Is Our School Board Presidents Reading?
News from Detroit:
“The president of the Detroit school board, Otis Mathis, is waging a legal battle to steer the academic future of 90,000 children, in the nation’s lowest-achieving big city district.
He also acknowledges he has difficulty composing a coherent English sentence. Here’s a sample from an e-mail he sent to friends and supporters on Sunday night, uncorrected for errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation and usage. It begins:
If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.
…
Here’s another mass e-mail from Mathis, from Aug. 11, 2009:
Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?
He graduated from Southwestern High School in 1973 with what he says was a 1.8 grade-point average but was previously reported as a .98 average. After serving in the Navy, Wayne State placed him in a special program to help academically unqualified students move forward, on the G.I. Bill.
He stayed at Wayne for 15 years, as a student and a counselor, becoming a virtual “prisoner of Wayne,” as he jokes, unable to graduate.
Mathis and another student unsuccessfully challenged the use of an English proficiency test as a requirement for graduation. In 1992, when the case went to trial, the lawsuit gained national attention. Mathis said then his failure to pass the test “made me feel stupid.” The requirement was eventually dropped in 2007, and Mathis applied to get his degree the next year, after his election.”
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March 16th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Maybe they SHOULD bulldoze that city…
March 17th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Detroit, Detroit, It’s a Helluva Town!
It’s not many school districts that require an emergency financial manager. Detroit does. It’s not many school districts that boast of an illiterate school board president. Detroit does.
The mostly black city, a status only dreamed of by its long-time mayor Coleman Young, has lost 50% of its school population in a decade, the same percentage loss suffered by the city over those ten years. Detroit is filled with vast areas resembling Berlin in 1945 but without the German will to overcome severe adversity.
Instead, Detroit’s city fathers are considering bulldozing vast tracts of dead tenement and broken factory land and converting them into farm land. That, at least, could make it more productive than its current decimated tax base.
Certainly Detroit’s plight is not fully the responsibility of municipal mismanagement. The United Auto Workers, the UAW, is also responsible for demanding, and getting, higher and higher wages and perks with no quality improvement in their product, demands which drove America’s auto industry into the ground and the Motor City into a concrete wall.
Most UAW members live and lived outside the innercity walls and thus have little voice or interest in determining the fate of Detroit and the fate and future of that one institution that could turn around Detroit’s sad destiny, its school system.
No such turnaround is expected soon even with the intervention of Mr. Robert Bobb, that governor-appointed emergency financial manager whose chief function so far has been centered on stemming the tide of computers stolen from schools, some 500 valued at $600,000.
In a cash-strapped district and city, twelve hundred dollar computers seem an extravagance anyway but . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1570)