By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

DETROIT – The people who made Detroit Public Schools the “ground zero” of education are back in charge, and they’re wasting no time dismantling efforts to improve the unfortunate school district.

The Detroit school board voted Monday to remove 15 of its most chronically failing schools from a new statewide reform school district that was created to improve academics for students, according to the Detroit News.

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Meanwhile the Detroit Federation of Teachers is suing the school district over the procedure it used to evaluate teachers last summer and determine who should be laid off, the Detroit News reports.

All of this is happening as a result of last week’s election, when Michigan voters overturned a state law that allowed the governor to appoint emergency managers with widespread powers to operate troubled municipalities and school districts.

That means Roy Roberts, the emergency manager who made great strides in a short period of time at DPS, is probably out of a job. At the very least, his power to operate the district in a logical manner, without the approval of the dysfunctional school board or self-serving teachers union, has been wiped away.

That leaves the school board back in charge. As anyone with a lick of sense in Detroit will attest, that’s very bad news for the families and children of the city.

The school board lived up to its promise to start returning the school district to the failed policies of the past Tuesday, voting to remove 15 failing schools from the state’s new Education Achievement Authority (EAA).

The EAA was formed to govern the state’s worst schools and focus on improving academics for students. Roberts serves as the superintendent of the EAA.

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Apparently the DPS school board didn’t like losing its authority to govern the schools that were transferred to the EAA. But those schools had been failing for years, and there was no sign the school board was going to do anything to help them recover and become functional centers for learning.

Perhaps the EAA would have had little luck turning these schools around. Unfortunately we may never know, since they’ve only been part of the EAA since September, and there hasn’t been enough time to gauge the effectiveness of the experiment.

What we do know for sure is that little in the way of positive learning happened at those schools under DPS rule. And there’s no reason to believe they will fare any better this time around.

Meanwhile, the Detroit Federation of Teachers took another step toward renewed instability in the district by announcing this morning that the union would sue the school district over the dismissal of 422 teachers last summer.

The dismissals followed the implementation of a new teacher evaluation system, which helped administrators determine which teachers to retain last summer. Union President Keith Johnson is claiming that the process was unfair and many teachers who scored over the passing threshold were denied jobs in the fall.

Oh well. We credit Roberts for at least devising some sort of plan to weed out the good teachers from the bad. It may not have been a perfect system, and some teachers may have been unfairly let go in the rush to form a new staff in time for the new school year.

But we haven’t noticed Johnson, the union or the school board, for that matter, making much of an effort to remove the many subpar teachers who have been contributing to the district’s academic demise for years.

The union only cares about the rights of teachers. The ability of students to learn from quality instructors never enters into the equation.

Frankly, we have to wonder how much student learning means to the Detroit school board or teachers union. As Roberts recently wrote to Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder regarding the current environment in the district, “It’s not about education, it’s about power. I didn’t come here for that.”

So Roberts will probably leave and the school board and union will probably be back in charge on a permanent basis.

We’re sure the area’s charter schools will see a big bump in student applications very soon.