Ruin.
Thematically education has trouble fitting into our page for lack of a "rise feature" as essentially Detroit had an education system that was average and then it went to ruin. first slowly then all at once Detroit lost a massive amount of its students due to population loss in the city. Suddenly the majority of schools had only half the students it should and lots of schools were closed down and student relocated. This itself was a big issue that only got worse. In attempts to fix the education system the school board was removed and reinstated 4 times in less than a 20 year period. Without a constantly changing leadership the education system was nothing short of a mess, with Detroit's schools scoring at the very bottom of national scores and graduation rates (reaching sub 30% graduating) all these factors quickly lead to a spending deficit of over 200 million a year with the total deficit reaching nearly 1.5 billion dollars at one point.
Still climbing to this day the last public report put its a over 2.5 billion dollars total. This wasn't helped by the corruption going on at the administrative level. There are lots of individual cases of corruption ranging from taking from the teachers pension funds to filling the pockets of supply distributors. Corruption is one of the reasons the system saw such uncertainty on the administrative level, because they all tried to line there own pockets instead of fix the school system. Other fairly predictable issues quickly followed such as health issues and teacher strikes taking place, constant changing of the systems superintendents, really the entire system was and still is considered a complete mess. Currently Detroit has the lowest standardized test scores in the entire nation with no hope for the future. Yes the fall of Detroit's education system was fast and hard, still to this day we see little hope for the future however there have been many attempts to improve the system.