Word: schooled
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...that prompted Granholm, a Democrat, to seize control of Detroit's public schools in the fall of 2008 and then look for someone to fix them. After a wide search, she settled on Bobb, who had a reputation for restoring fiscal sanity to city governments - including managing public-school-system budgets. When Bobb arrived last spring, here's what he found: Contracts had been stuffed in office drawers. The district couldn't afford new books. Gas was siphoned between buses. The district had to borrow money to pay its employees. There wasn't even a chief financial officer managing...
...Denial was a problem too. Shortly before Bobb took over, Detroit's school board okayed a budget that it claimed had an $8 million surplus. Bobb's assessment showed a budget deficit of $303.5 million. He's since reduced the deficit partly by trimming the system's job rolls from about 14,000 to about 13,000. He's closed 29 of the district's 194 schools and hired outside firms to restructure 17 others. And in what may be his most inspired move, Bobb has asked some 2,600 volunteers to donate 360,000 hours to helping kids read...
...Bobb as city manager and deputy mayor; he managed an $8 billion annual budget and some 20,000 employees. Three years later, he was elected president of D.C.'s board of education. After that experience, why would anyone want to take on the task of saving Detroit's public schools? "I wanted to go to an urban school district, the roughest and the toughest. Why? Because I understand the dynamics, the grit, the opportunities that are prevalent in urban America." (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
Bobb acknowledges that the cost-shaving measures have made some high school classrooms "look like lecture halls." They have also raised the potential for clashes between students from rival schools and neighborhoods suddenly thrown under the same roof; as a result 137 guidance counselors cut by Bobb were later hired back. Bobb had a similar change of heart after 20 piano teachers were dismissed. "You go back to your apartment and think, How can you have a school of music without a piano teacher?" Bobb says. So he hired them back too. Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Bobb's chief academic officer...
Meanwhile, Bobb is drafting broad academic reforms to bolster school-administrator, teacher and student performance. He is establishing systemwide standards for what classes a student needs to have passed to be promoted to the next grade. He has shuffled dozens of principals, often from relatively high-performing schools to less than stellar ones, and he may extend the school day. In the next 18 months, he wants significant gains in the percentage of fourth- and eighth-graders who perform at grade level in math and reading. By 2015, he wants 90% of all students to complete at least one Advanced...