FFM

I don't consider myself a big fan of Emergency Managers. I try to focus on the problem and to solve it and right now I have not seen a better solution. Some say it is Democracy. The "democracy" that you speak of got the city in the trouble that it presently confronts. The Governor had to do something. There are 700,000 citizens of the state that he has a fiduciary responsibility to. He gave the city council the opportunity to enter into a consent agreement and they didn't. Mayor Bing seems to be a good, honest guy but he lacked the leadership skills to take the appropriate action. The City Council was busy fighting among themselves, the Mayor and the state. Snyder had to do something. Yes, he went about overturning the voters wishes in an inappropriate manner. (His initial mistake was to take for granted that the Emergency Manager law, as it was written, would be passed by the voters.) Yes he lined up Orr in the shadows and in my opinion made a mistake giving Orr

Everyone's focus in Detroit presently is on the bankruptcy. Someone needs to start planning for a city that has turned around and is growing. This will not happen without a plan and its time to develop and implement one. A turnaround will not happen without an increase in the city's population and average incomes. Blight needs removing, crime needs to be reduced and street lights turned on.  The bull dog, Dan Gilbert, is focused on blight removal and I am confident it will happen. The new police chief is making strides in crime reduction and there is focus, in no small part due to the laser beam attention of the Detroit Free Press, to get the street lights back on. Detroit has one advantage over other municipalities in the region, an available existing housing stock. It is not too early to draft plans on how best to utilize it to attract new residents and increase the average income of the city's population. This will require effort and creativity. The city and it

There is fear that the federal government could adjust how they measure  test results under Common Core but that does not mean a college must adjust how they determine who to accept. Today, your child already must meet certain standards not decided by parents. I agree the acceptance into college should not be decided by the government but rather the school should decide. Common Core is a recommended curriculum fostered by the federal government and surely it will evolve into one measure of a child's acceptability to get into college. I don't see what is wrong with this. We live in a competitive world and common core helps us understand how we are doing. I find burying ones head in the sand does not solve problems. There is a major flaw in comparing our nations results relative to most other nations. In our country the primary source of funding primary and secondary education is property taxes. In most other nations the primary source for funding education is some form of