Detroit Public Schools Manager: System can only sustain 33% of student population because of teacher pensions, benefits

Detroit Public Schools (DPS) has 76,000 students currently. Emergency financial manager Robert Bobb says that only 26,000 can be adequately served. Why? 1) Pensions. 2) Healthcare benefits. The unions are sucking the system dry. To boot, the teachers in DPS have utterly failed the students, as indicated by the obscene 25% graduation rate. From The Detroit Free Press: Bobb: DPS can only support 26,000 students

Robert Bobb, Detroit schools emergency financial manager, said the 76,000 student Detroit district can only support 26,000 students unless it makes deep cuts in operating and long-term costs such as retirement and health care for employees.

He told the Detroit Regional Chamber's policy conference that he'll soon unveil a plan to reorganize Detroit public schools after it's approved by Gov. Jennifer Granholml (sp), who appointed him to oversee the district's finances.

Bobb said he will release a financial report to show the depth of the district's financial problems and the remedies needed. “That’s what we have to show the community,” Bobb said during a panel discussion on the state of Michigan education. “At the end of the day, we’re going to give a long term deficit elimination plan.”

Panelist Art Van Elslander, founder of Art Van Furniture, said schools are failing and attempts at reforms are "Band-Aids." He said he wants to hire 100 salesman for his 32 stores around the state, but can’t find qualified applicants, and he blamed a substandard education system.

“The quality if (sp) not there, they lack in math, interpersonal skills, listening ability,” Van Elslander said. ...

The only way to make public schools better are to make them compete. In that sense, I favor school vouchers to let the taxpayers decide where their kids go to school. Schools that perform will get more students will excel and grow. Schools that do not perform will go under. As they should. There is no incentive right now to innovate. Why is it that kids have to go to a particular school based on where they live? We are not made to get gas from only the closest gas station to our home. Or go to only one grocery store. If we were, do you think that gas station or grocery store would have any incentive whatsoever to improve its services? Nope. Even our public universities where I teach do not have a monopoly on any student population. We are forced to compete with other institutions for students. What we Michiganders have to get straight at the outset of any discussion is that support for public education is what matters, not necessarily the support of public schools. Those two have been diverging for some time and it has accelerated in the last decade. Rather than centers for learning, K-12 school districts - controlled largely by teachers unions - have become rackets, and no district exemplifies that more than DPS.

Of course, vouchers are out of the question for unions. They won't even entertain the notion. Nope. Have to keep kids shackled to failed public schools to keep the victim class alive. Vouchers were a proven success in DC. Obama and his education secretary Arne Duncan were the architects that betrayed the children in Washington DC that was running a successful voucher program that proved to be both effective and cost only a quarter (that's right - 25%) of what the public schools were taking in. Duncan and Obama had the data showing the success of the program before they decided to kill it off at the behest of the teachers unions. I have posted on that shameful act several times in this blog, such as these:

• It's official: Democrats kill successful DC voucher program, resegregate DC Public Schools 
• After hiding the data and dumping the successful DC voucher program, the only thing Obama should tell students today is "I'm sorry"
•  Freep: Public Schools Are Crap - Let's Remold It!  
• Detroit News: DPS FAIL!!! 
• Vouchers vs. D.C. public schools 
• WaPo: Voucher Subterfuge

Again, there is a big difference between supporting public education and supporting public schools and that gulf is widening by the day. Time for Detroit, and all of us, to set the priority. I've chosen mine and am siding with the children. Where will everyone else be?