Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  The isolation of DPS began in the early seventies, when suburban opponents of busing—led by Oakland County Commissioner L. Brooks Patterson, who had made his name through demogoguery on the racially charged issue—fought the desegregation order all the way to the Supreme Court, resulting in the landmark Milliken v. Bradley decision severely limiting the state’s ability to bus children across district lines. The ruling in effect ensured that Detroit’s school system would be comprised of a concentrated body of poor and minority students. Patterson still runs suburban Oakland County, which comprises a large portion of metropolitan Detroit, having coasted to a fourth term in 2008 with 58 percent of the vote.

  Meanwhile, Detroit’s public school district now serves an almost entirely black population and has been one of the worst in the country for years, with a graduation rate of 25 percent, the lowest math and reading test scores in the forty-year history of the National Assessment of Education Progress and 73 percent of fourth graders lacking (in the NAEP’s assessment) “even the basic skills that are the building blocks of reading.” Unfathomable percentages of the city’s children had essentially been written off as an acceptable level of attrition. What to do about Detroit’s public schools had become a major and especially contentious part of the city’s rightsizing debate, since many of the schools were not only failing but half empty, having been built when Detroit possessed more than twice its current population.

  In 1999, the state first took over the school system, replacing the elected school board with an appointed body; when the state returned control of the district to Detroit in 2005, the schools were actually performing lower on key math and reading tests and the district had a $200 million deficit, which the outgoing state-appointed manager, Kenneth Burnley, attributed to declining enrollment, swelling teacher benefits, and cuts in state aid. In 2009, the Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm reclaimed the school system, appointing Bobb, a former Washington, D.C., deputy mayor and city manager who’d also served as president of the board of education. The move was popular in the suburbs—Bobb being the sort of “leadership change” suburbanites generally praised. In the city, feelings were more mixed. Some Detroiters greeted Bobb as an educational messiah; others, including but not limited to members of the teachers unions, saw him in more Mephistophelean terms, yet one more outsider parachuting into town to figure out how corporate forces might profit from local misery. (In this case, the profit motive centered around the push to convert certain failing schools into private charters, as had been done in other troubled cities, most notably New Orleans.) The new emergency manager’s opponents began mockingly referring to him as “Bob Bobb.”

  Still, there was no denying the system he’d been charged with fixing was riddled with corruption and violence, and something drastic needed to happen. The FBI was investigating a kickback scheme involving $57 million missing from the district budget. There were shady no-bid contracts; kids had to bring their own toilet paper to school. The principal of Finney High got his jaw broken after being punched by a student wearing brass knuckles. At Mumford High, two kids were shot on the first day of class; the year before, the school’s new principal had resigned after serving only two months on the job, calling school violence “off in a different arena.” Part of Bobb’s mandate necessarily involved closing or merging schools, which could not help but be controversial. How far would kids be expected to travel to get to class? Would gangs from rival neighborhoods wind up in the same schools?

  One of the dynamics at play in the media war over control of DPS was the unsubtle contrast between the school board and Bob Bobb. The new emergency manager was a polished bureaucrat who spoke in tough-sounding platitudes; his opposition, meanwhile, came in the form of shouting inner-city parents and a board that included the dimwitted “Reverend” David Murray, who had legally changed his first name to Reverend as an adult,4 and Otis Mathis, the board president who graduated from a DPS public school with a D-plus average, took fifteen years and a lawsuit against Wayne State University in order to receive his bachelor’s degree (claiming in his lawsuit that an English proficiency test required for graduation discriminated against African Americans), was forced to resign after fondling himself in front of a female school superintendent, and whose emails, leaked to the Detroit News, suggested a literacy on par with the majority of his failing students:

  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.

  An activist parent (and member of Mensa, per the article) told the Detroit News, “I know he’s a terrible writer. Oh wow, I’ve seen his e-mails. His job, though, is to represent the community. His lack of writing skills is prevalent in the community. If anybody does, he understands the struggles of what it’s like to go through an institution and not be properly prepared.”

  Bobb had been walking a tricky line since his appointment. To justify the sorts of upheaval of the status quo he had in mind, he railed constantly about how awful the district was, with some exaggeration, as in his widely reported discovery of “ghost employees” who’d remained on school payrolls for years, which was later proven untrue. At the same time, he needed students to remain enrolled in DPS. If parents continued to jump from the sinking ship of the district—and why would they not, given how terrible it supposedly was—then DPS would lose all sorts of state and federal money, which of course it sorely needed. So as the 2009–2010 school year approached, Bobb and his minions—to convince parents to keep their children in the school system he’d spent all summer painting as one of the most corrupt in the country—rather perversely launched a half-million-dollar public relations campaign, with the goal being to get as many children’s bodies as possible in the schools on the all-important “Count Day,” when official head counts were taken to determine enrollment, which translated into per-pupil funding numbers.

  The hard sell employed couldn’t help but seem creepy, like the techniques of a used-car salesman or Las Vegas casino operator. To lure kids to Count Day, Bobb promised a free breakfast and lunch, along with raffles of goodies like laptops, iPods, and a 42” flatscreen plasma television. He also flew Bill Cosby to town, where the comedian (and former teacher) personally walked door-to-door to talk to parents about the district’s virtues. (Though at times Cosby seemed to stray off message, in one speech announcing he would probably “look for a charter school” if he were raising kids in the city.)

  Just before the beginning of the school year, Bobb staged a parade and rally in downtown’s Campus Martius square. One of the parade floats featured Thomas Edison, from Michigan, though not a product of DPS, at work in his laboratory. Nodding to the demographics of the student body, the float designer gave Edison a black lab assistant, or equal partner, it wasn’t quite clear—he wore a top hat and glasses and seemed to be cranking a phonograph. From a stage, Bobb and various DPS representatives, working together for the common goal of securing as much warm-body-money as possible, had the assembled children shout “DPS!” and wave their fists.

  Bobb proceeded to enlist his new charges in the PR blitz being rained upon them, bullying the crowd with hoarse call-and-response questions that began innocuously (“How many of you agree that great things are happening in Detroit?”) and became progressively weirder (“You wanna go into a building that’s safe?” YEAHHHH!! “You wanna go into a building where the adults aren’t stealing money?” YEAHHHH!!). The campaign’s slogan, “I’m In,” had been plastered on signs and T-shirts throughout the crowd. The logo featured a pair of blue doors, designed in a boxy, minimalist style that made me think of the World Trade Center. Actual blue doors had been set up on the stage, along with a sign asking “Are You In?” In a city with so many buildings in a ruinous state, entirely lacking windows and doors, this felt like an obvious reversal: just doors, with the rest of the home missing. Of c
ourse, the sight gag hadn’t been purposeful, though someone might have considered the problematic symbolism of goading kids into stepping through a set of doors leading nowhere.

  By the time Bobb left office in 2011, the DPS deficit had grown by another $100 million, though he’d shuttered fifty-nine schools and 30 percent of the workforce had been eliminated. On the plus side, the collapse of the housing market across the entire Detroit metropolitan area had allowed more and more families to send their kids to superior schools—by moving to the suburbs.

  For those left behind in DPS, the school closings meant longer commutes, occasionally to charter schools, still the solution of choice for a number of education reformers like Bobb. Doug Ross, whose Urban Preparatory Academy charter had an exemplary track record, was made DPS’s chief innovation officer, and would be overseeing ten planned “self-governing” public schools—which would receive full funding from the district but otherwise make autonomous decisions on budgeting, staffing, and curriculum—beginning in the 2012–2013 school year. It was an intriguing experiment, and one that might well pay off; proponents cited studies that favored granting talented principals as much leeway as possible. Still, whenever an experiment’s subjects happened to be almost entirely poor and black, the notion took on an unavoidably queasy Tuskeegean ring, no matter how pure the intent. On the other hand, the district had already lost so many students to charters and other districts (via a “school of choice” program), only 48 percent of children in the city attended DPS institutions anymore. Experimentation, at this late stage, struck many as an eminently reasonable response.

  * * *

  There were a handful of exemplary DPS schools, the majority of them specialized institutions like Cass Tech. But the most remarkable success story had to be the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a magnet school for pregnant teenagers and mothers. Catherine Ferguson Academy boasted a 90 percent graduation rate; its principal, Asenath Andrews, required her students to obtain at least one college acceptance letter in order to receive a diploma. The school had built such a sterling reputation that students had actually been caught lying to gain admission, borrowing infants to pass off as their own or swapping out their urine with a pregnant friend’s so as to produce a positive test.

  The school’s ninety-year-old building hulked on an otherwise barren stretch of urban prairie just north of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The student farm, where each of the girls tended her own vegetable plot and learned about everything from milking goats and baling hay to slaughtering livestock, included an apple orchard, chickens, rabbits, a horse, a beehive, a giant turkey, and an old red barn that appeared to have been airlifted directly from northern Michigan, though it was actually built by the students themselves. The farm took up several vacant lots behind the school, in the space where a football field would have been at a normal public school. Inside, the shabby hallway would have seemed unremarkable, save for the day-care workers tending to six infants seated in a long, multichild stroller made to look like a red bus. Nearby, a parking lot of single-rider strollers had formed in front of some lockers. A two-year-old in pink-ribboned braids wandered past, followed by her mother, cradling a second infant.

  Principal Andrews, at six feet tall, with a broad, freckled face and silver-streaked hair that swooped dramatically up from her forehead, cut an imposing figure. Yet there was something soothing about her presence, a confidence at once utterly relaxed and (forgive me, but this really is the best word) impregnable. Such self-assurance lent her authority a casual, improvised quality; everything coming out of her mouth sounded like the words of someone who’d just happily alit upon a brand new thought.

  Andrews grew up on Detroit’s northwest side. She attended Mumford High School, the only black girl in her grade. There were five black boys; the rest of the kids were Jewish. She says she can’t recall any overt racism, even though the neighborhood where she grew up was bounded by a six-foot-tall, foot-thick, half-mile-long concrete wall erected in the early 1940s by a local developer who wanted to build homes for middle-class whites and agreed to put up the wall in order to secure loans from the Federal Housing Authority, which considered such close proximity to a black neighborhood “high-risk.” (Remnants of the wall still exist.) Andrews’s family lived on the white side of the wall, but all of her cousins lived on the black side. Her parents both worked at Chrysler, like most people in the neighborhood. “It never occurred to me that I was less than,” she told me. “I didn’t think we were middle class, because I thought middle-class people wore suits to work. But my family had a middle-class income. Everyone I grew up with went to college, except for a boy named Craig, and he traveled around Europe instead.”

  Andrews attended Olivet College, a small liberal arts school a couple of hours west of Detroit, where she majored in psychology and art. She sold enough paintings to pay for her rent but decided by her junior year that if she ever had kids, she didn’t want them attending public school, so she obtained a teaching certificate as well, just in case homeschooling would be necessary. Eventually, she came to believe the only real way to affect political change was through education, and she began teaching in the public school system. When she became the founding principal of Catherine Ferguson Academy in 1985, the six-week alternative-ed program was based out of a Salvation Army building. The district had designated all of the students as handicapped. Andrews described the original program as a “warehouse-segregation model,” where students were taught things like cooking, typing, and bookkeeping. She began to lobby the district to lengthen the girls’ stay, which improved their test scores. Then she fought to move the school to its current building, a former elementary school that had fallen into disuse.

  “Look at the neighborhood,” Andrews said. “There is no neighborhood. I campaigned for six months to get us in here. When they finally moved us, we had to share the space with bad boys and expelled kids. Because these were ‘bad girls.’ You know, bad boys hold up liquor stores and knock you over the head, and bad girls get pregnant. That’s still the mentality. When I first came here, people were inviting me to teen crime seminars. I said, ‘Hey! They didn’t rob anybody. They had sex!’”

  Andrews’s telephone rang. We were sitting in her office. It was her sister calling. Andrews was having some work done on her house, and one of the contractors had apparently reached into a wall and got himself bit by an opossum. “No, I guess you shouldn’t let him do that,” Andrews said. She hung up. The opossum, a mother, had been holed up in the wall with a bunch of babies, and the contractor had wanted to seal the hole and let them die.

  Andrews either didn’t find the coincidence of having received this call in the middle of our interview amusing or she did but chose not to remark on it. In any event, she continued, “We had more teen mothers in the fifties than anytime since, but they all got married. The term ‘drop out’ didn’t really exist until the midsixties, because it wasn’t assumed you necessarily finished high school. You didn’t have to. I heard the white girls went away or had special doctors. It was such a stigma to be pregnant and not get married. You didn’t want anyone to go through that. By the time I got to college, we’d collect cigarette money if someone needed an abortion. You’d give your last.”

  I asked how she managed such an unheard-of college acceptance rate for a public high school. Andrews fixed me with a look and said, matter-of-factly, “I expect it.”

  I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. I said, “How is that not an overly simple answer? All of the special challenges—”

  She cut me off and asked, “Did you go to college right out of high school?”

  I said yes.

  She said, “How come?”

  This time I didn’t answer. Of course, she had a point.

  “You do things because that’s what you must do,” she said. Then she shrugged. She was wearing a pearl necklace over a periwinkle sweater. Often, though not this particular afternoon, she liked to pin unusually large corsages to her chest. We’re
talking flowers the size of a round sauceboat. This would have looked ridiculous on most women, but Andrews carried enough size, herself, to make it work.

  “I mean, you don’t have to be smart to go to college—George Bush was president,” she went on, her dark eyes flashing. “These girls know they’re important to me. Women do things for a lot of reasons. Most of them not for themselves. So you can use that for your own purposes.”

  * * *

  Upstairs, in Mr. Drewery’s stuffy world history classroom, six girls, looking as generally unenthused as your typical high school world history class, sat around four wobbly-legged tables facing a chalkboard crowded with a list of words: “Maginot Line,” “Benito Mussolini,” “Anti-Semitism,” “Hittites.” Since one of the girls was pregnant, Mr. Drewery let her sit at the desk closest to the window so she would be more comfortable. Another, not pregnant, wore a very short shirt and kept a single earbud of her headphones in her ear during class. I wasn’t sure whether Mr. Drewery noticed, but did not snitch. A third girl, wearing a tight white tank top with FLIRT printed in pink letters across the front, her blond-streaked hair spilling out of a glitter Cedar Point cap, pulled a cell phone out of her bra and checked the time. There was a large, noticeable hole in the ceiling. Various pots and pans had been arranged on the bookcases to catch water from other leaks.

  Mr. Drewery wore thick-framed black glasses riding low on his nose. He had sleepy eyes, a mustache and goatee, and a red lanyard with keys on the end dangling over his checked tie and white dress shirt.

  “Miss Murray,” he said to one of the girls, who had partially put her head down on her desk, “you’re not your usual energetic self.”

  The girl sighed and said that last night she and her family had heard what they thought had been a loud series of thunderclaps, but it turned out to be guys on their roof, trying to break into the house. Her father had chased them off, but the police didn’t arrive until two in the morning.