Video report: 40,000 Detroit Public School Students That Can Neither Read Nor Write Get New Laptops

An update on Tuesday's post: Irony: Detroit Free Press touts 40,000 "free" laptops to DPS kids days after reporting DPS laptops being hocked at pawn shops. For the record, Detroit Public Schools (DPS) was until recently run by an illiterate. The emergency financial manager declared that only 1 out of 3 students can be serviced because of obscene union benefits that are sucking the district dry. Which is why this is happening: Detroit Public Schools No Longer Preparing Kids For College, Instead Some Are Being Prepped For Cosmetology, Culinary Arts. DPS only graduates 1 in 4 students and the vast majority of the kids can't read their own diplomas. And those that make it through are not at all prepared for either college or career. Those not dropping out have such bad scores on national standardized tests that Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, had this to say:

"These numbers are only slightly better than what one would expect by chance as if the kids had never gone to school and simply guessed at the answers"

I asked in my prior post: "how is an infusion of laptops for students that can neither read nor write going to do anything but waste taxpayer money. Oh, that's right - it's stimulus money. So this $49 million is going to be thrown down the proverbial toilet just like the hundreds of billions before it. " The story of the laptop boondoggle has made it on the national stage:

The American Thinker picked up the story the day after I posted on it: Big Stimulus Money for Detroit Public Schools (HT: Kathy Hoekstra on FB). In that post, writer J. Robert Smith made the identical arguments that I made:

Who said that federal stimulus money was tax dollars thrown to the wind? ...

...All the new technology is fine as it goes, but there's a hitch. Detroit public school kids have trouble with the basics, like simple math, reading, and writing. In fact, a little over a year ago, a whopping 69% of Detroit fourth-graders scored "below basic" on math testing. The scores have dropped to an historic low. Reading and science scores aren't impressive either. According to the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, only 31.9% of Detroit's public school students graduate in four years. Greatschools.org gives Detroit public schools a mere three out of ten on its excellence scale.

So why $49 million for laptops when too many Detroit kids can't successfully use old fashioned pencils and paper to write simple words and sentences and do basic math? Why stuff like Kindle when kids can't even read from cardboard and paper books? ...

Great minds thinking alike?