The Detroit Public School system, teetering on the thin edge of bankruptcy, running on a gift of $49 million in state aid, is a prime example of why Johnny can't read with an 8th grade literacy rate that is actually lower than the unemployment rate for the city.
So, on the announcement that the school system will run out of money by June when the latest State bailout ends and will be unable to pay teachers, what does the teacher's union do?
Well, today they organized a coordinated sickout that shuts down 94 of 97 schools.
Strikes by public teachers are illegal but this, the latest in a series of organized sickouts is somehow not considered an illegal strike, and had anyone in authority had any spine they would just fire them all and start over, as Detroit probably can't do much worse.
Considering the lack of actual learning that seems to take place within the DPS, it is unlikely the students will notice the sickout or even notice if the teachers were all fired en masse, but the sickout will affect those parents who actually are employed who will now have nowhere to warehouse the kids for the day.
Unfortunately, Snyder is amazingly going full bore ahead on reinforcing failure and corruption by pushing for a 715 million dollar bailout of the failed system.
2 comments:
My thought is that every time something like this happens, the state managers who are overseeing this failure known as DPS should just fire 10% of the shirkers, starting with the known agitators and union leaders and then hopscotching through the rolls at random until ten percent of them have been cut loose, to be replaced with new non-unions hires who want to do the job. Bet you that the remaining 90% will think twice about doing something like this again and risking the 1 in 10 chance of joining the ranks of the unemployed.
Decimation...not just an obsolete Roman idea.
I am not entirely against Detroit City Teachers. They about match the average wages for the state of Michigan at $57K/year.
They also work to a target class load of 38 kids per classroom (for middle and high school).
The Detroit School District is bleeding money for Pupil Services and Instructional Staff Support. Combined, these add over $3100 per pupil to the cost of educating Detroit students. By way of comparison, my home school district spends about 20% as much per student for these items.
Source: http://detroit.k12.mi.us/data/finance/docs/FY2016_Adopted_Budget.pdf page 16
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