Detroit Public Schools: Rally and resistance

MARCH AND RALLY TO KEEP YOUR SCHOOL AND ALL SCHOOLS OPEN! 

DEFEND PUBLIC EDUCATION!  NO MORE CHARTERS!

Restore Music and Fine Arts Programs and Staff!

Good Riddance to Robert Bobb—Now Get Rid of Roy Roberts!

End the Dictatorship of Emergency Managers over DPS; Restore Detroiters’ democratic right to vote

Cancel the Debt—Full Funding for Detroit Students

Gather and MARCH from Catherine Ferguson Academy (2750 Selden) 4:00 Tuesday, May 10^th

5:00 RALLY and speak out at Robb Bobb’s Office 3011 W. Grand Blvd

Bobb may schedule presentations for any day next week or no day at all.  He will try to hold us off and keep up our hopes that our schools won’t close – but they will close if we do not fight! If Bobb does reschedule the presentations for May 10^th, we must mobilize to that location so massively that there is standing room only and the building is surrounded.

We Have Ended Robert Bobb’s Dictatorship Over DPS–No Honeymoon for New Emergency Manager Roy Roberts

We have succeeded in ending Robert Bobb’s career as chief destroyer of public education in Detroit. However, he’s staying until June 30 to “train” his replacement. It’s no coincidence that Governor Snyder appointed a car company millionaire as the new EM for DPS. Roy Roberts is no more qualified than Bobb. He is not an educator, he’s just a wealthy businessman, who, like Bobb and Bing, doesn’t even live in Detroit. Bobb is “training” Roberts to take over the job of dismantling public education in Detroit. Snyder, Bobb, Bing and Roberts have nothing good planned for the students and the people of Detroit.

 Attend the Rally No Matter What!

We scared Bobb off on May 3, which was great.  But the destroyers of public education are also buying time to just keep telling parents to increase the enrollment numbers, blaming the community, telling lies, and using other ways to stall off mass protests. 

The schools on the closing and charter list will be closed, unless we give them a real reason to fear us.  Bobb, Roberts and their tiny minority of billionaire backers and politicians ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS.  They are not even potential friends, who we can warm up to, to get favors from.  They are closing schools to drive students out of the district, so that next year The EM can say both that there are not enough students in your school, and also say that closing schools saves

money, when in fact the district is losing money under this plan.  Bobb and Roberts are enemies of public education.  The issue of whether or not the schools stay open is not a financial or logistical question or even a strictly formal question of whether the EM has the authority to close the schools.  It is a political question of whether the EM and his backers can get away with it.  Whether or not our schools stay open depends on whether we can overcome our fears and express our anger in a collective manner and put our foot down and declare that Detroit students, our schools, our neighborhoods and our city are not for sale.   

The closing of the schools in Detroit is a national policy to take away the right to a public education for black, Latino/a and poor people of all races.  It is not just local, not just your neighborhood, or your special needs- but all education as we know it.  Closing schools students with special needs, like the Detroit Day School for the Deaf, or The Catherine Ferguson Academy for Pregnant and Parenting Girls, the Hancock alternative school, magnet schools like Hally and Ludington or stable community schools like Carelton and Rutherford, are especially egregious attacks, but educating Bobb on these facts will not win us the victory of keeping them open.  The fact that these schools are nationally recognized and unique, do not shelter them, nor any other school, from the mad and hungry jaws of Rob Bobb or the billionaire masters he serves. In fact, the better the school, the juicier it is for them to eat up and profit off of, or close and push those students into charters, which they profit off of.   It is their intention to destroy public education, and get away with it with only formal objections from the community, i.e. that there will not be consequences, that Detroit will not raise total HELL around the destruction of our schools and our neighborhoods. 

The attack on public education is the most devastating and shameful civil rights attack of this century, but we can defeat it if we are prepared to take some bold actions.  The youth and community of Detroit should determine where our society’s resources are allocated.  For most people, it is how we first start to communicate, with others, shape our identity, and through some part of school find out who we are and who we want to be.  This is not about individual buildings.  It is about the do the people of Detroit have value.  

Bobb was appointed by a Democratic governor, and his power was strengthened through a Republican governor.  The only times his position was weakened politically was by BAMN.   BAMN includes students, teachers, parents, and organizers who understand that without public education, we get the new Jim Crow – permanent, second-class citizenship, imposed on black and Latino students by force. The furious, bi-partisan campaign of attacks on our schools, the arts and the humanities is designed to reimpose a “badge of inferiority” on black and Latina/o students and to block any opportunity for them to lead and shine. 

No more second rate charter schools

Minority students in urban areas across the country are being warehoused in inferior charters or in technical schools that are modeled on the kind of education black, Latina/o and other minority students received under the old Jim Crow. We are constantly harassed and brutalized by the police, and in the case of immigrant students, by the border patrol. Detroit students can bring all this degradation to a halt. Our movement can declare that we refuse to be subjected to educational ‘experiments’ at the whims of rich people because they don’t want to pay for public education any longer. We can end the regime of overcrowded classrooms, police in the schools doling out repression and brutality, and turning what should be places of learning where we can express and develop our full creativity and humanity, into cheap, stripped-down, prison-like holding cells. We want and deserve the full range of subjects and extracurriculars – art, music, dance, theatre, sports, AP and foreign language courses, chess, etc. – that a first-class comprehensive public education has to offer.  To the extent that any school becomes a charter, if they do not meet the full standards of the students and parents, they must lose their charter immediately!

We CAN defeat this plan, but only by getting off our knees and fighting. It’s time to heed the words of Frederick Douglass, one of the greatest leaders in the history of our nation, who said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Everyone who cares about Detroit and the future of its young people should march and rally and demand, not beg, that our schools remain open and public.