DETROIT – Getting a good education is tough, and it’s even tougher if you live in poverty and don’t know when your next meal is coming.
Detroit has some of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in all of America, and in these communities' school dropout rates are high while graduation rates are low. Despite great efforts from many caring teachers, kids often don’t succeed.
A big problem is many children lack support at home where too often kids are raised by a single parent or grandparent who works and is not around to supervise homework. Now, controversial former Detroit City Councilwoman Sharon McPhail is trying something new. At stake are the futures of some incredible kids who come from little and deserve an education that can break their cycle of poverty.
McPhail runs an 800-student K-through-12 charter school called Detroit Community Schools (DCS) in the Brightmoor neighborhood. Just to get to school in Brightmoor, you have to pass abandoned buildings where school girls have been raped, drugs are devoured, and guns are hidden by young killers who think nothing of shooting innocent people. The priority here is staying alive, followed by feeding your family. Making sure homework is done is a distant priority. For decades in Brightmoor literacy rates have been low and the cycle of poverty keeps rolling along.
Watch more: McPhail's school: Controversial hires
McPhail employs family, friends, convict
McPhail is taking heat from critics for hiring family, friends, and even someone convicted of a crime to help her run the school district. She earns $130,000 a year. She is also paying a six-figure salary to Bill Coleman, who once ran the Detroit Public Schools and was convicted in Texas for obstructing an investigation into kickbacks at the school district of which he was in charge. Coleman is now the chief financial officer at DCS. McPhail's dean of students is Sylvia James, who earns $75,000 a year. James was thrown off the bench as a judge in Inkster as part of an investigation into the misappropriation of funds. McPhail also has a brother on staff and a cousin of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who is serving a 28-year prison sentence for racketeering.
"I’m not apologizing for hiring people that do a wonderful job and help these kids," said McPhail.
McPhail lacks certification
It’s controversial for another reason, McPhail refuses to get certified by the department of education. When told all superintendents must be certified within three years on the job, she changed her title to chief administrative officer, telling me that she attended a class to be certified and found it to be, "A waste of my time."
Watch: McPhail’s school under investigation
Is her plan working?
McPhail's plan seems to be working. In her almost four years at the school, she has managed to improve graduation rates and move Detroit Community Schools off the state's failing school list. When she arrived, DCS was rated at the bottom 5 percent of all schools statewide. Today it is rated at the bottom 25 percent of all schools.
McPhail said there has been improvement and predicts great things in the future for DCS students. The biggest problem at the school is standardized test scores -- only two students have ever passed all four sections of the ACT college entrance exam. McPhail said test scores are slowly improving but until the district can convince science teachers to come and work in one of Detroit’s most dangerous and blighted neighborhoods, kids will continue to fail the science sections of standardized tests.
McPhail insists small miracles are happening inside the DCS doors. Education is improving and students are becoming hopeful about the future, she said.
McPhail challenged us to come see for ourselves and that is exactly what we did.
Watch: Sharon McPhail talks about Detroit Community Schools
Watch: Is McPhail's school working?
McPhail's past
Sharon McPhail served as general counsel for the city of Detroit. She also served on Detroit City Council from 2002 until 2006. She has been very outspoken about events in the city and is often called upon to provide her opinion on WDIV Local 4 News.
View: Documents showing DCS performance ranking
Listen to the anthem song for "Mothers Taking Our Streets Back" here: