Rochelle "Race All The Time" Riley Is At It Again, Now With Detroit Schools

Rochelle Riley's columns in the Free Press are generally quite predictable.

Pick any two, and ofttimes you'll get all three:

a. Racism is everywhere. Racism is alive, well, and just around the corner, except black folk can't be racist.

b. Whatever it is, it's not the Democrats', and Especially Not the Detroit Democrats' fault.

c. Someone, Anyone, else other than Detroit's Democrats need to take the blame and step up and fix Detroit's Problems, but don't suggest Detroit's Democrats can't be in charge for an instant.

Such it is yet again with her latest piece on Detroit Schools:

The Detroit Free Press: For leaders to fix Detroit's education problems, they need to talk about race

Yes, she's decided that Business Leaders, yes Busienss leaders, not say the heads of School Boards or other government officials actually in charge of education, are not talkig sufficiently about race as the core problem for the sorry state of Detroit's schools.

Of course, it could be that race isn't the core problem, but don't tell her that.

Our business community, for the most part, believes those problems lie with transit, training and trade. They plan to spend almost three whole days focused on three themes: preparing Michigan’s workers for a new generation, creating mobility for the future rather than the past and restoring trust in government, media and business.

But they always start the conversation in the wrong place.

Our region’s most pressing problem isn’t that we have a talent shortage, or that we aren’t competitive. Our most pressing problem is that we don’t care enough about education — and haven’t for more than a half century — nor do we realize that our talent problem begins in third grade.

What does that have to do with race? This: We have believed that if our suburban schools are adequate, we don't really have to care about urban or rural schools.

Unfortunately, that means that black students — and some rural ones — attend inferior schools and too many of those students grow up to be prison inmates or a part of Michigan’s poor.

She then blames Detorit's faling schools on racism. Not on the parents of the kids, not on the teachers, not on the board of education, not on the corrupt Democrat officials that beld the system dry. Nope, just on racism.

She then goes to list a multitude of factors that have little if anything to do with racism but instead crappy parenting, a high-crime urban environment, and administrative corruption and malfeasance by the peole who are the same race whether perpetrator or victim:

Ninety percent of the district’s third-graders read below grade level at a time when the Legislature has banned promoting them if that remains true.
More than 70% of children seen by Community Mental Health officials in Wayne County have experienced at least three potentially traumatic events that could change how they think and learn. Many of those children are in Detroit.
Every day, 14 children in the city became victims of crime. In 2014, the last year the study was done, about 43% were victims of homicide, sexual assault, aggravated assault or robbery.
Many of Detroit's children suffer from toxic stress related to the environments in which they live.
Many of Detroit's children have parents who are either undereducated or have difficulty reading. Parents who cannot read cannot teach their children or be partners in their education. Demanding that they do, without providing a way to do it, is folly.
Many of Detroit’s children are victims of adult misbehavior. Because the district was long plagued by mismanagement and corruption, it has become harder to persuade supporters to donate to the children. The district and its new superintendent must find a way to make businesses focus on the children, not the past.
The city schools began the year short 300 teachers. And as more teachers retire each year — and fewer head into urban school districts — the problem could get worse.

None of these things are due to the boogeyman of "racism". Instead, they're due to the complete breakdown of the Detroit family structure, runaway crime, and endemic Democrat corruption. Rochelle Riley of course wants to keep the kids in these same corrupt institutions, do the same things, and expect a better result. Oh, and she likely wants Michigan business to fork over more money to expiate the imaginary sins of systemic racism to buy some shiny objects and hope that fixes the problem. It won't.

Money spent isn't the issue, it is how badly it is being mismanaged and how badly the kids are being taught.

The Detroit Public School system currently spends more per student than "all but eight of the nation’s 100 largest school districts, or $14,259. Even with all that money, the district still generated the nation’s worst reading scores among low-income students."

Anywhere else that would be regarded a massive failure. In the business world with such a lousy result, business leaders would either be fired or their business would be driven into bankruptcy.

At $14,259 per student, it would be better to free them from their Democrat and union-run schools and send them off to private schools - likely there would be better results, but that would be taking away control of yet another one of Detroit's tarnished "jewels".