Detroit is Beautiful from Afar...

Detroit Is Beautiful From Afar, Just Don’t Live There  - according to some pundits and nay-Sayers

A casual observer sitting on a riverfront bench in Windsor looking across to the skyline of Detroit, unaware of conditions on the ground there, would marvel at the visual appeal and the apparent delight of its location.

How long do you think we can go on ignorantly and stubbornly believing that the implosion of this major U.S. city is not taking place?

In answering this question, it really doesn't matter, conservative or liberal, how you view your ideals or harbor your political prejudices. In Detroit, the American dream has dimmed and may go out altogether. Of course, there have been efforts to reverse the downward trend but they appear to be off-set by such factors as: white flight, the business departures, the departure of the Catholic church from over two dozen parishes, the indifference of the state government, and the systemic corruption and spoils involved in Detroit city governance.

Detroit is not Chicago, with its Magic Mile and its elite condos and row houses in the heart of the that great city.

Walk the deserted streets of the core business district of Detroit at after close of business and pervasively sense for yourself the personal danger you are surrounded by. No one on the streets. The Motor City is not the Windy City.

In recent and very open and honest public comments to columnists and to editorials, a careful reader is finding the ground level noise about what is actually going on in the troubled Detroit core city and in its schools and it isn't pretty.

The angst and despair expressed by Daniel Howes in this column is bone-cutting. Verbally graphic, and long over due.

What About Level of Educational Progress in DPS?
It's altogether possible that there is a pervasive and street savvy sub-culture running through the city's youths. In a place so seemingly hopeless, with so little to cause a child to dream or aspire, there has developed a youth counter-culture that hates what it sees a life confined this wrenched poverty and black-on-black crime, and flatly refuses to play the game other Americans better placed embrace.

When we learn that students in the DPS have a habit of bringing down student achievers and hurling distain and hatred toward those who study and perform well in the classroom (calling them Uncle Tom's and other derisive names, even assaulting them when they get "A's") there's a grievous, oppressive condition afoot. Such a pulling down of students, one of the other, is apparently widely accepted by active student counter-culture. Outcast student populations come to rule the young social lives of younger students, driven by peer pressure, and cause kids to undermine any desire to make better achievement.

It is said that Detroit students did as poorly, or more poorly, on the math testing than if they were guessing. Yes, what if the students purposefully did not properly take the test and simply guessed? That has to be a partial possibility.

Detroit's General Degradation & Its Corrupted Infrastructure Pollutes the Whole
Hopelessness. If money corrupts, then complete hopelessness and endless poverty goes money one further into total despair and eventually open rebellion...Many of the higher values of our nation are build around the American Dream become thusly spurned and ridiculed, believed unattainable from these streets.

What is future the work place prepared for an all "B" DPS student, McDonalds? And beyond that what? Good jobs have left the city. Students are keenly aware of the depressing number of good jobs and limited possibilities for college or trade school remain available to them. Where will the money for tuition, for an ITT institute come from?

When there is no respect for the authority of the teacher, the law enforcement officer, the fireman, the principal or any adult with contact with these youths, then swearing, obscenity, and great verbal and physical disrespect become rampant the situation is out of control.

The disrespect for authority is not limited to "lost" youths, it pervades the comments of so many contributors to these opinion blogs also. It's a cynicism that has no positive bearing on attempting to resolve the multitude of problems at street level. Simply turning on teachers, police, and public officials will not suffice.

The News and the Legislature Believe in Fairy Tales: e.g. Alternative Teaching Credentials
Tell me how a man with great math ability (Let' say one recently cut out of the General Motors Comptrollers Office), a mind like a Einstein or a brain like Hawkins, is going to find suitable conditions and success when he steps in (under Erne Duncan's R2T) to take up a desk and attempt to teach a class of 34 sophomores right in the middle of this kind of blackboard jungle?

There may be cultural differences and solid reasons why the classroom has become this kind of zoo, but no educational program will succeed until the troublemakers are removed, order and respect are completely restored, and attendance is strictly enforced.

Shocking Results of Detroit's NAEP Scores
We are told he school personnel "wept" a the results of the standardized testing for math. What were they weeping about?

Were they weeping over the fact that they had failed to try to do their best to instruct the pupils who got the failing grades?

Were they weeping that the proper materials necessary to achieve the scores by targeted curriculum were not available?

"They were weeping out of creeping despair: 'These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children,' said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, a coalition of big city school systems that usually defends its members," as we read in Amber Arellano's recent column "Detroit hits educational bottom" in the Detroit News on December 08, 2009.

The school personnel are right to be weeping over those "externalities" which the harsh critics of public education have been red tagging Detroit teachers with for decades. The critics mantra, "You teachers can not blame the total environment the students come from for these poor results" you, the teachers, have failed. Don't whine to us about the home conditions and the degradation of the core city. We pay you for a job done. Objections we do not accept.

As Amber points out, "Then there is the usual defeatist Detroit mentality: 'We're different than other cities.'" It is possible that is a true fact? Where does the impetus for that feeling come from, today's street level conditions?

Michigan's Blacks Are Not Achieving Regardless of Location Detroit or Outstate
Actually, it's about black kids all around Michigan. In a real sense African American children's underachievement is a Michigan problem according to Amber's column: "Detroit is not the only poor performer in the state. NAEP scores released earlier this fall showed Michigan's African-American students are essentially the lowest-performing black students in the country after falling for years."

Playing Pin the Blame
There will be a rush to find a way to pin blame. However, there is a real anomaly here. Some of the low scores were from schools labeled "high-performing" NAEP officials ensured test takers "included some of Detroit's highest-performing schools."

The most common response is that there are teachers who do not perform to standards, lots of them. Mind you, we are thinking about teaching elementary school students where the staff is often at least 60 percent women. Do critics mean to say that there are large numbers of women, who have undertaken to teach in Detroit's schools (with all their associated problems and social/economic situations, including treats of assault), who are, of their own violation, not doing the job put before them.

Adults in Detroit Have Failed the Children
Actually, Allando's column doesn't go that far. The critic says, "These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children." The operative phrase here is "the adults in this city." That's very inclusive and does not wrongfully saddle the teacher with the total blame. Even though the old blamespeaking is there, as Michael Casserly, Council of Great City Schools opines, ""If you can't make it as a teacher, you're out."

Note that the under-performing schools included Detroit's much promoted charter schools. Putting a teacher out on the street is simple: At a charter, just find the teacher a box and then find them the door. So let's see the charter's conduct wholesale dismissals in response to the demands of R2T.

Race to the Top is the Super Solution?
We are told that the Race to the Top has the answers. O.K. lets see, we are going to sack a sizable number of teachers and replace them with people with an academic degree. Walk-ins who want to enter these dangerous and unruly failing schools and assume an equal responsibility with professional teachers, to be thrown out the door if they can't get immediate results (R2T's alternative certification) and that's the answer. NO SO.

Again, there's a rush to find a "quick fix" to move the problem off the political stage, off the front page. It is obvious that the stonehearted won't look into the deterioration and neglect, the political frauds, financial scandals, and the "territorial fiefdoms" imbedded in Detroit's present governance and social structure.

There is a reason Detroit's math scores are at the bottom. It's life in inner city Detroit. . No other single factor so strong, so important as the home and the parent(s) along with the spirit of the community in forming the mindset, determining the well-being, the welfare and academic achievement of Detroit's children. Where is the hope for a normal, happy and useful life?

We Know the Profile of the Underachieving in Detroit:

*They are the poor.
*They are homeless or have been foreclosed upon.
*They are on public assistance/welfare or their caregivers are unemployed without sufficient work and income.
*They live largely in urban ghettos.
*They live in high crime areas.
*They are exposed to constant gun violence.
*They are children in homes rife with abuse and neglect.
*They are hungry and go day-to-day without proper nourishment, staggering numbers qualify for free or reduced meals.
*They are the children of children, frequently the off spring of promiscuous mothers, often the mothers were children themselves when they gave birth.
*They live in rundown, dangerous, or condemned housing.
*They go cold in the winter in their own places of abode and often they go to school without proper outerwear.
*They are exposed everyday to the drug culture.
*They are harassed, threatened, and controlled, herded about by gangs. They live in constant despair, terrorized by street crime and shots in the night.
*They are those who have been neglected or abandoned by the houses of worship.
*They grow up in a jobless environment and have no real hope for an adequately paying occupation or a living wage.
*They are in large numbers, teenage boys of color who dropout of school.
*They are unhealthy, too many die as infants, get few vaccinations, little or no pre-natal or insufficient post-natal care.
*They are culturally deprived: living in areas with few good public libraries or free or affordable cultural activities.
*They have very limited access to banner stores such as abound in the suburbs.
*They are often in foster care.
*They have little opportunity to investigate the natural beauty or the beauty and wonders of the out state areas of Michigan, many have never left their neighborhoods, have never seen the open countryside, the dunes, or the Mackinaw Bridge.
*They have juvenile criminal records, often numerous misdemeanors.
*They are truant, or frequently fail to come to school.
*They have few books or educational stimuli in the home.
*They often lack the basic social skills, at age five cannot perform such simple tasks as tying their own shoes, may eat. lap out of bowls without utensils. .
*They are outside the profile sought by the "marketplace entrepreneurials," with the exception of drug pushers.
*They have not received the proper diets as infants, in the early critically formative years of mental development, and may have therefore diminished capacities to learn.
*They cannot move or play freely in their neighborhoods without fear and anxiety.
*They are victims of various kinds of political shams, blamespeaking, and disparaging debates, the flotsam and jetsom of Lansing debate and enduring cynicism.


My God the Children
We aren't getting our minds around these kinds of pervasive problems, because frankly, they appear to be beyond our comprehension and our concern. We have done so little to assuage the decline, we may not be able to reverse the trend.

Detroit is at the bottom and may stay there. That's a sobering thought.

The kinds of efforts and inspiration it takes to overcome the creeping despair could start just as simply as immediately hiring workers to take down the some 80,000 abandoned homes and bringing back paying jobs to the city by commercial investment with a mind to stay the course. Jobs in the city! What a novel thought, in a city where so many individuals don't have cars or means to take them to the far away, outer suburbs where the few jobs there are, are located.

Give the kids something tangible to work toward and a visible goal to achieve "give them hope".


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