In federal court today, attorneys responding to a suit naming Gov. Rick Snyder as a defendant argued that the state of Michigan, which has been so intimately involved with Detroit Public Schools for almost 20 years, has no responsibility to ensure students in the district are able to learn to read.
The suit, brought by seven Detroit schoolchildren in September of last year, charged Gov. Snyder, the members of the Michigan Board of Education, and various other state officials with failing to provide an opportunity to learn.
Now, before you out-county city-bashers erupt in unanimous invective about inner-city pathologies, children who don’t want to learn, and babies having babies, read on and decide if any child could learn under the circumstances outlined in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit describes classrooms without books, teachers, or even functioning climate control, where temperatures can exceed 90 degrees in the summer and drop to 32 degrees in the winter. The lawsuit describes vermin and nonfunctioning restrooms. The lawyers associated with the case describes an environment where since no books exist no homework can be assigned. Students are essentially warehoused in a building for several hours a day. Yes, in such conditions, even Brad and Ashley from the prosperous precincts of Independence Township might find it a challenge to learn.
What’s more, before the state of Michigan intervened, the district had a surplus of $93 million, healthy enrollment and test scores that were on the rise. After the state’s “rescue” in 1999, and then under the ensuing succession of emergency managers, little remained of those promising figures. In 2015, as Curt Guyette reported, enrollment had plummeted by nearly 50 percent, the number of schools cut in half, and a tide of red ink annually amounted to tens of millions of dollars, and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
But this afternoon, with a straight face, Deputy Attorney General Timothy Haynes argued before Judge Stephen J. Murphy III that the state of Michigan didn’t agree that state officials had any responsibility to provide DPS students with literacy. They also challenged that the state has controlled Detroit Public Schools since 1999. The Bill of Rights, Haynes argued, mentions no specific right to literacy. Instead, counsel pointed to the charter operators, authorizers, boards, and intermediaries as possible culprits. The courtroom gallery was dense with a cross-section of inner-city students, teachers, and their families, who showed remarkable restraint to sit in polite silence through this effort to explain away the grotesque barriers to education that prevail at many of their schools.