Education for Profit in Detroit
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck.It seemed like a scene from an auction block. This past Tuesday at the House of Representatives in Lansing, MI, the education committee held a hearing on a bill (HB 6004) which would help drive a deeper stake into the heart of public education in Detroit, transferring absolute power to the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), a “public body corporate,” as its chancellor, John Covington, defined during his testimony, which currently occupies over 15 (9 elementary/middle, 6 high) Detroit Public Schools (DPS) and services 10,000 students. It is a bill aimed, in plain terms, at shipping off larger swaths of Detroit’s kids (worth $7,000/yr, roughly $42 /day) into a private system.
— Strange Fruit — Billie Holiday
The hearing room was packed full and overflowed: mainly from a coalition of Detroit activists, public school teachers and board members, lawyers, journalists, professors, parents and students who had come—some by bus. some by cars—to Lansing to plow through the avalanche of myths and lies which filled up the four-hour hearing. Beyond Covington, other testifiers included EAA parents, principals, teachers and students, all singing the same tune about “changing the culture of the schools.”
The EAA is, in theory, a bidder on the block, merely a contractor seeking to eradicate its main competitor, Detroit Public Schools (along with the elected school board), thereby gaining strong territorial and financial control over a 50,000-student district—a predominantly poor and Black, severely at-risk district, a blight-drenched district undergoing (much like New Orleans post-Katrina) disaster capitalism, absolved of all electorally bestowed power and subject to the whims of a sorely-hated emergency financial manager. The EAA is, as well, a for-profit industry, which like any other, is ever-expanding, or at least seeking to.