Despair and Hope in Detroit

One of the most breathtaking, and heartbreaking, facts I came across when researching education policy for the 2010 Hunger Report: A Just and Sustainable Recovery was the high school dropout rate in Detroit. Three-quarters of Detroit kids drop out of school.

Let me say that again, the high school graduation rate inside the city is just 25 percent. Probably nothing better than this conveys the despair and neglect of parts of America. 

We talk a lot about marginalized areas of the country in the 2010 Hunger Report, but Detroit sticks out in my mind right now because of something I just read about it. Bob Herbert, who has a column twice a week in the New York Times, has written recently about Detroit. Herbert is one of my favorite columnists writing for a major newspaper these days. Few others who occupy such important real estate on an Op-Ed page are willing to talk to (rather than just about) people struggling in low-wage jobs or marginalized neighborhoods like the ones Bread for the World Institute zeroed in on in the 2010 Hunger Report.

Herbert’s most recent piece about Detroit ran today. It was a sequel to another that ran on Saturday, a depressing view on the state of the city and how the recession that the rest of the country is feeling has been unraveling quietly in Detroit for decades.

Detroit and its environs are suffering the agonies of the economic damned because of policies, crafted at the highest national and corporate levels, that resulted in the implosion of crucially important components of America’s manufacturing base. Those decisions have had a profound effect on the fortunes not just of Detroit, or even Michigan, but the entire U.S. economy.

As we said in the Hunger Report, and Herbert discusses in this column, the manufacturing base is crucial to maintaining a healthy middle class. What happened to Detroit could at one time be seen as symptomatic of a self-destructive streak in U.S. industrial policy. The current recession is revealing how that streak now looks more like a fait accompli.

But in Herbert’s second article about Detroit, which he titles it Signs of Hope, despair gives way to something good that may be coming up for the city, as well as the country's battered industrial base. The focus of the article is Stan Ovshinksky. By no means a household name, Ovshinsky is someone we should hope to all hear more about if we believe restoring America’s industrial base is crucial to rebuilding our economy in ways that will keep it growing sustainably.

Mr. Ovshinsky knows as much or more about the development and production of alternative energy as anyone on the planet. He developed the technology and designed the production method that made it possible to produce solar material “by the mile.” When he proposed the idea years ago, based on the science of amorphous materials, which he invented, he was ridiculed. 

Over the weekend, a colleague of mine at Bread for the World Institute sent me an email about the first Herbert article, saying it echoes much of what we said in the 2010 Hunger Report, except it left out the clean energy sector we champion as the best hope for rebuilding America's industrial base. It was gratifying to see Herbert use today’s column to add hope to the despair that Detroit has come to stand for. There is indeed hope for America's industrial sector, but it will depend on forward thinking public policy to bring it to fruition. And it will not only require investments in clean energy, but also in education so that workers in Detroit will have the skills to take advantage of new manufacturing jobs.