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...Short-term literacy and vocational programs, popular with donors, abound. As do school buildings up to the latest Western standards - some even have wheelchair-accessible ramps, in a country where there are few sidewalks and even fewer wheelchairs. Politicians back in the U.S. like to point to these projects as examples of taxpayer dollars being put to good use, and often cite the exponential number of girls in schools, some 2 million today compared to zero in 2001, as proof of success. But those schools are meaningless if there are no good teachers. In many rural parts of the country...
...recent morning, a crowd filled a downtown Detroit courtroom for the sentencing of a 19-year-old ninth-grade dropout caught breaking into a public school, apparently to steal computers. The hearing's main attraction was not the guilty man or the judge but Robert Bobb, the state-appointed emergency financial manager of Detroit's public schools. In the last six months of 2009, Bobb told the court, nearly 500 computers were stolen from schools, costing his system some $600,000. "The Detroit public-school system isn't an electronics store," he said...
This isn't the kind of problem most school chiefs in the U.S. have to worry about. A year ago, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm gave Bobb, the former president of Washington, D.C.'s Board of Education, the task of ending the financial crisis that has devastated the Detroit public-school system. In the past decade, the number of Detroit public-school students has plummeted from more than 167,000 to 84,600, mainly because of the emergence of charter schools and the middle class's exodus to the suburbs. It could fall further, to 65,000 in the next four...
...national math exam scored at "below basic" levels. In October 2008, some 57% of Detroit third- through eighth-graders essentially failed a state writing test. Detroit's graduation rate is 58%. "The system is academically bankrupt. This is almost academic homicide," Bobb says. (See pictures of a public boarding school...
Experts point to Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; and Denver as big-city school districts that have rebounded in the hands of strong managers. Detroit presents a very different situation. The tax base is nearly gone. Poverty and unemployment are far more pervasive than in most other major American cities. Many adults lack the basic skills necessary to qualify for the high-tech jobs officials are desperately trying to attract to Michigan, which has the U.S.'s highest unemployment rate. Home values, on which property-tax revenues are based, have plunged to pennies on the dollar. Over the past decade, the Detroit...