Bing: Bobb should go

Robert Bobb may — or may not — want to stick around and continue to run Detroit's public schools. But that's not what Mayor Dave Bing wants. During a wide-ranging interview last week, I asked him about the controversial emergency financial manager.

"He's made some hard decisions that had to be made, and I respect him for that. He had an impossible job from a fiscal standpoint." But when asked to give Bobb a grade, the mayor said, "Well, not an A, I don't think. He's got the teachers' association [union] obviously against him, and he's got a lot of the people in the community against him." When I asked if it were time for Bobb to go, and time for somebody new, the mayor said, "Yes," and "Oh, yeah."

The interview took place the day before a front-page story in The Detroit News appeared to advocate keeping Bobb in place. For months, Bobb talked as if he was willing, if not eager, to return to Washington, D.C., when his hitch in Detroit expires June 30.

But then the Legislature passed a new emergency financial manager law that would give Bobb control over academic matters as well, something the courts earlier ruled was beyond his jurisdiction.

After that, hints began that he might be willing to stay. However, the mayor did not only say it was time for someone new to be running DPS. He indicated that he thought that the future of education in his city would soon be mostly not in the Detroit Public Schools.

"If they are going to lose students out of DPS, we don't want to lose them out of the city of Detroit. People are now talking about systems of public education, rather than DPS. There are private schools, parochial schools, charters." Mayor Bing paused.

"You know, 40 percent of kids now go to charter schools and that number is only going to grow." He noted that Robert Bobb has proposed closing another batch of schools by the end of this year. Mayor Bing worries about the effect of these suddenly vacant buildings on their surrounding neighborhoods, and hopes charters fill at least some.

What he doesn't want, however, is to take control of the schools himself, although in the past the mayor has spoken as if mayoral oversight of DPS might not be a bad thing. "I think adding their deficit to our deficit might be a little overwhelming," he said.

Despite a month of budget woes, steadily more ominous news from Lansing and shockingly low census numbers, Dave Bing seemed upbeat and energetic, two years into the job.

The mayor, who has already signaled that he's running for re-election in 2013, had been amusedly exasperated by a story that day that criticized him for spending too much time in the office and not enough time pressing the flesh in the neighborhoods.

He knows that if he started doing more events, another story would soon appear asking why he wasn't at his desk. He shrugged.

"You know, the expectations in this job are impossible. Today, they want you to be all things to everybody." The truth is, he said, that he had to spend "an inordinate amount of time" chained to his desk.

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