Bankrupt mentality a cancer in Detroit

Detroit is not bankrupt -- not officially, anyway. But it may as well be.

The former mayor, forced to resign in disgrace, is back in court to defend his spending practices. A member of his inner circle cops to a bribery charge, auguring more to come. The city is borrowing money to pay its bills. Public schools students deliver the worst performance in the 40-year history of a national standardized test, even as teachers angrily denounce proposals to inject accountability into their next contract.

Oh, the horror! Oh, the outrage should be more like it, because this week's ugly surprise from DPS stands as a searing indictment of a community inside (and, yes, outside of) Detroit benumbed by its own benign neglect.

The crushing embarrassment of the test results should serve as a tipping point for leadership, starting with Mayor Dave Bing, the new City Council, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and the Legislature. Time to dispense with political half-measures and move straight to raw power.

With the notable exception of Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager appointed by the governor to fix the schools' appalling books, Detroit Public Schools are an unambiguous failure. Worse, they are failing the children that the state of Michigan is constitutionally obligated to educate.

Pumping yet more taxpayer dollars into Detroit's bankrupt-in-all-but-name public education system is financial folly and political malpractice. The only thing more immoral would be political and business leaders consigning, by their inaction, another generation of children to lives of ignorance, want and missed opportunity.

Charles Dickens would be all over this story. His likely take would be devastating: The self-absorption, preening egos and petty power trips of those in charge begetting wave after wave of young people unprepared for the challenges and change of contemporary society.

His tale of this city would feature a parade of squabbling school board members who don't know governance from management and whose over-riding obsessions are dividing the spoils among competing interests. There would be union loudmouths who defend teachers' performance even as the quantifiable results go from bad to worse to inexcusable.

There would be the parents who don't help and others who don't set the right tone as still others search for ways out. And there would be state legislators too content to look the other way, business leaders who say it's not their problem, outsiders who look in with contempt and a governor afraid to wield the full force of her powers in the name of a single word: stop.

This is the unraveling of an American city, a haunting parallel to the reckoning that is forcing fundamental change on the Detroit auto industry, its people, unions and communities. The keepers of the city's institutions are desperately fighting to maintain a status quo that is operationally broken, intellectually spent and morally indefensible.

Just as this year exposed the rotting structure supporting Detroit's auto industry, the financial morass weighing on city finances, the metastasizing corruption probes and the complete failure of the public schools are conspiring to show how effectively bankrupt Detroit has become.

That's not negative and it's not Detroit-bashing. It's the harsh truth, a measure of the monumental challenges facing Bing and a new council when they both open new terms next month.

The saddest part is that it's taken this long for the obvious to become undeniable. You could argue that business investment and the jobs that come with them aren't necessarily influenced by the quality of a city's schools. You could posit that most businesses wouldn't be in the market to hire Detroiters anyway. You could lobby for the sanctity of collective bargaining and elected school boards.

But they would all be excuses that are beside the fundamental point: Adults who take public money to fund their rotting institutions and then abandon children to an educational wasteland are destroying the most valuable sort of capital we have -- human capital.

And it's wrong. The legacies of leaders, starting with a governor poised to begin her final year in office, are defined as much by what they don't do as what they do. Because it's the right thing to do, whatever the political consequences.

dchowes@detnews.com">dchowes@detnews.com (313) 222-2106 Daniel Howes' column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Catch him Fridays with Paul W. Smith on WJR-AM (760).