Rochelle Riley

Detroit Free Press Columnist

So let me get this straight:



Twenty days after Detroiters elected a new school board to revive a failing district, the state announced that it might close a quarter of the city's schools.

Twenty days after the district finally ended 16 years of failed state control so local officials could have another go at creating a working system for the city's 131,000 school-age children — many of whom attend schools outside the city — the state stepped in to decrease locations where children could be educated.

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To add insult to potential injury, the School Reform Office announced last week that it won’t make a decision about closing 25 of 97 city schools (housed in 94 buildings) until May. That is only three months before the start of a new school year and long after local officials need to put bodies in seats, including 5,000 kids from the just-closed, failed, experimental, state Education Achievement Authority District, whose 14 schools all came from the Detroit district.

Hmm. What is this feeling of déjà vu I'm getting? Ah, yes, the Michigan Legislature left the Detroit district sitting on the precipice of bankruptcy in December 2015 — just adjourned and left town, leaving in the lurch district officials and teachers and students all awaiting word that Detroit would even have a school district.



How does this make sense, and why are Gov. Rick Snyder and state officials making it harder for local officials — and the children they’re responsible for — to be successful?



Detroit Interim Superintendent Alycia Meriweather said the action puts the district in a “terrible position,” but her entire focus is on standing with the school board to fight the closings.



“We do not believe any of these schools should close and we will continue to fight against the school closures,” she said. “We will fight toward excellence in every one of our schools.”



Meriweather said that if the state, as it pledged, is delaying a decision so it can work on solutions with the school board and that do not require closures, then she is ready to help. But, she said, “you cannot improve closed schools.”



The School Reform Office recently announced that it had targeted 38 schools for potential closure because the schools ranked in the bottom 5% academically for three straight years. In Detroit, those rankings occurred under state-imposed emergency management. The announcement led to rallies, protests and legal action from the Kalamazoo Public Schools and the Saginaw Public Schools Board. The Detroit Public Schools Community District, with 25 schools on the list, also is considering a lawsuit.



Tonya Allen, president and CEO of the Skillman Foundation, which has pumped millions of dollars into the district and provided a co-chair for the coalition that helped create a plan to save the district, said after the delay announcement that she hoped it was “a recognition that the way the state was handling school closures was ineffective and that there was not sufficient time to address the issue.”



I think it points to the ineffectiveness of a state office that did nothing to improve those schools under emergency management when they all ranked in the bottom 5% academically for three years — or, in some cases, more than three times that. That was years worth of kids attending schools that weren't preparing children for anything.

Worse, if the School Reform Office does decide to close schools, a Detroit Free analysis of Detroit schools found that none of the 25 targeted ones are located near schools that are performing much better.



As a matter of fact, only 20 schools in Detroit rank at or above the 25th percentile — the threshold state officials use to determine school performance. If a school performs better than 25% of the schools in the state, it is ranked at the 25th percentile.



Ari Adler, a spokesman for Snyder, who moved the reform office out of the education department, where it belongs, to a statistical department he controls, said the office "was languishing" in the old structure, and the governor moved it to make it easier to help children.

"We're looking at what was handed to us by the Legislature and trying to give a good look at what we can do to these schools up to and including closure," Adler said. "What you'll see is us trying to work with school districts to see what the best option is."

Adler said the action was based on state law that requires action, but that has been mostly ignored where many of these schools are concerned.

"This is the first time anybody has done what they should have been doing for years, looking at where these schools were ranking and what they can do to get better," he said. He added that, among actions being considered is partnerships between failing schools, local ISDs and the state Department of Education to increase resources and improve rankings. "That would increase accountability and increase resources," he said. He said he wasn't aware of any conversations that would partner Detroit schools with any charter schools.

"It's an imperfect process, but we're trying to do what we're supposed to do and have everybody work together, interacting with local superintendents and local boards. We're slowing the process down," he said.

So this either was a case of the governor forgetting that the state no longer runs Detroit's schools, or taking a thoughtful step back after threatened lawsuits and bad publicity. I hope it's the latter. But either way, the process needs to happen quickly so parents and students can get settled after two tumultuous years of chaos.

And we all need to keep our eyes on the prize since suspicion grows that what our new U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos really wants is a national charter school system across the country, using Detroit as a petri dish to determine how to make it work.

Let’s hope this threat to shut schools instead of improving them isn’t the first shot across the bow in that kind of fight.

Michigan cannot afford the experiment. Detroit cannot afford the uncertainty. And the governor cannot afford another scandal.

Contact Rochelle Riley: rriley99@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @rochelleriley.