Source: Time

By Josh Sanburn

An unprecedented idea may help stabilize the city’s public schools—or signal their demise

When Detroit students return to school on Sept. 6, the rodents and mold found in classrooms last year will be all but gone. Cracked windows will be repaired. Collapsed ceilings patched up. Chipped paint removed. Last year, not a single Detroit public school complied with the city’s public health and safety codes, one reason teachers protested with widespread sick-outs that temporarily crippled the system. This year, 92% of schools are in full compliance.

The most significant changes for the country’s most challenged big-city school system, however, will be right beneath the surface. Beyond cleaned-up classrooms, Detroit’s students will return to a brand-new district altogether—one that isn’t saddled with mountains of debt. This new district is the result of a radical idea: that ailing public entities such as school systems could be overhauled like a bankrupt business.

In June, Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed a sweeping education package to provide financial support for Detroit’s public schools modeled on the 2009 restructuring of General Motors. The legislation left the old district behind as a shell to pay down $515 million in operating debt, similar to GM’s Chapter 11 that created an “old” and “new” General Motors, with the aim of restructuring a public school system that was all but bankrupt. Millions of dollars were allocated to repair the district’s aging facilities, and the legislation allowed the schools—which include some of the nation’s worst and have been under state-run emergency management since 2009—to return to a locally run school board. “DPS is fiscally sound now,” says John Walsh, Gov. Snyder’s director of strategy. Snyder’s use of state-appointed emergency managers has been widely scrutinized since the water crisis in Flint, where lead leeched into the municipal water supply while the city’s finances were being overseen by the state. The water crisis raised questions about Snyder’s reliance on state managers to step in and fix local issues.

The unprecedented experiment is being closely watched by other struggling urban public school systems around the U.S. “There are quite a number of districts that are ending up on the brink of bankruptcy,” says Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at the University of Washington that supports charter schools. “There’s a lot of attention on Detroit.”

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