Detroit, MI
Whitmer, Democrats have to fix what Betsy DeVos did | Opinion
Michigan public schools have been in a free fall for decades, with every demographic group lagging their peers nationally on most key measures. That means when affluent suburban kids in Michigan are compared to affluent suburban kids in other states, the achievement gap is widening.
So if wealthy, suburban kids in Michigan public schools caught the proverbial cold, Detroit kids in public schools have the flu.
Beyond decades of disinvestment and state-controlled financial mismanagement, major education policy has made even the simplest tasks difficult for Detroit parents.
Parents of children who live in Detroit are flooded with “choices,” but decades-old Lansing policies have made choice nothing more than a fallacy. Instead of just showing up to enroll their children at a neighborhood school, Detroit parents face the unenviable task of sifting through mountains of data and community recommendations simply to select a school for their child to attend.
Some parents get lucky, enrolling their child in the best possible school that meets their child’s needs, while other parents feel like they’re in the movie “Groundhog Day” — stuck in an enrollment trap they can’t get out of. Detroit parents do the best they can with the resources and information available, but there is no cohesion in the chaotic “marketplace” that is public education in Detroit.
It needs to change.
When choice isn’t a choice
Detroit Public School Community District operates 106 schools, serving nearly 49,000 students. But that represents only half of Detroit children.
There are also 97 charter schools (privately run public schools) in Wayne County, most in the city of Detroit, and another two dozen charter schools in Macomb and Oakland County. Detroit children also attend those schools. There are a dozen or so “schools of choice” traditional public school districts that accept nonresident students. Most of them are in inner ring suburbs of Detroit.
In all, there are over 200 public school options for every Detroit parent to consider, and the only way to compare schools is to do it manually. So is enrollment — DPSCD and each individual charter have separate enrollment processes.
Until Detroit parents can objectively compare their choices and enroll their children through a central process, Detroit parents don’t have real choice. Parents must also be guaranteed transportation to get to whatever school they choose, because a choice you can’t get to is no choice at all.
Our Democratic Legislature and governor should act now to offer Detroit parents real choice.
We all know where good intentions lead
In 1994, Michigan voters approved the school funding tax Proposal A — still the single largest tax policy shift in Michigan in the last 100 years.
At a high level, Proposal A was intended to equalize school funding by capping property taxes for school funds at 6 mills, and raising the state sales tax from 4% to 6%. This created the state foundation allowance (also known as per pupil allotment), which distributes a set amount of school funding to every child in Michigan.
This move was sold as a way to eliminate funding disparities between school districts that relied solely on property tax revenue. Before Prop A, the average district levied a 35-mill school tax.
But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The per-pupil-allotment treats public school children in Michigan as fungible widgets, all the same. The cost to educate a second grader in this model is viewed the same as an 11th grader, or for students with special needs or at risk in other ways.
Proposal A launched absurd protocols such as Count Day — student attendance on the first Wednesday in October, a single day, accounts for 90% of school funding for every school district in Michigan. Each year, Count Day brings iPad raffles and pizza parties all over Michigan to ensure the highest student attendance (thus highest revenue) possible.
But accompanied this new tax scheme was the creation of charter schools and schools of choice, adding competition for this new interchangeable commodity — the public-school student, and that student’s accompanying state dollars.
This policy singlehandedly formed the basis of the mess that Detroit parents must deal with today.
A plan that didn’t work
The original aim of charter schools was to stimulate innovation, and push traditional public schools to do the same.
Charter schools — the number of charters was initially capped by the legislation that enabled them — were intended to break free from the large bureaucracies of traditional public school districts, allowing for innovation led by teachers and not bureaucracy-heavy central offices.
But today, most charter schools in Michigan are run exactly like traditional school districts, with large central office bureaucracies (“management companies”), in which teachers have little to no say in methods of instruction.
It should be noted, these (mostly for-profit) management companies are exempt from the same public disclosure requirements traditional school districts are bound by. And, while 30 years later, the creation of charter schools in Michigan has not pushed traditional public schools to innovate, Michigan has more charter schools than any state but Louisiana.
This is perhaps due to the fact that billionaire political donor Betsy DeVos bankrolled the no-compromise, pro-charter school movement in Michigan, funding groups such as the Great Lakes Education project, a staunch pro-charter advocacy organization.
In 2011, DeVos successfully lobbied to remove the cap on charters and charter school openings in Michigan skyrocketed, and now roughly one-third of all charter school students in Michigan are residents of Detroit.
Which brings us back to Detroit parents, and choice.
What DeVos did, and how we can fix it
In 2016, Detroit Public Schools was facing bankruptcy. Four state-appointed emergency managers couldn’t solve one thing, and it related to the above-mentioned per-pupil-allocation.
For 70 years, Detroit’s population has been declining from its 1950 peak of 2 million residents. Now, the city has just around 632,000 residents. Public school enrollment has fallen even faster, from around 299,000 in 1966 to 49,000 today.
Student enrollment declined, of course, as parents moved out of the city. The drop was exacerbated as students who stayed in the city went to attend charters and schools of choice. As the district lost students, revenue declined.
But the difference between Detroit Public Schools and the historic City of Detroit municipal bankruptcy, is that the pension obligations for educators are guaranteed by the Michigan taxpayer. So, a deal had to be done. A Republican governor and state Legislature had to get to work.
The Senate Majority Leader at the time tapped Goeff Hansen, a Republican senator from Hart — over three hours away from Detroit—to lead the work on bringing Detroit Public Schools to continued solvency.
Hansen — clearly not a DeVos puppet — was facing term limits, and wouldn’t get caught up in political gamesmanship.
He visited Detroit over a dozen times to learn about the issues facing Detroit children and focused on shepherding policy that could improve their outcomes, and led the Senate to pass a package of bills he described as, “saving DPS and school choice.”
The Senate bills created a new district — Detroit Public Schools Community District — a debt-free entity that would educate children, while preserving DPS to collect the school millage and pay off the district’s debt.
It also called for a Detroit Education Commission that included an accountability plan. All schools — both DPS and all charters — would be assessed and receive a letter grade of A-F. The commission would also manage public and charter school openings and locations — some Detroit neighborhoods are inundated with school options, and some are veritable deserts. Finally, some measure of accountability for charters.
As to the number of schools to choose from between DPS and charters, Hansen said that “confusion and chaos negatively impacts parents seeking stability and positive educational options for their children. This new level of coordination will bring about increased parental choice and attract new education options for students.” For good measure, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan dedicated his entire keynote at the Mackinac Policy Conference that year in support of the Detroit Education Commission and Hansen’s bills.
But after passing the Senate, the bills suffered a tragic fate in the state House. Betsy DeVos and other members of the wealthy family went on a spending blitz, donating $1.45 million to Republican members over a seven-week period — an average of $25,000 a day — successfully killing the notion of a Detroit Education Commission.
The legislation created a new, financially viable district. But it did nothing to regulate the major issues that affect Detroit children. And it left Detroit parents in the same chaotic public education system 30 years in the making.
Now in 2024, there is a limited Democratic majority in both legislative chambers and a Democratic governor unbeholden to Betsy DeVos.
The time is now to advance a package of bills that addresses this chaos.
I think they should call it “Detroit Kids First.”
The core should be a Detroit Education Commission, with members appointed by Detroit’s mayor, that:
- Creates a common enrollment process for all schools located in Detroit including all charters and DPSCD;
- Creates an accountability standard that assesses school performance and provides an A-F letter grade for every school in Detroit, located on the common enrollment website;
- Administers a common transportation program in which every school in Detroit is mandated to participate and to which all Detroit children have access.
The DeVos money hasn’t disappeared. Outfits like GLEP will still oppose any form of regulation involving charter schools.
But Detroit parents — half of whom send their children to charter schools — would welcome a commission that can provide some semblance of stability and certainty to the exercise of school choice.
The notion that parents will be able to make more informed choices and have an opportunity to attend these schools, just makes sense. I encourage my friends in the state Legislature — particularly in the Detroit Caucus — to take up this cause.
Detroit parents — and students — will surely be grateful.
Michael Griffie is the Detroit Metro Leader for AECOM and a former Detroit charter school principal. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters.
There was a time when many Historical Black Colleges had swimming teams. The late Robert ‘Fish’ Jenkins benefited from that era and then he spent much of his adult life lifting up youths in Detroit.
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The celebration of Black History Month throughout February provides an opportunity to share stories about Detroiters that have positively impacted the lives of others in a variety of ways.
And included among those stories that have been shared this month is a “Fish” story that is unique, without exaggeration.
That is because this story is about the late Robert “Fish” Jenkins Sr., a longtime Detroit educator and a groundbreaking coach, whose superpower was his ability to create life-changing opportunities for young people in unconventional spaces.
In 1969, Jenkins arrived at Detroit’s Northern High School as a physical education teacher and coach. During Northern’s heyday, the high school, formerly located on Woodward Avenue at Owen in the city’s North End, produced a host of high-profile sports stars, including basketball greats Bill Buntin — a two-time All-American center at the University of Michigan during the 1960s — and Derrick Coleman — the first overall pick in the 1990 NBA draft. And record-breaking sprinter Marshall Dill, Track & Field News’ High School Athlete of the Year in 1971, who set world records in the 300-yard dash while running for Michigan State University.
However, Jenkins specialized in coaching sports that were a little less popular among young people in Detroit, particularly Black students. Jenkins coached teams at Northern — and for one year at East English Village Preparatory Academy after he retired from teaching in 2001 — to 24 Detroit Public School League championships in swimming, golf and soccer.
“No matter what the sport was, he had the formula to make a team a champion,” Robert Jenkins Jr. said about his father, who died on Jan. 14 at the age 86.
“But more than that, my father had a profound impact on the minds of every student he touched. He brought golf, and all the lessons golf teaches, to the North End. And, in the summer, he had members of the swim team teach the younger kids in the neighborhood how to swim, which taught his swim team members how to give back to the community.”
During the evening of Feb. 22, Robert Jenkins Jr. took pride in sharing stories about young people who were coached and mentored by his father across multiple decades that went on to become “doctors, educators, business leaders, and parents” that have made positive contributions to the city of Detroit.
Robert Jenkins Jr. also described some of the friendly interactions that his dad had with notable people like U.S. Olympic sprint champion Wilma Rudolph and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer Dick Barnett at Tennessee State University, where the elder Jenkins received the education and training that he needed to teach and coach student-athletes in Detroit.
But earlier that day, an equally compelling “Fish” story was told by another community member.
“Mr. Jenkins was a very important person in my life and he is one of the reasons why I have always tried to do my part when it comes to providing opportunities for young people in our city,” said Gary Peterson, who has coached young swimmers in Detroit for 47 years, including at Detroit’s King High School, where he coaches boys and girls swimmers today.
Long before Peterson coached high school swimmers — and youth swimmers of virtually all ages when he was a full-time swimming instructor for the city of Detroit’s Recreation Department — Peterson was on the swim team at King High School (Class of 1974), when Robert Jenkins Sr. came into his life.
“There were coaches at other schools that helped young swimmers that wanted to improve and go to another level, and Mr. Jenkins was one of those coaches,” said Peterson, who was coached at King High School by Clyde James, a lifelong friend and teammate of Jenkins on the Tennessee State University swimming team during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when they brought national attention to the school’s swimming program.
“Mr. Jenkins would make his pool at Northern available to students from other schools that wanted to get in extra practice. Then, as I got closer to going to college, Mr. Jenkins was the person who introduced me to the colleges that were recruiting Black high school swimmers.
“At that time, there were more than 20 HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) that had competitive swimming programs. Today, there is only one (Howard University in Washington, DC). But back then, Mr. Jenkins wanted to make sure we had the opportunities and exposure, which included sending a small group of us to South Carolina State for a recruiting trip.
“Afterwards, Mr. Jenkins even came over to King from Northern to present me with my scholarship to South Carolina State, while I was sitting in a King classroom. I couldn’t believe it and I was ecstatic, but everything that he did for me and other young swimmers in the city he did so willingly. And that’s what I always thought I was supposed to do as a coach.”
Peterson said he would do even more with Jenkins when Peterson returned to Detroit from Orangeburg, South Carolina, after graduating from college.
“In the late 1980s, a team I was coaching at Johnson Recreation Center and Mr. Jenkins’ team at Northern, traveled to Washington DC as one team in February to compete in the Black History Invitational Swim Meet. And that tradition of Detroit competing as one team at that meet continued every year until COVID,” said Peterson, who also recalled that Jenkins coached softball and even junior varsity football for a time, in addition to swimming, golf and soccer.
“Just as Mr. Jenkins thought it was critical for us to come together and take our kids to DC for that swim meet because it was the biggest showcase for Black swimmers, he wanted all the young people he coached to have good training and exposure. And in my case, as the son of sharecroppers, I can say that Mr. Jenkins inspired me as well, as a swimmer and a coach.”
Every time Peterson walks into King High to coach the current group of swimmers at the school, he said he is reminded of Jenkins and other important people that paved the way for Black swimmers in Detroit.
For example, in 2023, the natatorium at King was rededicated as the Clyde James Natatorium by the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Peterson says the renaming was not only a salute to James, who was a finalist in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Championships in the 100-yard butterfly during the 1960-61 season while swimming for Tennessee State, but also a tribute to the fabled swimming program that was once housed at the Brewster Recreation Center, which helped to develop James, Jenkins and many other Detroit swimmers that competed nationally. Brewster’s early swimming program was led by the legendary Clarence Gatliff, an all-city swimmer at Cass Tech during the 1920s.
Another pleasant reminder of the history and evolution of Black swimmers in Detroit that Peterson sees when inside King High is 54-year-old Robert Jenkins Jr., an educator like his father, who is teaching personal finance this school year at King and hopes to honor his father’s legacy this summer by offering a swimming and golf program to students.
“I want to make sure that Detroiters understand my father’s legacy,” said Jenkins, a 1989 graduate of Northern High School, who explained that his father and mother (Norma Jean Jenkins) taught him and his sister (Dr. Marlo Rencher) that “we don’t half do anything.”
And that includes community service.
“My father was a servant leader and he would offer encouragement to any young person he was around, not just the students he coached. And paying it (that support) forward was a lesson he always taught in the process.”
Scott Talley is a native Detroiter, a proud product of Detroit Public Schools and a lifelong lover of Detroit culture in its diverse forms. In his second tour with the Free Press, which he grew up reading as a child, he is excited and humbled to cover the city’s neighborhoods and the many interesting people who define its various communities. Contact him at stalley@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @STalleyfreep. Read more of Scott’s stories at www.freep.com/mosaic/detroit-is/. Please help us grow great community-focused journalism by becoming a subscriber.
TV and newspapers: Detroit media history
The Detroit Free Press has been publishing since the mid-19th century.
Fox 2 Detroit (WJBK-TV) morning news anchor Amy Andrews took to social media on Thursday, Feb. 26, to share with viewers why she has been off the air again.
Andrews posted on Instagram that she is on a “physician-directed medical leave” as she continues treatment for dysautonomia, which she described as “a disorder of the autonomic nervous system that affects things like heart rate, blood pressure, and circulation.”
Wrote Andrews, “For me, it can cause significant dizziness, vision changes, brain fog, and sudden drops in blood pressure, making live television unsafe until it’s properly stabilized.”
According to the Dysautonomia Project, a nonprofit collaborative effort to provide education on the condition, an estimated 70 million people across the globe have some form of dysfunction to the autonomic system that regulates “functions that are automatic in nature such as heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, excretion, perspiration, temperature regulation, pupil dilation, circulation, and respiration” and more.
“Often dysautonomias are invisible illnesses. Patients may not look sick, and yet they have symptoms that make it difficult to work, go to school, and perform activities of daily living,” the collaborative effort says.
Andrews explained on her post that she doesn’t take her decision to step back from work lightly “I love what I do, and I love serving this community. Right now, my focus is following my doctors’ guidance so that I can return safely and consistently.”
She added, “I miss our mornings together more than I can say. Please know I am working hard, I am not giving up, and my goal is to return as soon as I am medically able. Thank you for the incredible support so many of you have shown me over the years. It means everything.”
Andrews received several supportive comments to her posting, including from Local 4 News (WDIV-TV) anchors Rhonda Walker, Karen Drew and Jason Colthorp.
“From your friends and competitors across town: Get well soon. Hope to look up and see your face soon,,” wrote Colthorp.
Andrews, who is an anchor of “Fox 2 News Mornings,” returned to work in September 2025 after an extended absence for what she said at the time on social media were health issues, describing symptoms like “extreme dizziness, balance issues, brain fog and blurred vision.”
Before that, in July 2025, she wrote online to thank staffers at the Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders (which has several locations in metro Detroit) for taking “amazing” care of her and wrote shortly afterward in August 2025: “My neurologist was able to rule out what would’ve been a devastating diagnosis! … However, that means I move on to different specialists and different tests until we figure this out.”
Andrews has been open about her medical challenges in the past and is also an advocate for mental health awareness. Through social media, she revealed in 2022 and 2024 that she had taken medical leaves to deal with depression and anxiety.In 2021, she underwent back surgery to remove herniated disc fragments in her lower back after an injury suffered during a vacation in Florida.Andrews is an alum of Indiana University, Oakland University and the Specs Howard School of Media Arts. She worked at TV stations in Colorado, Nevada, California and the Flint and Saginaw market before joining Fox 2 Detroit in 2011.
She is involved with many community causes including Gleaners Community Food Bank, C.A.T.C.H Children’s Charity, the Crohn’s Colitis Foundation of America, Habitat for Humanity, the American Heart Association and Angels of Hope, according to her Fox 2 Detroit biography.Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
Watch Mary Sheffield sworn in as first female Detroit mayor
Mary Sheffield officially became Detroit’s 76th mayor during a public ceremonial swearing-in.
LANSING — Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield said she was both excited and inspired by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s State of the State address Feb. 25, especially the plans Whitmer announced related to literacy and housing.
Sheffield spoke to the Detroit Free Press just outside the House chamber, immediately after Whitmer’s final State of the State as governor and Sheffield’s first as mayor of Detroit.
Sheffield said the governor hit on many “kitchen table topics that matter to not just Michiganders, but everyday Detroiters as well.”
Whitmer has made literacy a key topic for the last year of her final term, proposing in her recent 2027 budget a record investment in literacy coaches, new school curricula, and other initiatives, supported by a one-time $645-million surge in literacy funding.
“The literacy piece is big because Detroiters want a mayor that focuses more on education,” Sheffield said.
She said she wants to see more after-school programming and safe spaces where Detroit children can read.
On housing, Sheffield said she wants to build 1,000 new single-family homes in Detroit and she supports Whitmer’s proposal to ease zoning restrictions and streamline construction regulations.
“Her wanting to expedite and remove regulations to build housing something quicker is something I was very, very interested in,” Sheffield said.
Sheffield also attended President Donald Trump’s Feb. 24 State of the Union address.
Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com.
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