Destroying Detroit Schools

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4650
Date Written:  2018-05-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21385

The Detroit Public School system (DPS) has been under state control for 15 years, the last decade under the direction of a series of Emergency Managers.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Over the past decade 160 Detroit schools of various types have opened or closed. In some neighborhoods there is no public school, only charters or the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), the disastrously failing system set up by Governor Rick Snyder. Yet neither the Governor nor the legislature is willing to accept responsibility for the chaos, assume the debt and return the public school system back to local control.

As teachers and parents attempt to make plans for the fall semester - not knowing where their kids will be in school, or where they'll be teaching - the stress is taking a severe toll all around. It looks like a calculated ploy to prevent teachers and the community from getting organized.

Meanwhile the rightwing Michigan legislature is bickering over how to design legislation to use the DPS debt, which the state caused, to further weaken the bargaining power of the Detroit Federation of Teachers and prevent citizen control through an elected school board.