What was once a beautiful and vibrant city with fabulous architecture, has become a ghetto. It’s heartbreaking and sickening to see what was and now is Detroit and all at the hands of 40 years of statism.
Last summer the Detroit school board voted to close 23 schools and laid off 600 teachers. The city is depopulating and with that, student enrollment has shrunk from 140,000 in 1999 to 95,000 today – a 32% drop in 10 years.
A generation and a half of entitlements, union theft and mismanagement has taken its toll on the remaining population. They are a dispirited citizenry and their children’s school performance reflects that. Once again the state wants to step in and fix the problem by forcing parents – who receive state aide – to sign a contract requiring they become more active in their child’s education or be fined for not doing so.
After 40 years of taking personal responsibility away from the people, now they want to make people behave responsibly. Now they want to force parents to actually behave like parents or pay up. A little late in the game for that. These are parents who were raised on entitlements and affirmative action.
[State Rep. George Cushingberry, D-Detroit] wants to do something about the other parents, the ones who are too young, or who don’t read well enough to help their children. He is sensitive to those for whom poverty has been an obstacle.
“Poverty has been an obstacle” to these parents thanks to the do-gooder statists like Cushingberry and other democrats. They have kept Detroiters in poverty for the last 4 decades. As Ben Franklin once said, they have made poverty too comfortable and removed any incentive for these sad people.
This is the scary future that we face from the statist majority in our federal government. This could very well be the fate of all our big cities, our states and our schools.
Steven Crowder has a brand new video about Detroit, worth a watch, here. It’s a real eye opener.