At town hall meetings last week, Detroit parents and teachers denounced plans by Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb to close 44 schools and implement other cuts as part of his school reorganization plan. Bobb’s plan will mean the elimination of at least 1,500 jobs of school employees.
The town hall meetings were the first in a series announced by Bobb. The meetings are being poorly publicized and tightly managed. Speakers are preselected, with each school allowed only 20 minutes to make its case to avoid the axe.
There has been an obtrusive police presence at all the town hall meetings, lending an air of intimidation. Those attending have to walk through metal detectors and have their handbags searched.
The latest wave of closures follows the shuttering of 27 schools last year. The additional closures will mean that nearly half of all Detroit public schools open in 2006 will be shut down.
What New Orleans has done, Detroit will follow. These mayors and such are ALL bought off by the billionaire brigade:
NATE WALKER: Yeah, It is interesting that New Orleans has now become the model for school reform.
AMY GOODMAN: There they closed the public schools, fired all the teachers who were unionized.
NATE WALKER: Absolutely. So in New Orleans there is 4 public schools that have opened now, and it’s pretty much a charter run school system, and in many ways, that is what is happening in Detroit. Right before Robert Bobb announced that 44 schools would be closing, the Skillman Foundation along with other foundations announced that they would be opening 70 new schools in the next 5 years. So, currently in Detroit 70% of students in Detroit go to Detroit public schools and 30% go to charter schools. The Excellent Schools Plan, which was announced about a month ago, intends that by 2015 25% of students will go to Detroit public schools and 75% will go to charter schools. You can see the shift in who’s going to be providing education in the city of Detroit.
AMY GOODMAN: How many kids go to school here in Detroit and how has that number changed?
NATE WALKER: When I began teaching in 2002, there was 160,000 students in the Detroit public schools. Currently, there’s about 88,000. You can see that number has almost been cut in half. Families are leaving the city. The students go to other districts and other places, but there’s also students leaving the public school system to enroll at charter schools as well. It is interesting in the context of the shift of who is going to be providing education, there is a couple things happening. First, as was mentioned in Doug’s clip when he spoke, the foundations are not only going to be providing money to start new schools, they’re also setting up an accountability network. They will be deciding what constitutes a good school to be closed or to be opened. So that is totally taken out of the realm of the public sphere where parents and community members decide on a type of education that is necessary for the city, and foundations and folks who are not necessarily considering those voices are deciding what is good education. In a certain way, that is going to be driven by what we call student achievement. In a sense, student achievement is a number of how students perform on tests course, it is a bottom line. It is a system that is being started and developed on this assumption of a bottom line that is the most important thing about schooling. It has changed what a parent’s role in schooling is. Before, where a parent would have a voice, either by running for the school board or contributing to how education happens, and now they’re delegated to the role of consumer where they exercise their choice as to where they can enroll but not necessarily how they can be involved in the schooling process. That is very similar to what’s happened in New York City when Joe Cline took control of schools, you see the shift were folks call for parental involvement, but not in any of the decision making, so be involved on our terms because we know what’s best for your children.
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