BAMN E-MAIL - 9/29/2008
BAMN members across the country: here is a pamphlet that BAMN is now circulating to renew the fight to realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education beginning in Michigan. The fight we are waging there has valuable lessons for how other communities can fight to end separate and unequal education in their communities.
If you live in Michigan, contact BAMN now to join the movement!
Go to the
BAMN WEBSITE to download the pamphlet and watch BAMN's slideshow comparing Detroit's schools to those in the suburbs
For the first time in forty years, Detroit students and parents have the power to win equal, quality education for the young people of Detroit. Over the last five years the metropolitan Detroit area has been turning into a regional school district. Every day, tens of thousands of Detroit students get on buses to attend schools in Detroit suburbs. Students from Southfield, Oak Park and other school districts use the Detroit address of a relative or family friend, to attend Renaissance, Cass Tech and Martin Luther King High Schools and other Detroit schools. What was considered impossible—Detroit majority white suburbs seeking out and welcoming Detroit students to their districts and black parents putting their sons and daughters on busses to attend school in those suburban districts—is happening on a mass basis every day.
The regionalization of education is currently developing in an unplanned and haphazard manner. If left unplanned and uncoordinated, it will result in the creation of a whole new Jim Crow education system for Detroit youth. However, if we act, the people of Detroit could finally win the right of every Detroit student—those in DPS, those in private and public charters and those in suburban schools—to attend first-class, high-quality, integrated schools.
Detroit has the power to do what almost no other school district in this nation can do: make Brown v. Board of Education a living reality. Winning this history-making gain will require the people of Detroit to follow bold, farsighted leaders committed to building the new youth-led integrated mass civil rights movement on an independent basis.
We have the courage and the new optimism we need to try the impossible and win. We just need to get started.
Understanding the causes of the crisis of education gripping Detroit and its surrounding districts is key to winning. Charters and suburban public school districts are spending thousands of dollars on fancy advertising campaigns to beg Detroit students to come to their districts because they desperately need the state per-pupil allowance of $7,400 that goes with every student they recruit. In addition, poorer Detroit students bring close to $3,000 of additional federal funding with them to any school they attend.
This whole situation gives Detroit the leverage to say: "If you want our money, you must give us the same opportunities and the same quality of education that you provide your own residents. You neither have the right nor the ability to teach us if you see Detroit students as walking dollar signs or as inferior and second class."
Michigan "Schools of Choice" Act = Right of Suburban Schools to Implement the New Jim Crow
Ferndale provides a classic example of the Jim Crow system that the suburbs are creating on the basis of the Michigan "Schools of Choice Act," which gives school districts the right to pick and choose which of their schools they open to non-residents.
Ferndale has one school, Ferndale High School (FHS), which is reserved for Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge and Oak Park residents only. It is racially integrated, 60% black, 40% white, offers 20 Advanced Placement (AP) courses, five foreign languages, access to enrichment classes through the Center for Advanced Studies and the Arts, six career pathways, a broad range of electives, complete sports, music and art programs, an open campus, and no dress code. Guidance counselors and other auxiliary staff make the student to teacher/staff ratio 12 to 1.
The high school open to Detroit and other out-of-district students is Ferndale's public charter, cynically and misleadingly named University High School (UHS). Ferndale's UHS is 98% black, has only three AP offerings, next-to-no sports, music or art programs, next-to-no electives, offers only Spanish as a foreign language, requires uniforms, has a closed campus and offers only one career pathway. Because UHS has almost no auxiliary staff its student to teacher/staff ratio is 35 to 1.
UHS promises to place all prospective students in internships with the automobile companies, but in reality it places only a handful of students. Most students at UHS are receiving an education designed to place them in a low-paying technical job rather than a college classroom.
Ferndale is clearly using some of the per-pupil allocation it gets from its Detroit students to help provide an integrated, diverse, quality, college preparatory education to its own residents, while offering an inferior, segregated, largely technical education to Detroit students. Ferndale is relying on prejudice and baseless, degrading and racist stereotypes of Detroit students to act as if it is doing Detroit a big favor by allowing Detroit students to attend school in Ferndale. The truth is that Ferndale is just skimming off Detroit students' revenues to pay for Ferndale's rising education costs. This is separate and unequal. This is state-sponsored discrimination.
This is what Brown v. Board of Education declared illegal, unjust, and unfair in 1954. At a moment when America is being challenged to elect its first black president, it is unacceptable for black, Latina/o and other minority youth of Detroit to be stigmatized and offered little to no good educational opportunities in either Detroit or suburban public or charter schools.
It Is Time to Put the Needs of Students Before Prejudice
Ferndale is not alone in implementing discriminatory policies against Detroit students. Several other suburban districts are creating public charters or utilizing other policies which discriminate against Detroit students. The actions being taken by Ferndale and Detroit's other suburban neighbors flow directly from the right-wing, free-market, and pro-charter attacks on public education that began under the Engler administration, and which are now being pushed by both conservatives and liberals all across this nation.
Several of Michigan's educational funding policies, including Proposal A and other school finance/property tax reforms, were created under the misguided and often racist theory that Oakland and Macomb counties could thrive and develop even if Detroit remained poor and under-resourced. Suburban politicians and taxpayers pushed for school funding reforms that they believed would provide their communities with enough state aid to maintain their communities and school systems. Now those same funding schemes aimed at punishing Detroit and attracting new home owners and businesses to the suburbs, are creating an insoluble budget crisis for virtually every middle-class suburban and rural Michigan school district. Only the wealthiest suburban school districts—which have the ability to supplant rising education costs with private funds and which receive more than $12,000 in per pupil state aid, compared to the $7,400 allocated to many middle class districts—are able to survive the policies they pushed forward.
Every school district is looking for ways to avoid making cuts in school staff or programs. Each one is in a mad competition with each other to recruit out-of-district students to attend school in their districts. Instead of raiding Detroit, suburban school districts can improve education for their students and for Detroit students by uniting with Detroit, in a joint fight for increased and equitable funding for all school districts in Michigan, and for a rational, consolidated, unified, tri-county public school system.
Detroit Must Lead the Struggle for Metro-Detroit to Prosper
The whole social, economic and cultural rebirth of the area depends on the vitality of Detroit. No urban area can grow or prosper without a strong public education system. The economic and social future of Ferndale and all the other metro Detroit suburbs rests with the fate of Detroit. The economic and social viability of every Detroit suburb rests on making Detroit a strong and vibrant economic anchor for the whole tri-county area. All the theories which centered on creating a vast network of smaller suburban centers to grow the economy have failed to achieve anything. Everyone knows this.
If Detroiters can just recognize our strength, organize it, follow leaders who are strong rather than those who are the cynical and corrupt bidders for the charter companies or are just too scared to stand up to the right wing, then we could stop the seemingly endless rounds of attacks on our schools emanating from Lansing. Governor Granholm and other politicians recognize the central importance of Detroit to the prosperity of the whole tri-county area. These politicians are calling for a moratorium on the Cobo Hall debt.
The education of our youth is far more important to the future of the region than a convention center. Detroit had millions of dollars squandered or stolen under the state takeover. We have been forced to incur millions of dollars of new debt because of Lansing's failed policies. Granting a moratorium on the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) debt and returning the revenues we lost under the state takeover are fair and just demands we can win but only if we fight.
The massive school closings of 2007 have left whole Detroit neighborhoods with no schools. The predictable and terrible overcrowding in the high schools caused by the school closings has led to more violence, more students dropping out, less education taking place in the classroom and more student, teacher and staff demoralization and hopelessness. Detroit parents and students loyal to DPS are leaving the district because they feel that they have no other option.
The only way to break free from the vicious cycle of cuts leading to students withdrawing from the district, which in turn leads to more cuts and closures, is for Detroit to exercise its muscle and fight for our city's right to control the quality and character of education that Detroit students receive wherever they go to school. But this requires unleashing the power of Detroit students, something which only BAMN has been prepared to do, and combining that power with the power of the teachers' union and other city unions, parent and community organizations and any other forces prepared to fight for a bright future for Detroit. If we move in this direction, we can save public education in this region and defeat the imposition of second-rate charters on Detroit.
A Plan of Action to Win: It's Time to Fight Like the Old Civil Rights Movement and to Build the New Civil Rights Movement
Charter schools exist for one purpose: to make money. They must be free of public regulation and scrutiny, free to use non-certified teachers, outmoded teaching techniques, and specifically free of having a diverse student body to profit. If the elected Detroit School Board would hold public hearings on the practices of private and public, suburban and Detroit charters instead of trying to imitate their cost-saving, ridiculous, education-failing "reforms," it could gain control over the charters and in doing so stop their growth. Just holding charter schools accountable will stop large charter companies from ever entering Detroit.
Public and private charters that refuse to be accountable to Detroit and its elected School Board could be easily closed down by an old-fashioned BAM/BAMN "OPEN THEM UP OR WE WILL SHUT THEM DOWN" campaign. The aim of such a campaign would be to make both public and private charters attended by Detroit students open up to the scrutiny, regulation and control of Detroit, or else face boycotts, legal action or special legislation aimed at shutting them down.
Detroiters must take pride in the strength of our city and gain confidence from our understanding that the black communities have provided the leadership needed to win every progressive gain in this nation's history. At the same time, we cannot treat the isolation our city has been placed in for so long as a virtue. Racial segregation and isolation do not and cannot benefit Detroit. The power of the black communities is always greatest when we are fighting to end separate and unequal, to integrate every aspect of this society, and demanding to be treated as the peers and equals of everyone. When we are following Dr. King's example and building and leading an integrated civil movement fighting for freedom and equality and for the rights of all, the oppressed our power is limitless.
The whole greater Detroit area is becoming much more culturally diverse, with new, vibrant and growing Asian, Arab, Chaldean and Latina/o communities being established throughout the tri-county area. The growing strength of the Latina/o communities is completely changing the character of civil rights struggle and racial politics across this nation and in this region.
Unity of the black, Latina/o, Arab, and other immigrant communities is the key to victory. If we allow our communities to be divided by subscribing to the pervasive anti-immigrant or racial prejudices that have kept us weak and separated, all attempts to improve education for the students of the metropolitan Detroit area will fail. Together, united in a single integrated movement, we can defeat the racist response to Michigan's changing demographics. Support for educational segregation to preserve white privilege—the long-standing aim of charter school, voucher and other privatization efforts and all the attacks on affirmative action—are not only increasingly unpopular; they are politically and socially unviable. Diverse and integrated schools, which are what the vast majority of Michigan's young people of all races want to attend, are now not only possible, but represent the only solution to the crisis of public education confronting this region.
Our Immediate Tasks: End School Segregation in Ferndale and Other Suburbs
Making rational and reasonable arguments will not win the demand for consolidating the 80+ districts in the tri-county area into a unitary, public, integrated, quality school district. We have to begin this fight where we are strong. The suburbs' need for Detroit student dollars gives the students, parents, teachers and whole city of Detroit the power to win this fight. Stopping the illegal, unfair, unjust and absolutely unviable policy of placing Detroit students in segregated, separate and unequal schools is the strongest basis from which to launch our campaign.
Starting with Ferndale, and then expanding to the other districts that are exploiting the desperation of Detroit parents and students, we must demand that Ferndale and other suburban districts open all their schools to Detroit students, improve the quality of the schools currently being attended by Detroit students, and equalize the educational offerings at all their schools. We should demand that Ferndale and other suburban school districts combine their public charters and resident-only public schools into a single seamless school system, with student placement being determined by a lottery or some other fair, non-discriminatory, and equitable process. Every school will be improved if every school is integrated; and every district will integrate all their schools if the choices are either to racially and geographically integrate their schools or degrade their own district schools and go under financially.
We should urge Ferndale and other districts to do the right thing. If they resist, it is time for us to employ the tactics of Dr. King. No one would eat at a Ferndale restaurant that segregates black from white or Ferndale residents from Detroit residents, and there is no reason why we should accept such a policy when it is applied to our students. We must boycott, rally and march on any district that insists on segregating and stigmatizing Detroit students. We can end the new Jim Crow the same way we ended the old Jim Crow.
The suburbs of Metropolitan Detroit are in favor of regionalizing all the valuable and/or profitable institutions of the City of Detroit, such as the DIA, the zoo and the water and sewerage department. We should demand that regionalizing, integrating and making equitable public education in Metropolitan Detroit be a prerequisite to any negotiations regarding regionalization of any more of Detroit's assets.
Detroit Students Are the Peers and Equals of Every Other Michigan Students: We Will Not Accept Being Stigmatized or Treated as Inferior
We must stop the Michigan state government and our state universities from overseeing and justifying the New Jim Crow. We must go to the regents of the various universities, including Lawrence Tech, which is involved with Ferndale's University High School, and tell them to stop promoting, stop profiting from, and stop providing the ideological basis for the development of the New Jim Crow.
The "educational policies" that these institutions claim are needed to help black Detroit students to learn—rigid, structured, limited curriculum offerings, military discipline, uniforms, overcrowded schools devoid of art, music, joy and creativity—are never advocated for white suburban students. The same opportunity to learn how to think critically, to be exposed to all kinds of different subject matter and learning techniques, and to sit in diverse and small classroom settings that these university administrators and regents seek for their own children's' education are exactly what the students of metro- Detroit need to really shine and develop. We should settle for nothing less.
Public schools in Detroit like Renaissance High School are already becoming flagship magnet schools for the metro-Detroit area. If Detroit and our suburban school districts join together and pool our resources, we can accelerate this process and offer a vast number of better and different public educational programs for all children. Together, we could create magnet fine arts, science and other specialized public schools equivalent to New York's famed Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and the "Fame" Performing Arts public high schools. Expensive but vital special needs services and gifted and talented programs currently floundering in small financially-strapped districts would flourish in a large consolidated district. Public and private charters that pretend to be high-quality "university schools" or "educational academies" could be replaced by truly excellent and varied school choices.
Only the Youth of Detroit Can Lead This Historic Effort
The young people of Detroit must take the lead in order for us to win this bold plan of action. Detroit students and youth have been playing an important and decisive role in building the new, integrated civil rights movement. Detroit and other Michigan high school and middle school students led the organizing campaign to defend affirmative action and to realize the promise of Brown that culminated with the 50,000-person march on Washington on April 1, 2003.
In the spring of 2006, Latina/o and immigrant students throughout Michigan joined millions of other Latina/o and immigrant youth and successfully organized to defeat the anti-immigrant federal HR 4437. The mass mobilizations of 2006 placed the questions of civil rights, equality and an end to second-class treatment for Latina/o, black, Asian, Arab and other minorities back on the American political agenda. Senator Obama would not be the Democratic candidate for President, if not for the determined action of young people who believe that American society can be united by a common vision of hope, rather than hopelessly divided by racism and bigotry.
Detroit youth are now in a position to make the conclusion of Brown v. Board of Education, that separate can never be equal, into a living reality for youth in the metropolitan Detroit area, and through our example, for young people all across this nation.
If we lead, others will follow.
Young people are always at the forefront of successful civil rights struggles. Inspired by the dedication of young, black leaders, most importantly, the young Dr. Martin Luther King, young people of all races stood shoulder to shoulder, fought together, and defeated the old Jim Crow. We can beat the New Jim Crow if the young people of Detroit step forward to build and to lead the new civil rights movement. Building this movement is the only way we can assure that people of all races, the oppressed, and the poor are treated with the dignity and respect we all deserve and desire. We are living in an era in which many young people are embracing hope and rejecting cynicism.
Change that once seemed impossible now looks inevitable. It will not occur without our leadership. The time to fight and to win is now.
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