School's Been in Session The Whole Time

A Fine Example. School is back in session in Detroit but I've been thinking a lot about what the students of this city were learning while they watched the Detroit Teachers Strike play out. It was a parade of adults behaving badly. And last week, after an all-nighter in the Mayor's office, the euphoric news conference was, ahem, bizarre.
It was called "a great day for the city of Detroit". Are you kidding me? It was merely a day that wasn't as awful as the two weeks prior. And who needs to take sides? All three of the key parties need the paddle that used to symbolize justice in some of the elementary schools I attended.
The teachers certainly had fair complaints; they had given up plenty in the implied promise that they would get theirs this time around. But they work for a different district than the one that first hired them. It's smaller and it's underfunded. And while their complaints about the district's poor spending habits have resonance, you can't drive your district deeper into the red with a strike that moves more students (and their accompanying $7500) to the suburbs.
The school district gets an "F" in strike strategy. For William Coleman to promise that Detroit would open school on time strike or not was a breathtaking miscalculation. It nearly guaranteed a strike, a kind of irrestistable dare for the teachers' union. It also threw respect out the window which was already in short supply in the negotiations.
The third laurel of dishonor is reserved for her honor, Judge Susan Borman. The resolve with which she continually steered the parties back into negotiations might have been admirable had it not been so lacking in courage. She kept delaying a ruling on whether the strike was legal because, she said, she felt the two sides were getting so close to an agreement. I'm not an attorney, but what in the world does the negotiating process have to do with the question of the strike's legality? Absolutely none.
So the kids are back in school. Kudos to the Mayor for force-feeding them some common sense (albeit too late). But unless you're a student, the first semester report cards are pretty ugly. And glad-handing at a news conference won't cover the city's latest bloody nose.