I wonder what The New Yorker magazine would have thought of L. Brooks Patterson, Oakland County, and Detroit if they had any sense of or interest in the current processes of education "reform" in the state of Michigan and the direct line from L.Brooks and his first moment on the public stage in the early 70s to our current day.
L.Brooks, of course, got himself in to some media trouble when he said some supposedly incendiary things about Detroit to the New Yorker's Paige Williams who reported them as if Patterson's opinion of Detroit was somehow news.http://www.freep.com/article/20140121/NEWS03/301210093/L-Brooks-Patterson-Detroit-The-New-Yorker
Rather remarkably, the story got picked up! L. Brooks Patterson says you shouldn't fill up for gas in Detroit! And the sun also rises in the morning!
Given the media blitz surrounding Patterson's mere comments, The New Yorker might think it interesting to take a look at education reform here in Governor Snyder's Michigan where there really is, in fact, a juicy story involving Oakland County, Detroit and Patterson.
You see Patterson rose to prominence in 1970 or so when he got attached to an anti-busing battle in Pontiac. Judge Damon Keith -- also still famously around -- and a few others finally got convinced that Pontiac Public Schools were reshuffling their intra-District boundaries so that all the white kids eventually went to Pontiac Northern and all the black kids when to Pontiac Central creating, in effect, a thoroughly segregated District.
Keith ordered a busing program to correct that.
Anti-busing "activist" groups signed on Patterson to help their cause. Patterson saw Keith's order as an instance of "social engineering" that would cause great damage to Pontiac in particular.
Schools should be locally controlled.
Things got so heated that, in fact, ten (!) Pontiac school buses were bombed on North Saginaw by the Klanhttp://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White%20Materials/White%20Assassination%20Clippings%20Folders/Miscell.... The situation only was resolved when the anti-busing folks insisted on and won a decision that would have forced busing all over the state. When the 1 size fits all idea started to spread everybody pulled back. Perhaps this is a piece of US constitutional history Lansing would mandate be taught in schools.
Senator Colbeck?
I remember this well as a grade schooler and a mom who was a teacher in Detroit whose own busing policies re-oriented the District entirely.
Flash forward to 2014.
Governor Snyder became determined in 2011 to "unbundle" all geographically defined School Districts. Indeed, much of the political rhetoric from the reformers and from Republicans was about fairness and "choice." Some have even gone as far as too talk about education reform as the Civil Rights issue of our time! (would that civil rights had been funded by the Waltons, the Kochs, the Broads, and the Gates Foundation).
Some kids, they argued, had it great, others don't they argued. WE will set it right! Kids first they argued, per Michelle Rhee, as did the antibusing parents in Pontiac in the late 60s and early 70s.
But "Unbundling" quickly turned to "dissolving" in 2013 after schools caught on to the problems and real world consequences of Snyder's Mackinac Center/Devos funded ideology, at heart a privatization scheme of the worst order, and Inkster and Saginaw Buena Vista went down. "Choice" it seemed was a whale sized red herring. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-nelson/school-vouchers-choice-red-herring_b_4562438.htmlThose families got to "choose," for example, to go to Districts now overloaded and about to get punished for not managing their money well enough to handle the extra demands. "Choice" holds it self as a term of fairness and equity but historically always breaks, well, bad, really bad.
As fate would have it, though, the strange crusade to dissolve School Districts for the sake of greater fairness and "choice" hit a real big road block without having to consider history on an abstract level.
Guess where?
Patterson's Pontiac, natch. Hello New York(er)! All unresolved social problems eventually come home to roost.
The District, now primarily African-American, was struggling and it looked like a perfect target for Lansing's innovative reform idea of saving schools by closing schools.
But Oakland County Republicans woke up and said, whoa, hey, closing Pontiac would really cause problems for surrounding Districts -- like Bloomfield, itself downsizing and consolidating high schools -- and so Republicans from Oakland were forced to deal quietly -- in a 70s backroom kind of way -- with the internal contradiction in their own "reform" scheme. Just before the dissolution law was hastily finalized some Oakland County officials popped in a clause that said Districts with more than 2500 kids can't close. They are too big to fail. We have bashed teachers and teacher unions so much we are going to damage our own communities! Forsooth!
So: Pontiac lives! As does, of course, clumsy contradiction and hypocrisy.
Pontiac Schools became a political football again -- although of a different sort -- the only constants being, perhaps, that nothing that was said about public schools by elected officials throughout the state was true and that Patterson was still influential.
Rather than close Pontiac, the state appointed a "consultant" for two years for 750K. The consultant, curiously, turned out to be the former EM of Muskegon Heights and Highland Park -- two other primarily black Districts shut down by the state. That consultant's brother, in turn, was appointed to replace "him" as the EM.http://bloomfield-mi.patch.com/groups/ken-jacksons-blog/p/em-by-any-other-name
When some from Oakland County balked at the Governor's attempt to expand the EAA and render a horrific 1 sized fits all solution to public education, the only virtue of which is that is equally bad for all, no matter your skin color, Superintendent Flanagan clumsily tried to remind them of the Pontiac sweetheart deal. That might go away he hinted, perhaps having sat in Lansing so long he believed he had the power to do it.
Today (after the initial posting of this blog), it looks like the "consultant" has found a way to "sell" Pontiac Public Schools and a chunk of what was the Oakland County to a virtual university in Florida. Talk about snowbirds:http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140122/SCHOOLS/301220066/Pontiac-School-District-wants-10-years...
So, yes, as L. Brooks says, hesitate before you stop for gas in Detroit. There are some corrupt criminals there. I drive in every day and I am cautious.
But keep a closer watch out for those who would "save" schools by unbundling and dissolving them. I watch them every day and I am much more terrified of them than I am of carjacking in Detroit.
There is, in short, as history shows, usually a wee bit more involved than putting kids first and academic achievement and PISA test scores. And those things need to be argued honestly. Those conversations are hard and sometimes ugly, but necessary, and not dangerous.
If, however, someone tries to talk to you about public education without talking directly about race, poverty, economics, history, etc. and instead bombards you with buzz words -- "choice, achievement gap, career and college readiness", etc. -- duck, and lock the car doors, too.
