Detroit -- Impassioned parents demanded jail time for educators and district officials Saturday following the release of test scores that showed fourth- and eighth-graders had the worst math scores in the nation.
City students took the National Assessment of Educational Progress test this year, and 69 percent of fourth-graders scored below the basic level in math and 77 percent of eighth-graders scored below basic.
The Detroit scores on the progress test were the lowest in its 40-year history. The sample of students included 900 of Detroit's 6,000 fourth-graders and 1,000 of the district's 6,000 eighth-graders.
Sharlonda Buckman, CEO of the Detroit Parent Network, called for jailing and civil lawsuits against anyone in the city's educational system that is not doing his or her share to help properly educate children.
Maybe, Sharlonda, you should start with negligent PARENTS and with kids who blow off the tests.
This is what Susan Ohanian notes:
There's lots of blame to go around, but of course it is entirely coincidental that this organized parent attack, getting parents to heap blame on teachers, comes right when the district, under the financial leadership of Robert Bobb, who completed his course at the Broad Superintendents Academy in 2005, is twisting teachers' arms to accept a contract that forces them to lend the district $10,000, $250 to be taken out of their paychecks every two weeks.
More explanation:
None of this, however, seems to matter to outfits like The Skillman Foundation, a corporate non-profit tax dodge in Michigan with a 50 year history of accumlating tax credits for friends of the Ford family, all the while pushing public policies that are corporate friendly. The Foundation is a founding funder of the the Detroit Parent Network, and it was this weekend that the Network's CEO (yes, Virginia, parent groups now have CEOs) of that illustrious group, Sharlonda Buckman, called for jailing Detroit teachers, who must be to blame for the latest NAEP math scores for Detroit, which show that children in the City without Hope don't give a neighborhood rat's ass anymore about how they do on, yet, another meaningless test.
While Sharlonda doesn't seem to care about is that the corporations who pay her for her services, or the State of Michigan, or the U. S. Department of Education don't seem to have any plan to help alleviate the $219 million dollar hole in the Schools' budget or to help improve learning in the Schools. Never mind that that Skillman Foundation has almost a half billion in corporate assets (non-profit assets, of course) that they are not interested sharing to pay down the Schools' debt. What Sharlonda and her handlers are supporting is the plan to take $500 per month from each teacher's salary to bring down the budget deficit--with a promise to pay back at retirement time. Hah!
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