Save Michigan's Public Schools Rally

SAVE MICHIGAN'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS RALLY

By Dr. Thomas C. Pedroni

June 19, 2013

As those of you who have been following the news these past few weeks already know, the Koch brothers and their other allies in Michigan have resorted to using Detroit as a dumping ground. Yes, I mean the mountains of toxic petroleum coke that pile up along the river in Detroit just a few blocks from where I work at Wayne State University. But I also mean a lot of other crap that's been piling up in Detroit and across the state and what I mean by that is the toxic educational legislation that the Koch brothers and the Broad Foundation and others have been dumping into our legislature. We've seen them quickly shuffle in when they think no one is looking and dump one school-destroying bill after another onto the children and schools of this state-- school district dissolution bills, EAA expansion bills, school defunding bills, charter trigger bills-- you name it.

But we've got news for the Koch brothers, for the Broad Foundation, for Gov. Snyder and his skunk works. Detroit is not a dumping ground for your toxic sludge so-called educational reform. Michigan is not your dumping ground. Those of us who love Michigan know that our river-fronts and our public schools are our birthright, and we will not let your out of state corporate cronies and their greed soil everything that we value, everything that we've built. Whether it's Right to Work, or the shores of the Detroit River, or our children's schools, we're telling you to pack up your bags you carpetbaggers and take your hazardous waste back to your billionaire mansions and your private clubs. These are our schools, this is our Michigan, this is our Capitol building.

You actually think that we'll believe your pittering story that you're doing all this legislative dumping for the poor black and brown children of Detroit. Give us a break.  You actually think that we'll believe that you're sending in your emergency managers and your EAA chancellors to save Detroit's children from the electoral choices of their parents, their church congregations, their block clubs and neighborhood associations. You actually think we'll believe that Detroit's children can only be saved by the benevolent white fathers here in Lansing. That if we can just relieve the people of Detroit from their centuries-long fought battle for the right to vote, to elect their own representatives, then Detroit's children will finally get what they need from you. Because you actually think that we'll believe that the Koch brothers and the Broad Foundation and their bought and paid for puppets in this government love Detroit's children more than Detroit's families do.

Look what you've done. 

You swept aside the people's choice for school leadership beginning in 2009. And your emergency managers, after four years-- according to your own state Department of Education website-- have caused students in Detroit Public schools to fall even farther behind their Michigan peers in almost every tested category. Your wrecking ball has hit our youngest students particularly hard-- Detroit's third, fourth, and fifth graders. Today they are much farther behind their state peers in math and reading than they were four years ago when Arne Duncan pronounced Detroit to be Ground Zero for education reform. Shame on you for destroying the futures of Detroit's children. You put in your emergency manager to shore up DPS finances, allegedly, and the first one caused the district's deficit to balloon to unprecedented levels. Then you put your General Motors car salesman in there who turns around and claims victory for reducing the deficit 200 million dollars by taking out hundreds of millions of dollars of new loans. Shame on you for mortgaging the futures of our children.

Yes, you want us to believe that you were fighting the corruption of self-serving adults by putting in a new separate Jim Crow EAA district for 15 schools in Detroit, yet you put in the most corrupt educational leadership this nation has to offer-- carpetbaggers who ran out of Kansas City before that district lost its accreditation-- criminal leadership that believes it's okay to lie by claiming you run 60 schools when you only run a dozen, on federal grants for millions of dollars. Who claimed massive student growth on tests in their new apartheid school district while at the same time hiding from the public all the students who didn't take the test at all, or couldn't take the test because the technology didn't work, or took the wrong test, or took the right test but when that test showed decreasing learning you excluded those scores. Those of us who are real educators have words for what you did-- we call it cheating. And deceiving the public, whose money you siphon away with scandalously high salaries and sweetheart deals with your for-profit cronies. You want us to believe that this lying stinky skunky district is helping the children of Detroit?  

We've all seen this script before and it's called extracting public wealth from the poor.  It's called naked self-serving colonialism. Whether it is Africa a hundred years ago or Detroit or Flint or Highland Park today, it's about greed. It's about convincing the rest of the world that you go in with the white man's burden to save savages, when what you're really there for has nothing to do with salvation or education but only your own enrichment by feasting, cannibalizing the bodies and minds of poor black and brown children for the public education money that you see in them.

Shame on you. But now we know. And we're giving you a little wake up call.  Mr. and  Mr. Koch, Detroit is not your dumping ground. Mr. Broad and Mr. Snyder, Michigan is not your dumping ground for your school destroying tsunami of greed inspired bills. All of us here today, the hundreds of us here today-- all those who are listening and who will read about all that we've learned today-- all that we know-- we're gonna run you and your carpetbaggers right out of the Legislature, right out of this Capitol building. And right out of this state.