Take a look at this column, published in Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice.
It reviews a book, Hope and Despair in the American City by Gerald Grant (Harvard University Press 2009), which examines school desegregation through metropolitan-wide school reorganization.
The premise? This work “compares the sorry recent history of Syracuse, New York with the glad success of Raleigh, North Carolina. One town tried desegregation within the boundaries of the old city and failed, and is dying, while the other town regionalized schools, and has been growing by leaps and bounds,” writes reviewer Bruce Fisher. (Fisher is …

I didn’t expect to hear anything encouraging about the Cleveland Municipal School District in this year’s round of state report cards. And as expected, the district overall performed poorly, registering at “academic watch,’ the equivalent of a D grade.
There’s a silver lining, however. The Plain Dealer is reporting the district’s “innovative” schools are performing relatively well, even some of those that are designated for at-risk students.
Cleveland’s MC STEM High School, Cleveland School of Science and Medicine and Warner Girls Leadership Academy all outscored the district overall on standardized tests. Three …

This past week, The New York Times highlighted Sinclair Community College, a school in Dayton helping to retrain workers for the “new” economy.
This glowing piece highlights the school’s low tuition, well-respected programs, aid for displaced G.M. and Delphi workers, and growing enrollment.
“We help people go from $8-an-hour jobs to $18-an-hour jobs,”the school’s president told The Times.
It’s also good to see a Dayton institution get good press after all the negative “dying cities” stuff.

Several Detroit Public School employees have been charged with felonies in connection with corruption and missing funds totaling tens of millions of dollars, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
This is on top of another pressing problem the school is struggling with, a $259 million budget deficit.
The charges are pretty shocking - “A probe launched by [Emergency financial manager] Mr. Bobb uncovered paychecks going to 257 “ghost” employees who have yet to be accounted for,” the Journal explained.
“He said that approximately 500 illegal health-care dependents he uncovered have cost the district …

Jezebel.com is running an interview with Detroit teacher Amanda Rosman, one of five founders of the Bogg’s Educational Center, set to open on Detroit’s East Side in 2011-2012 year.

The school was inspired by the Boggs Center, a development center for leaders and grassroots organization named after two prominent Detroit activists James and Grace Lee Boggs.

Rosman and her group plan to use urban gardening and other nontraditional education approaches to encourage critical thinking as opposed to test-prep memorization.

  This is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever read. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that 1,000 students from Chicago Public Schools skipped the first day of class, rode a bus to a wealthy district and tried to register as students in order to highlight the gross inequalities that exist in the Illinois’ public schools.
  The story follows Brandon, a student from Chicago’s mostly-black South Side, whose school spends about $11,000 per student per year, and Amanda, who attends one of the nation’s wealthiest schools a short distance away. …

Detroit Public Schools has filed for federal disaster relief, The Detroit News reports.
I think this is wise. I think what’s happening in Detroit should be treated similar to a natural disaster.

A Detroit News story today about an effort to reform a Detroit Public School caught my eye.  The story was about Osborn High School, where only 4 percent of students passed the math and writing portions of the Michigan merit exam last year.

Did you know what the graduation rate in Detroit Public Schools is? 37.5 percent! The lowest in the country.