Detroit Public Schools just posted one of the worst record scores for children of Michigan’s largest public school system.
Certainly this is not good news to ride home for the holiday season.
Most of the school’s fourth and eight grade students failed to make it on a basic math level test on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The students scored for the most part 200 against the national average of 239 on a scale of 500 with about 1900 students from Detroit participating.
Mayor Dave Bing called it a “wake up call for our community and demonstrates the need for accountability at all levels. We cannot afford to lose another child.”
Yes, that’s how Bing is describing it because he knows that if we continue to fail our children and mortgage their future, certainly no one will be interested in moving their families to Detroit.
The mayor knows that if Detroit doesn’t get it’s A game tight it might as well forget about building the future for children.
It’s almost 2010 and many of us are eager to enter the new year with stringent resolutions about what we want to see done in our lives and those we care about.
But before you start making resolutions that you most likely will break in the first six months of the year, think hard about the test scores revealing the academic inadequacies we’ve shamefully accepted as the educational moniker for children in Detroit.
Think about Detroit in the next 15 years and what that would mean to children born in this city.
Fifteen years from now when my son and other children born this year turn 16 they will expect their parents to buy them their first cars.
Will the auto industry in Detroit then be on life support or would it have reinvented itself to produce top cars that are affordable, eco-friendly, compact and widely liked?
As the year is coming to an end I’m projecting into the future, and worried about the future my son and other children will inherit. And the news from DPS this week doesn’t help ease the climate of confusion that is forcing parents to choose between DPS and other districts.
What would the Michigan economy be like given that it is currently driving away graduates to other states because they find no greener pastures at home?
The economic situation in Detroit and the state places upon us a challenge to go beyond policy enactment to making deliberate choices, personal sacrifices that will secure a future for Michigan’s children.
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