51,000 opt out of Detroit schools

[RustTown]

This isn't going to stop no matter what structural changes are made. The grass is always greener on the other side, I guess.

51,000 opt out of Detroit schools

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...HOOLS/701150362

[Jasoncw]

I wonder if most of Detroit students went to the suburbs for school, if that would be good for the city-suburb relationship (because people would actually interact with each other), or if it would be bad for the relationship.

[RustTown]

As soon as these districts start to integrate, the families just pick up and move on to the next suburb, anyway. I don't think this is the preferable way to heal broken relationships. Just look at Southfield, or a number of inner-ring suburban school districts around this country where minorities are overrepresented in the school system relative to their population in these suburbs. Heck, I see this in Lansing, a city 61% non-hispanic white, but with a school system demographic much more heavily minority than white.

Still, more importantly, I've read that Detroit's primary school-aged population has actually increased over the past few years or so, so it's not so much that the DPS is losing all of the students to the suburbs. In fact, I think DPS is losing more students to in-city charter schools. So, even if you are hoping for the dispora to mean something good for the metro, it's probably not even happening on the scale it'd need to to be meaningful.