Gov. Rick Snyder came into office with an earnest approach toward government – pragmatism, problem solving and “relentless positive action.”
With an accountant’s mentality, the governor’s approach toward chronically failing school districts and cities was to put a data-driven expert – an emergency (financial) manager – in charge of all the levers of power on a temporary basis.
The thought was this: How does it help the public (the “customers”) to stick with a local institution led by elected officials if those in authority shirk their responsibilities and refuse to take the hard choices needed to right the ship? Isn’t a limited pause in the democratic process acceptable if it fixes crumbling schools and cities?
Now, of course, those questions seem irrelevant. The Snyder approach has failed in dramatic fashion – in Flint, at the Detroit Public Schools, and with the supposedly innovative Education Achievement Authority (EAA), an ad hoc collection of the state’s worst-performing school districts.
$1 million bribery scheme
The death knell of the entire emergency manager process might have been heard on Tuesday when federal prosecutors announced criminal indictments for 12 Detroit school principals and one administrator on corruption charges.
The biased cynics among us probably smirked at the news of this $1 million bribery scheme, declaring that it represents “typical Detroit.” But the rest of us should be shocked and dismayed at such a widespread display of depravity and selfish disregard for the well-being of beleaguered Detroit students.
The implications of this scourge likely will be felt in a further decline in student enrollment, the flight of quality teachers, and a much greater reluctance in Lansing to provide a desperately needed state bailout.
This was more than another black eye for the Detroit schools. This amounted to kicking the DPS while they’re down and bleeding.
Snyder keeps the faith
Over at Eclectablog, a leading liberal voice in Michigan politics, publisher Chris Savage concludes that the EM law cannot be viewed as anything less than a complete failure. After all, seven years under EMs has left us at the lowest point in DPS history.
Yet, Snyder clings to the EM process. That makes Savage, who has written extensively on the EM process and the EAA experiment, wonder what the real motivation is behind this intransigence.
Here’s a portion of a column he wrote hours after the indictments:
At some point you’d think our Republican governor and his Republican colleagues in the state Legislature would come to realize that Emergency Managers cannot cut their way to corruption-free, adequately-funded schools and cities. You’d think they’d finally understand, given the huge preponderance of evidence, that “Emergency Manager” is, in fact, a failed policy, one that guts the finances of already struggling schools and municipalities, forcing unnecessary austerity measures on already weakened administrations.
You would, of course, be wrong about that. As recently as last week, Gov. Snyder made it clear that he has no intentions of walking away from Emergency Management in Michigan.
Over two years ago, I asked the question, “Is the Education Achievement Authority intentionally designed to fail???” With Republicans continuing to double down on Emergency Management, we are now confronted with the same question about the policy of taking over schools and cities with a single unelected individual in charge of making all of the decisions once made by democratically-elected school boards and city councils. Is this system also designed to fail so that another, more corporate-friendly policy can be enacted with more privatization and more siphoning of tax dollars into the coffers of for-profit corporations?
I cannot buy into the conspiracy laid out by Savage. But it is undeniable that a pragmatic, data-driven approach to government has taken another big hit under the Snyder administration.
Relentless positive action now sounds like a positively quaint –and delusional – phrase.
