Lofty Goals

I realized this evening that there are a fair number of Detroit-focused programs that have optimistic (and in some cases unrealistic) goals:

The 15×15 Initiative, a project from the Hudson-Webber foundation (and many others) that aims to bring 15,000 new households to Detroit’s “Greater Downtown” by 2015.
The Skillman Foundation’s 10-year, $100M Good Neighborhoods plan hopes to create “good schools and good neighborhoods so that young people can be safe, healthy, educated and prepared for adulthood.”
The Thompson Foundation is working to create schools that have both a 90 percent graduation rate and 90 percent of graduates attending college. According to several articles from 2005 (one sample), this goal was supposed to have been met by 2007. Schools that did not meet it were to be closed. I have not yet researched the program outcomes.
The new Educational Achievement Authority run by Roy Roberts aims to have “100 percent college- and career-ready graduates, 100 percent of third graders reading at grade level, [and] as much as 95 percent of resources going directly to the schools.” If I recall correctly, Roberts has claimed similar goals for the Detroit Public Schools, but I don’t have a reference immediately available.
The goal of the HOPE Village Initiative is that "100 percent of those in the HOPE Village Initiative neighborhood will be educationally well-prepared, economically self-sufficient, and living in a safe and supportive environment by the year 2031.“

Matt Hampel