Dismantled: The Breakup of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1980-2016 by Leanne Kang

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dismantled: The Breakup of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1980-2016 by Leanne Kang Jeffrey R. Henig Leanne Kang. Dismantled: The Breakup of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1980-2016. New York: Teachers College Press, 2020. Pp. 132. Index. Notes. Paperback: $34.95. The world of education policy often is portrayed in quick flashes and disconnected contemporary events. This or that proposal is enacted by this or [End Page 148] that school board or state. A new study shows that this or that policy initiative is working, or that it's not. This or that new school superintendent (state legislator, or "education governor") is showing the country what can be done. But these flashes and vignettes can distract from important trends that are slow-moving with long and loopy causal chains. In Dismantled: The Breakup of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1980-2016, Leanne Kang provides an alternative perspective, linked to a concise and clearly presented history of a nearly four-decade erosion of locally controlled public education in Detroit. This is a compact book: 94 pages of text (132, including footnotes and references). As such, it seems more designed for interested citizens or students rather than historians wanting deep and original scholarship. Kang, an assistant professor of educational foundations at Grand Valley State University, weaves a mélange of "newspaper and magazine articles, reports, websites, government documents, pamphlets and a body of secondary sources" (7) into a compelling narrative that she grounds in the political science concept of "regime change." (4-6) Broad changes in governance institutions, in her telling, both reflect and further feed a shift in the array of political interests with access and influence over Detroit's fate. The core of the book is organized around four key episodes of governance change. The first, Proposal A, championed by then-governor John Engler, was approved by Michigan voters in 1994. On its face, this was a school finance reform intended to replace a system of high and inequitable local property taxes with state revenues, but the shift to state funding also constituted a sharp shift to state-driven initiatives at the expense of local district control. The second, mayoral control, was an on-again (1999), off-again (2004) state-led experiment to shift power over education policy from the elected school board to the mayor. The third key policy was the 2009 naming of Robert Bobb as emergency financial manager for Detroit schools; although prompted by the school system's severe fiscal problems, Bobb attempted to use his office to broadly restructure the system in ways that had academic and political ramifications as well. Bobb's tenure sparked backlash and ultimately his resignation, but then-governor Rick Snyder opted to double-down on the belief that salvation and progress depended on keeping locally elected representatives on the margins. In 2011, he signed a state law super-charging the position of emergency manager to explicitly include authority over academic and curriculum matters and then established a new body—the Educational Achievement Authority—to fully take over the district's schools. Kang does a good job of explicating the political currents propelling these seemingly distinct governance shifts. The Michigan reformers' [End Page 149] animating vision was not anchored in ideas or evidence about teaching and instruction; it had less to do with ideas about what should happen in Detroit's classrooms than ideas about who should be calling the shots. Local educators, the teachers' union, the traditional school board and, by extension, the parents who elected the school board, were seen as witting or unwitting defenders of a dysfunctional system. National reformers, philanthropists, private education providers, state political leaders, and business and civic elites would start over and do better. Most favored a more market-oriented approach to education: contracting with provide providers, propagating charter schools and other parental choice options, weakening the constraints on imposed by collective bargaining on hiring, evaluating, firing, and rewarding teachers based on measured student gains. Kang doesn't romanticize the old regime and corruption, patronage, and mismanagement that helped make Detroit an easy target for those with idealistic or self-interested motives to push aside the old structures and their occupants...