A friend sent me a link to an odd story, actually an op-ed piece from 4 March 2010.  Before I post the link, review this email a person sent to his colleagues on 28 February 2010:

“If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.”

Here’s another one, dated 11 August 2009:

“Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?”

Nothing spectacular about functional illiteracy.  A brief skim through the comments section of most blogs will turn up an unacceptable number of folks who can’t properly spell, use punctuation or capitalization, or employ basic grammar.

Okay, before I go much further, set your beverages down and do not take a sip or it’ll end up on your lap when your jaw drops.  Ready?

The author of those e-mail snippets is Mr. Otis Mathis, President of the Detroit School Board.

“The rest of the e-mail, and others that Mathis has written, demonstrate what one of his school board colleagues describes, carefully, as “his communication issues.” But if these deficits have limited Mathis, as he admits they have, they have not stopped him from graduating from high school and college. In January, his peers elected him president by a 10-1 vote over Tyrone Winfrey, a University of Michigan academic officer.”

Source: The Detroit News

Could be that Mr. Mathis is dyslexic. I’ve met two, and they survived by rote, sheer memorization, and became successful, despite having serious reading and writing problems.  (Please, no “existence of dog” jokes here.)

Yet here is a guy who flunked 4th grade, graduated High School in 1973 with a .98 grade point average (or 1.8 according to Mathis) . To his credit, he served in the Navy, and with his G.I. Bill in hand, graduated from Wayne State after struggling for 15 years.

But is this the guy who should be put in charge of 90,000 students in one of the worst performing school districts in the U.S.?