Nikolai Vitti (Twitter photo)
Nikolai Vitti (Twitter photo)
Nikolai Vitti, who took over as Detroit schools superintendent about a year ago, says Detroit children have been treated like political pawns in a district with low performance and lack of opportunity, the Detroit Free Press reports.
He attributed part of that to racism.
Katrease Stafford of the Detroit Free Press reports:
"There is a racist element to what has happened," said Vitti, who participated in a panel, Detroit's New Era of Collaboration on Education, moderated by Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley, during the Mackinac Policy Conference. "Children in Detroit have been treated like second-class citizens. When a system is allowed to be run over a decade by individuals that had no track record of education reform ... no governance structure, years and years of low performance, a lack of growth, drop in enrollment, that would never, ever happen in any white suburban district in this country."
Vitti said race has continued to be an underlying factor in the educational sphere, in terms of what opportunities are afforded.
"We see signs of that in Flint, we saw signs of that in New Orleans after the flood, we have multiple examples of this," Vitti said. "...Let's get back to the root cause, which often is linked to race, linked to poverty and let's invest in the whole child regardless of that child's ZIP code, regardless of that child's race, and we'll actually see what children can accomplish."
