Reckoning on race reignites fight for equal funding of Detroit’s public schools

By Louisa Stuhec, Newsroom By the Bay

DETROIT –– “D-P-S-C-D Matters.”

That was the chant among members of Detroit’s Public Schools Community District during a protest on June 11. Students, staff and parents marched together in front of the city’s Spirit of Detroit statue, calling for improved educational funding.

Schools in Detroit have been underfunded for years, resulting in deteriorating facilities and meager counseling resources. The district’s student population of more than 50,000 is primarily low-income with 86% of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches.

According to Chalkbeat Detroit, part of a nonprofit news organization that focuses its reporting on equity in education, Detroit’s public schools receive $4,212 less per student per year compared to the Bloomfield School District in the wealthy neighboring county located 24.5 miles from Detroit’s City Hall.

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, conversations about educational inequality are gaining traction in the city, which has the nation’s highest children’s poverty rate at 57%.

“It’s a small sign to me that humanity is moving in the right direction,” said Professor Steven Kahn, director of Wayne State University’s Center of Excellence and Equity in Mathematics. Kahn has decades of experience working with students from the inner city’s low-income neighborhoods. 

“The Black Lives Matter movement is at the forefront now and I think it gives us hope that maybe finally the time has come where people see the value of our kids and the goodness within them,” Kahn said in an interview.

“(Black Lives Matter) goes back to the arc of the moral universe that Dr. (Martin Luther) King, (Jr.) talked about,” Kahn added. “What we all need to do is help to bend that arc towards justice. It won’t bend by itself.”

During the 1980s, Kahn volunteered at an alternative school in Detroit called The High School Development Center, which was attended by 300 students “identified as unsuccessful by principals of five high schools” according to the school’s stated mission. Outraged after discovering that the students did not have a math teacher, Kahn decided to pitch in and fill the empty teaching position during his spare time off work.

“It was a horrible place,” he said. The students there were not set up with what they needed to be thriving. “(The building) had holes in the ceiling. It was nowhere that kids should be having to learn.” 

Eventually, the school had to close down. Thereafter, Kahn continued his involvement as a positive force for kids in the city. In 1992, he co-founded Math Corps, a tutoring and mentoring program with a humanitarian mission to fight for economically disadvantaged students. Led by a team of professional mathematics instructors and college students, the program runs over a course of several weeks during the summer as well as during the school year. Through an application process, high school students from nearby areas can become a “teaching assistant,” serving as a role model and math tutor for two of the middle schoolers. 

Math Corps is now a nationally recognized program, rapidly expanding across the country with sites in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. As director in Detroit, Kahn says he strives to foster a supportive and appreciative community where every student feels like they’re part of a family.

“(Students in Detroit) are not being provided with the same kinds of opportunities that other kids get,” Kahn said. “The Math Corps is 30 years old, but it’s not like … we were able to build a program and then five years later, everything was solved. Thirty years later, things are not fine, not even close to fine. The fight for social justice goes on.”

Featured Photo: A flyer by the Detroit Public Schools Community District Office and Family Engagement encourages students to participate in a peaceful march on June 11, 2020. Fair Use.

Editor’s note: Stuhec is a teaching assistant for the University of Michigan Math Corps site in Ypsilanti, Michigan. 

For more on Math Corps’ mission, listen to Kahn’s 2010 TEDxDetroit talk here.  Listen to “Institutional Inequality,” the audio version of this story, at “Recording Race,” a new podcast created by Newsroom by the Bay’s Summer 2020 students under the guidance of team leader Maggie Galloway.