Detroit's Schools Head Toward Disaster

Across America, crises over money, schoolroom violence and forced busing threaten to overwhelm the cities' public schools. In Chicago and Philadelphia, the school districts are reeling under deficits totaling tens of millions of dollars. In New York and Los Angeles assaults on teachers and students were at an alltime high. In Washington and Richmond, so many white families have fled to the suburbs that the city schools are being left, de facto, segregated.

A.L of these problems--and some uniquely its own--are reflected in Detroit. Put bluntly, Detroit's public education system is close to collapse. Though fourth largest in the U.S., with 300 schools, 10,500 teachers, 285,000 pupils and a budget of $292 million a year, it is running $90 million in the red and may be forced to close March 15, two months ahead of schedule. The system does not have the $73.2 million needed to operate longer. Chances that it will get the money are so slim that a fortnight ago the board of education sent dismissal notices to all teachers.

Detroit's plight does not result from lavish spending. Its schools have been living frugally for several years, and more so than ever this year when $16 million was slashed from the budget. The schools now must get by with old versions of textbooks instead of buying new editions, and cutbacks have been made in such courses as music, art, remedial instruction and athletics. The teaching staff has been reduced by 350 to 10,500, even though it means larger classes--35 pupils per class, about ten more than the statewide average. Teacher salaries now average $11,500; the average autoworker earns $12,500.

New school construction has been halted, and existing schools are seriously overcrowded. Cass Technical High School, for example, was built in 1917 for 2,500 students; today it has 4,800. Space is so scarce that counselors meet parents in the high-ceilinged main office to discuss students' private problems within earshot of anyone who happens by. For lack of a study hall, students spend free periods lounging in the graffiti-smeared corridors, often whiling their time away pitching pennies. Yet Cass is one of Detroit's elite schools, housing the city's top students in music, science and the arts.

Supply rooms have become as barren as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. "There's never enough paper," complains a teacher at an inner city elementary school. "So far this year I've bought ten reams of paper myself. It's a matter of protecting your own sanity --when you see a kid without anything to do, you've got to get him a pencil and a piece of paper."

Broken equipment is often not repaired, and nonessential maintenance like repainting buildings has been deferred for two years. To put all 300 schools back into first-rate condition, the board of education estimates, would cost $100 million. Even school security forces have been chopped--at a time of rising criminal attacks on students and teachers (see box, page 74). At Kettering High School on the east side the guard force was reduced from 14 to four. Yet when Principal Herbert Tabor chained fire doors to keep out intruders, he was fined $100 for violating Detroit's fire laws. Now the fire doors are unlocked, and intruders, some armed with knives or revolvers, find it easier to roam the building, selling drugs, shaking down students for money or snatching teachers' purses.

The result is that the quality of education in Detroit has suffered enormously. Says Mary Ellen Riordan, president of the Detroit teachers federation: "Kids are jammed into schools so that it's almost impossible to handle them. You see 200 kids in a 'study hall' which is nothing more than the balcony of the auditorium--with the orchestra practicing onstage; you see 2,000 kids shoved through a 200-capacity lunchroom in 22-minute shifts. In a lot of places, school amounts to nothing more today than 13 years of baby-sitting."

Teachers agree. "Talk about achievement," sighs one teacher at a white junior high school. "You find yourself wanting to get rid of them. I've seen kids graduate who can barely spell their names. I had one boy graduate with an E from me--everybody else passed him to get rid of him."

In such an atmosphere, many teachers simply walk through their jobs. Problem pupils are passed to get them out of school as quickly as possible, regardless of their lack of achievement. When Detroit children were measured this year against national achievement norms, only 5% of the fourth-graders and 6% of the sixth-graders scored above average. Some 46% of the fourth-graders and 51% of the sixth-graders were below.

No Obligation. There is no mystery about the origins of Detroit's problems. They lie in the flight to the suburbs by middle-class whites since World War II. In their wake they left the poor and the elderly who were joined by black families, most of them poor Southerners seeking jobs in the automobile plants. Today, while the city's white population averages 45 years of age, its black adults are primarily young and raising children. As a result, although half of Detroiters are black (compared with 16% in 1950), they make up 68% of the public school population. But, because so many are below voting age, they account for only 40% of the voters.

The white, aging majority still controls the political process, and many of them see no reason to vote for taxes that will benefit other people's children. Detroit's school tax of 15 mills ($1.50 in taxes for every $100 of assessed value) is one of the lowest in the state. But levies for other public services, such as police and welfare, make Detroit taxes the state's highest. They include a 2% income tax imposed in no other Michigan community.

Detroit schools have also found it impossible to hang onto their taxes.

Michigan law requires that voters periodically renew school taxes, but when the district last year asked them to reap-prove a five-mill property tax and an additional five-mill tax, the voters, including a large number of blacks, balked.

Three times the request was made; three times the voters said no.

They were not, of course, simply voting against the schools. Explains State School Superintendent John Porter: "Education is the only constitutionally established responsibility in which the people are asked to participate in the financing. We don't ask them to levy millage against themselves for highways or health services--only for schools. It's the only place people can vent their frustrations about taxes." Unless public attitudes change, Detroit schools may lose half of their remaining property tax revenues next year when a 7.5-mill tax comes up for reapproval.

Detroit's school system also is faced with a declining tax base. In addition to the exodus to the suburbs, homes and businesses worth $64 million were burned down during the 1967 ghetto riots and never rebuilt. Thus, the school district lost $91 million in revenue over the past five years--a bit more than the present deficit. The schools also have lost $2,000,000 a year in revenue because in the past decade Detroit has taken $150 million worth of private property for 23 miles of freeways to take suburbanites to their city jobs.

The city feels no obligation to replace that lost revenue because legally the school district is a separate political jurisdiction, which levies its own taxes. Reports TIME Bureau Chief Edwin Reingold: "One gets the curious situation in which the city fathers talk about the schools as alien and not the responsibility of the government of the city whose youth they serve."

That sense of alienation is magnified by the fact that even teachers and school administrators are leaving the city. About half of the whites--who make up about 60% of the teaching body --live in the suburbs. "At my children's school," says School Board President Cornelius Golightly, "the principal couldn't come to our P.T.A. meeting one night because he was looking after his own P.T.A. in Oak Park."

To Golightly, 55, a black and the son of a Mississippi farmer, the chief cause of the schools' problems is not just money but the fact that "for many years they were basically middle-class institutions run by middle-class people. Now the schools are still largely run by middle-class people who live in the suburbs and do not send their children to the schools they run."

Outraged. An effort in 1970 to give blacks their fair share of representation in the school system caused a near revolt by white voters. The liberal-dominated school committee divided the city into eight school districts, each governed by a board made up of local residents. The committee also insisted that Detroit begin desegregating its high schools by busing 3,000 white children to predominantly black schools. "That was the crucial thing," recalls Golightly. "When the plan leaked to the press, all hell broke loose."

Whites were outraged and responded by voting out four of the liberals. The new board abandoned the integration plan and redrew district lines so that all eight would be controlled by whites. That sent the N.A.A.C.P. to court, and in a series of decisions beginning in September 1971, Federal Judge Stephen Roth further angered white parents by ordering the city's schools to integrate with those of 52 suburbs. Though his rulings are still under appeal, they would require that about 310,000 children be bused between city and suburban schools--about 40% of the total in the metropolitan area.

The effects of Roth's order were immediate. Sales of suburban housing plummeted, and Detroit's housing starts continued to decline. Apparently parents were abandoning both the city and the suburbs and moving to rural areas to escape the turmoil of busing. Michigan Senator Robert Griffin proposed an antibusing amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and state legislators prohibited state gasoline-tax revenues from being used to pay for busing to integrated schools.

For all of the Detroit schools' problems, the answer is obvious: Detroiters must help themselves. Certainly little help can be expected elsewhere. The Federal Government, which today pays about 10% of the Detroit school bill, will be contributing less next year if President Nixon's proposed 9% cut in federal school aid is passed by Congress. Nor will funds from revenue sharing be available; they will be spent on other city services. Says Mayor Roman Gribbs: "Sharing the federal money with the schools would be like getting a lifeboat and then cutting it in half."

The state legislature is not likely to help either. It is dominated by rural and suburban interests who resent contributing taxes to Detroit's schools, particularly when its school tax rate is less than half that of some suburbs and far below the state average of 26 mills. Snaps Democrat William Copeland of suburban Wyandotte: "I don't see how you can expect me to tax my people for Detroit when they are already paying their fair share for the schools, and Detroit is only paying 15 mills."

Nor are the state's voters noticeably eager to add to their heavy tax bills. They overwhelmingly defeated last November a referendum sponsored by Governor William G. Milliken that would have abolished local property taxes as the basic method of financing public schools. Voters feared the proposal would lead to higher income taxes, mostly for the benefit of Detroit. Since then, the state Supreme Court has followed the precedent set by other states and ruled that Michigan's unequal funding of schools is unconstitutional. It left to the legislature, however, the details of what might be a more equitable way of paying for schools. The formula is likely to be a long time coming --certainly too long to help Detroit out of its crisis.

A Carrot. One possible solution was proposed last week by Milliken and State Senator Gilbert Bursley of Ann Arbor, who drafted a bill that would increase state aid, but only if a district's voters agreed to increase their local school taxes. "This carrot," says Bursley, "may be enough for the voter to see the reward in voting for millage."

Even so, not enough time may be left to save Detroit. Despite eleventh-hour negotiations with legislators, the board of education made no changes in its plan to close down. "Closing will be somewhat precipitate," says Superintendent Charles Wolfe, "because we don't have the time--nor should we take it--for an orderly closing. There are few school days left, and I want to take advantage of every one of them."

Serious as the effects may be this school year, they promise to be even worse next fall. The early closing of schools would mean that the board must cancel leases on 25 rented classroom buildings; they may not be available next year. Teachers and other personnel may move away or take other jobs. Unless amended by the legislature, existing state aid will be reduced because the distribution formula is based on how many days the schools are in session this year. Federal aid, school officials fear, may also be jeopardized. Thus, far from solving its financial problems by closing early, Detroit schools figure to have even worse ones next year.

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