As dire as conditions are for the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System, be advised it could be worse. Just look at Illinois. Across the country, pension funds are suffering from the same confluence of factors, including rising health-care costs, falling returns on investment, lax oversight and more. It is very difficult to directly compare […]
Nancy Derringer
Nancy Nall Derringer is a former reporter at Bridge
Posted inTalent & Education
Lightening the lead foot
I don’t know what it is with me and paying for energy, but whatever it is, I inherited it from my father. Growing up, my friends referred to our chilly winter house as “the meat locker” and knew that just because the house looked dark when they pulled into the driveway, it didn’t mean we […]
Posted inQuality of Life
Bandwidth by the barrel: Bloggers take aim
The old saw says it’s unwise to pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel. Updated for the digital era, it might say something about bandwidth or Twitter followers. As old-style editorial-page fire-breathing waned with newspaper cutbacks and consolidation, bloggers happily stepped into the breach to fire their slingshots at policymakers who […]
Posted inQuality of Life
The unending ballad of Willie and Bronco
It takes three to make a trend, but maybe the word doesn’t apply for a city like Detroit, where the extraordinary news that fills the daily papers makes it one of the most interesting cities in the country. Last week, a 75-year-old man shot and killed an 18-year-old who had just kicked in his side […]
Posted inQuality of Life
Gang takes over parks — and tidies them
Tom Nardone’s father was an Elk in Wakefield, Mass., and spent time, as Elks do, in the Elks Hall. His son assumed his dad went to the club mostly to have a place to drink with his buddies. “I didn’t know the money they spent there went to children’s charities,” he said. “It never occurred […]
Posted inTalent & Education
Do charters skim profit, or spend smarter?
When Vickie Markavitch discusses the finances of traditional public schools vs. charter schools, she starts with a table of expenses, taking care to note the figures her analysis uses come from the state Senate Fiscal Agency, a reliable, nonpartisan source. Then the superintendent of the Oakland Intermediate School District starts her rundown. The per-pupil state […]
Posted inTalent & Education
Arizona offers balmy climes to charter schools
If charter schools are poised to grow in Michigan, they’ve already exploded in Arizona. Neighboring California leads the nation in sheer numbers of charter schools, but Arizona has everyone beat on percentages – a quarter of Arizona’s public schools are charters, growth that accelerated after the state lifted its charter cap in 1999. “We had […]
Posted inTalent & Education
Back to school. And stay there.
My boss, Bridge editor Derek Melot, doesn’t have children. I get the idea if he did, they’d have run away to grandma’s by now, fleeing their father’s firmly held belief that what ails children is very simple: Not enough schoolin’. “If you want to get better at something, do you spend less time at it?” […]
Posted inTalent & Education
Charter schools: Different road, but still bumpy
Nearly 20 years into the experiment, public-school academies — charter schools, as they are more popularly known — would appear a rousing success. An enthusiastic Michigan Legislature, as part of a comprehensive reform package, lifted the state cap on charters late last year. The charter ranks, now at 255 schools, can start growing next year […]
Posted inTalent & Education
For parents, charters are about choice
Once upon a time in public education, when all schools were neighborhood schools and attendance was a matter of which side of the boundary lines you lived on, families like Marilyn Williams’ would have been rare indeed. The mother of two teenage daughters just two years apart, Williams’ daughters don’t just attend different classes, but […]