I didn’t expect my call for Michigan to declare Detroit Public Schools bankrupt to lead to action so quickly. But it doesn’t sound like the state is willing to go far enough. While it’s true that Michigan took over DPS not so long ago, the state wasn’t willing to make the dramatic moves necessary to changing the dynamics on the ground. Now is its chance to get it right with a true fresh start.

National Review Online must have been a fan of Fordham’s Education Olympics, for this week it has articles by not one, but two of its stars, Roy Romer and our own Mike Petrilli. Romer offers the sensible and familiar argument that too many large school systems are in crisis and that “we cannot continue to just do more of the same.” What we need, he argues, are “exacting standards,” “quality teachers” in every classroom, pay-for-performance plans, and more pay for “those who teach in under-performing, at-risk schools.”

I’m sure Mike would agree with those prescriptions, but today he’s in no mood for mere incremental reforms, worthy as they might be. In districts like Detroit, whose mammoth failures mirror those of Wall Street, he writes that

States have a long history of coming to the rescue of huge urban districts, long after they have demonstrated an utter inability to get results or balance their books... What’s needed is a fresh start, a do-over, a clean slate for Detroit. Simply put, the state should declare Detroit Public Schools bankrupt. Michigan should take it into receivership and void or renegotiate all of its contracts (including its collective-bargaining agreement with the teachers union). It should slice through any red tape that would keep Detroit from creating a world-class system, including Michigan’s cap on new charter schools and its burdensome teacher-certification requirements.

Americans are understandably growing impatient with government bailouts of Wall Street. When will we become just as frustrated with government bailouts of dysfunctional public school systems too?

The Wall Street analogy is far from perfect - the obvious objection being that when a bank or insurance company fails, the direct impact is felt in one’s wallet; when schools are shut, the pain is borne by children. Still, New Orleans can’t be the only urban system in American needing to start anew, so it’s worth pondering this: would any politician be so bold as to inflict a man-made Katrina, or Lehman Brothers, on a public school system?

It’s hard not to be shaken by the financial news emanating from Wall Street these days. I can’t help but wish I’d studied more economics in college (or that I’d sold our house and started renting a few years ago). But I also can’t help but wish that dysfunctional urban school systems could experience some of the “market discipline” that Lehman Brothers is enjoying right now.

Take Detroit Public Schools, perhaps America’s worst school system. While the ship is sinking, school board members and the superintendent are squabbling over “rudeness.” Is there any reason to believe that the current governance arrangement, political dynamic, and leadership are conducive to the systemic transformation needed to save Motown’s children from a life of despair?

What’s needed is a fresh start, a do-over, a man-made hurricane that can provide the clean slate for Detroit (and other cities with failed systems) that Katrina provided New Orleans. Simply put, Detroit Public Schools should be declared bankrupt. The state should take it into receivership, declare all of its contracts (including collective bargaining agreements) void. It should slice through any red tape that would keep Detroit from creating a world-class system, including Michigan’s inane cap on new charter schools and its burdensome teacher certification requirements. A Paul Vallas-type (if not Paul Vallas himself) should be recruited to build, from the bottom-up, a strong curriculum, a culture of excellence, back-office and human resource routines that work—all the elements of a functioning organization.

All of this will take a change in state law—and a sense of urgency from Governor Granholm and legislative leaders that Michigan won’t allow Detroit to die at the hands of the Detroit Public Schools. Yesterday, Lehman Brothers got sacrificed in order to save the Wall Street system. Today, DPS and other failed school systems should be sacrificed in order to save their cities, their children, and their futures. Political leaders: what are you waiting for?

It wouldn’t surprise me if appreciable, overarching positive changes in most big-city school districts occur only if and when the demographics of the big cities in question naturally shift (emphasis on the word naturally). Certainly it would be interesting if someone could observe a metropolitan “tipping point,” after reaching which a city’s schools get much, much better. Perhaps someone already has? Certainly many people claim that individual schools have race and class “tipping points” (i.e., if a school’s enrollment is more than 50 percent low income, for example, that school is statistically likely to be bad and get worse).

Michelle Rhee gets some support from Senator Joseph Lieberman.

I just got back from Joel Klein’s address at the American Enterprise Institute (carried live on C-SPAN). The New York City Schools Chancellor gave a sober (read: boring) presentation of his tenure in New York, which left the audience a bit wanting in terms of engagement (read: he lectured from a text-packed PowerPoint for forty minutes and talked to the screen instead of the 200-person crowd).

Regardless, there’s plenty to like about his story of New York City school reform. As one of the most prominent spokesmen of the “do whatever works” crowd (or, if you prefer, the incentivists), he talked at length about the structural reforms he and his team have enacted, including a freer and fairer market for hiring teachers; greater autonomy for principals; an expansion of charter schools and other forms of choice; and a version of weighted-student funding.

Still, seven years into his tenure it’s clear that he’s not particularly passionate about the “stuff” of schools, specifically curriculum. But maybe that’s changing. Asked by a certain intrepid blogger about any regrets he might harbor, particularly considering New York City’s lack of progress in 4^th grade reading since 2003 (while the rest of the country is finally showing gains), he admitted a few. First, that he mandated “Month by Month Phonics” in his early years (read: we only put phonics in our program’s name as a marketing ploy, but we’re really all about whole language). And second, that his reading curriculum hasn’t focused enough on non-fiction, a la Core Knowledge. (Joel and Randi agree about something!)

That’s surely not enough to appease his detractors-for example, he still took credit for gains from 2002-2003, even though his reform plans were announced just months before his students took the 2003 NAEP test. (More on that controversy here.) And he still doesn’t embrace scientifically-based reading research, pointing to this flawed study to buttress his argument that nobody really knows for sure which reading method is best. But perhaps, just perhaps, you could say that he’s starting to move in the right direction.

Of course our fallen soldiers deserve the recognition they receive this special day (deserve much more than that, for sure), but this Memorial Day Weekend brought some recognition for a few living heroes, too.

I’m referring to this shout-out for SEED from uber-columnist Tom Friedman in the Sunday New York Times. (By the way, nice title.)

Every once in a while as a journalist you see a scene that grips you and will not let go, a scene that is at once so uplifting and so cruel it’s difficult to even convey in words. I saw such a scene last weekend at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in Baltimore. It was actually a lottery, but no ordinary lottery. The winners didn’t win cash, but a ticket to a better life. The losers left with their hopes and lottery tickets crumpled.

The event was a lottery to choose the first 80 students who will attend a new public boarding school - the SEED School of Maryland - based in Baltimore. I went along because my wife is on the SEED Foundation board. The foundation opened its first school 10 years ago in Washington, D.C., as the nation’s first college-prep, public, urban boarding school. Baltimore is its second campus. The vast majority of students are African-American, drawn from the most disadvantaged and violent school districts.

Some reformers are upset that he didn’t use the term “charter” to describe the school, though to be fair, SEED Maryland isn’t a charter school, to my knowledge, though its cousin in D.C. is. And furthermore, expecting Friedman to embrace any form of public school choice in education only leads to disappointment; his most famous tome came right to the edge of calling for a major overhaul of our education system and blinked. Anyway, this is a day to express gratitude, so let us not be greedy.