who live in the Detroit district attend Detroit Public Schools. The rest attend charters, other school districts under “schools of choice” plans, the new Education Achievement Authority schools, and non-public schools. This pupil loss has been much larger and faster than the overall decline in population. (About half of Michigan’s charter schools are located in or near Detroit.)
Michigan’s school finance system exacerbates this problem. The entire operating budget of every school district is determined by the number of students enrolled. The state legislature sets a per-pupil “foundation allowance” for each district each year, and state funding brings districts up to that level. (Michigan drastically centralized its school funding system in 1994; local communities are not allowed to increase local property taxes for school operations beyond the basic level expected of all communities.) That means that if you lose 5% of your enrollment, you will lose 5% of your operating budget *in the same year*.
What this means is that a school district loses, say, $7000 when a pupil moves to a charter or another district. However, the district does not save $7000 by having one less student. In districts with declining enrollment, it leads to what we call the “death spiral,” where enrollment losses drive budget cuts, which then drive further enrollment losses, and so on. One district near me, Willow Run Community Schools, went so far down that spiral that they had to combine with a neighboring district to keep from dissolving altogether. (The neighbor, Ypsilanti Public Schools, had been the recipient of many of the lost Willow Run students, though they in turn lost students to other nearby districts.)
Exacerbating this process is the fact that per-pupil funding is an average; it does not take into account the higher expenses of high school students, or the extra funding needed for special education students (state-wide, roughly 40% of special education expenses must be subsidized out of the general per-pupil funding). Charters, in particular, have specialized in K-8 education and have lower special education ratios than local public districts. In Detroit especially, the concentration of expensive special education students has increased dramatically in recent years. Not only does this make the student population harder to serve, but it increases the stress on the operating budget as special ed services have to be paid in part with general ed dollars.
This process of stripping local public districts of students, and therefore funding, has been in place long before Rick Snyder was elected Governor, but his election coincided with the election of an extremely conservative, Tea Party influenced, legislative majority which has driven the education agenda since 2010. Caps on charters are being removed, limits on fully online “cyber” charters will be relaxed over the next few years, and in general state policy gives (silent) preference to privately managed schools rather than community-governed ones. This is where our state stands today.