Emergency management has neither fixed the finances of Detroit Public Schools nor provided even an adequate education to most Detroit students.
The state’s takeover of the district, and the appointment of four different managers during those six years, has been like shuffling captains on the Titanic after the iceberg has been hit. Unless the hole gets plugged, the ship is going down no matter who is at the helm.
In the case of DPS, the district’s perpetual annual deficits (pegged at nearly $170 million for the current fiscal year) and its long-term debt (which is at more than $2.1 billion as of last June) aren’t just an issue of management. Unless severe structural problems are resolved, the district will continue sinking.
Wayne State University economist and law school professor Peter Hammer focused on the crisis facing DPS in a paper published in The Journal of Law in Society.
“The important point is that the dynamics of the problem are structural and largely transcend issues of governance,” wrote Hammer in a paper titled “The Fate of the Detroit Public Schools: Governance, Finance and Competition.“