Beware of the multiplying alarm bells in the news media about failing public schools. One needs only to look at Detroit to understand why.
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In Detroit, a city where workers are wracked by long-term unemployment, deeply entrenched racism and the ravages of the current economic crisis, public education and the teachers’ union are under escalating attacks. Robert Bobb, the school district’s emergency financial manager, the government and the news media have all ferociously hounded the union in recent weeks.
Budget shortfalls, bankruptcy, the economic downturn and the lowest ever test scores in the city’s history, have greatly raised the level of tension in the school district. On Dec. 21, public school teachers were forced to defer $10,000 in wages for each of the next two years.
There is no doubt that public education is in crisis in Detroit and all over the country. But what is the real cause of the crisis?
The media and local, state and federal governments all seem to be in agreement that blame is shared by some combination of “greedy” teachers, the inherent “corruption” of public school systems and the “bad habits” of students and parents from poor and oppressed communities. In fact, there is a nationwide war on public school funding and teachers’ unions.
Progressives and revolutionaries blame the public education crisis on systematic inequality in society and a decades-long assault on the right to quality, free public education.
The struggle for public education in Detroit
Detroit’s fourth- and eighth-grade students scored so poorly on recent National Assessment of Education Performance tests that Detroit has been declared “the most ignorant place in the United States,” according to Nolan Finley, editorial page editor of The Detroit News.
One editorial after another has called for teachers to stop fighting against demands for them to fork over $250 per paycheck to pay down Detroit Public School red ink. After forgoing a total of $10,000 apiece, teachers are supposed to get the money back upon separation.
The new contract contains numerous concessions. The ominously coined Termination Incentive Plan has caused some in the Detroit Federation of Teachers to call for their president’s resignation and to prepare for a strike.
Ramping up the anti-teacher barrage further is the Detroit Parent Network, whose CEO, Sharlonda Buckman, denounced the teachers’ call for a strike against the deferred pay and proclaimed that those responsible for the test scores should go to jail.
The question here is who, or what, is responsible for those test scores? And though no one could argue that the education of Detroit’s children is in dire straits, what do those scores really mean, and what should be done?
Officials from Governor Granholm, to Detroit’s Mayor Bing, numerous pundits, and “experts” like Michael Van Beek at the right-wing Mackinac Center for Public Policy, sing the praises of restructuring, which is code for privatization.
The drive to privatize public schools, though perking along for decades, has quickly gained impetus as a result of President Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative. Unlike the Wall Street bailout given to the architects of the current economic crisis, recipients of money for schools must be held accountable to get their piddly-in-comparison cash. So states and districts are pitted against one another to vie for a chunk of $4.35 billion. Eligibility requires restructuring the public schools.
According to Van Beek, Michigan could get $600 million (up to $90 million for Detroit) merely by adopting four “reforms,” including creating more charter schools, increasing alternative certification of teachers, linking “student performance data to individual teachers, and systemiz[ing] reform procedures for failing schools.”
Blocking these “reforms” are the teachers, who denounce charter schools and argue that there is no evidence that charter schools improve student performance and oppose them as well because they typically are not unionized.
There is no evidence that charter schools improve student performance. Kevin Welner, director of the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado, summed up the charter school issue this way as cited in an October 2009 article in the Denver Post: “Despite the federal push, the entire body of charter research seems to show no real pattern or trend. … Some schools are excellent, others are awful—and that is a mirror image of the public school system. And … parents disgruntled with the current system are using charters the way they use private-school opportunities, looking at charters as elite enclaves.”
“So much is being devoted to charter reform,” the article quotes Welner as saying, including funding. But since the entire body of research on charters is “a wash,” he says, “then all this effort is a wash, too.”
What can be said for sure is that teachers at charter schools earn thousands less on average that those at public schools. It is also certain that there is a vast pool of qualified teachers in Michigan, such that alternative certification serves only to pit one segment of the working class against another. Privatized public schools, or charter schools, are often funded by corporate interests.
And as for the brouhaha about NAEP scores that inflamed this assault on Detroit’s public schools and teachers, and the demand for performance pay linkage, there is a wealth of research demonstrating the fallacy of that approach. A 1982 study commissioned by the NAEP board concluded, “setting levels of failure, mediocrity, or excellence in terms of NAEP percentages would be a serious mistake.”
The GAO reached essentially the same conclusions after another study in the early 1990s. In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences concluded, the process for setting NAEP achievement levels is fundamentally flawed, and achievement-level results do not appear to be reasonable. All these research findings are ignored by those who use such unreasonable and flawed measures to propel the assault against public schools.
It’s time to take back our schools!
This cynical portrayal of teachers as selfish, greedy and oppositional to the welfare of the children in their charges plays into the hands of those who seek to bust the teachers unions, further reverse the gains of the organized working class over the last century, and end education as a public good. Furthermore, this attack on the public schools, and in particular on public school teachers, is based on a foundation of lies.
When one strategy for ending public education has failed, the capitalist class turns to another. In a September 2008 piece, former Michigan teacher Richard Gibboney wrote about capitalism and public schools. He pointed out how in the 1940s and 1950s, according to Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, public schools were attacked on several fronts: communism, internationalism and sexual depravity, which it linked to racism and desegregated schools.
Gibboney goes on to say, “Teachers don’t cause financial meltdowns, home foreclosures, climate change, or hurricanes. And they don’t invade countries or outsource jobs. Teachers don’t cause mind-numbing conditions of poverty that limit children’s ability to learn. However, teachers are the ones asked to cope with the poisonous effects of poverty.”
At this moment, Detroit is the most impoverished big city in the United States. A city that has lost over half its population of fifty years ago, leaving 70,000 abandoned and blighted parcels of land–an estimated 40 square miles of the city. Among those parcels are 14 vacant schools slated for demolition.
One-third of Detroit’s inhabitants live at or below the poverty line. Hunger has more than doubled in the last year. Unemployment, officially 30 percent, is in reality probably close to 50 percent, Bing admits. Add in rising homelessness and utility shut-offs, and a truly grim picture emerges for survival, let alone for study and learning and achieving high test scores.
Even without taking into account the voluminous studies documenting the deleterious effects of poverty on children’s well-being, including education, any rational human being could see why students might fail. One would figure that even the most hardened critic of Detroit public schools surely would admit that Detroit cannot be fixed by restructuring the schools. And surely, someone as knowledgeable and high-positioned as State School Superintendent Mike Flanagan would not gloss over the role of these social and economic effects on school performance. But not so. There are no excuses, Flanagan declares. There’s no more hearing these are poor kids according to him.
The struggle is far from over in Detroit and across the country.
It’s time to stop and reverse the war on public schools and the teachers unions. Teachers, students, parents and all working people must join together and fight—that is how we won public education in the first place.
Our struggles for education stem from the simple fact that we live under a system the puts profits over people’s needs, including public education. Instead of devoting resources to prop-up public schools, resources and energy are devoted to attacking the unions, dismantling public education and segregating school districts between charter and public schools and “good” and “bad” students.
Let’s resist these racist, anti-worker strategies and take back our schools from the politicians and the corporations. Free, quality public education is a right!
