By Any Means Necessary and Detroit

By Any Means Necessary

“By Any Means Necessary’ or BAMN, www.bamn.com is by far the most progressive voice in the fight for public education, students, parents, teachers, student integration, desegregation, an end to racist school policies, and murderous privatization plans by the ruling class.

I have written long and hard on BAMN and their efforts, from fighting Wal Mart internships that attempted to snake their way into three public high schools in Detroit, to student walk-outs, to bus carravans and the fight against SB 6 (the Florida legislative plan that would have tied teacher performance to the private testing regimes), to the march on Arne Duncan’s office in Washington earlier this year, to the student organizational activities within D.C. schools (the home of the killing spree of Michelle Rhee) to the court battles with Financial Manager for Detroit schools, Robert Bobb the Kellogg Co. and Eli Broad paid shill who also pockets taxpayer funds as salary, to the sit-in at Governor Granholm’s office (that ended in the arrest of 13 students and activists last week) in their effort to gain dialogue with the Governor and ask the Governor to attend a local school board meeting, to the walk-outs that happened today, May 18th in Detroit by students, as well the inner struggle within the Detroit Federation of Teachers to remove Keith Johnson, the DFT head who is Robert Bobb’s supporter.

Without a doubt the record is clear: BAMN is one of the most unique organizations that is actually organzing and fighting, both in court and in the streets, for the right to an integrated public education that serves all members of the community.  They have taken on the formidable billionaires who pour monies into Robert Bobb as if he was a deposit annex for a system of racial and special needs apartheid.

Robert Bobb, like a stink that never leaves

The isssues involving the fight against Robert Bobb are so simple they can be complex.  I spoke with Donna Stern today by phone, she is the spokespeerson for the National BAMN.  She told me that there were really two aspects to the BAMN court case against Bobb.  

To begin with, Bobb wants to and has to a great degree, laid off all fine art teachers, destroyed drama programs, art programs, eliminated music from children’s curriculum, gotten rid of school bands and anything that has to do with culture and art.  He wants to strip schools of everything but test prep time and test taking time.  His plan is clear and the misery palpable; he will not stop unless leashed.

Secondly, Robert Bobb wants to increase the rate of decertification for special education students.  This means he wants to ‘kick them off the special education role’ so public monies are not used to pay for their education.  He does this by having publicly paid for phony reviews, re-evaluating students as a ploy to get them re-classified or out of schools and removed from government assistance.  These are students whose special needs can range from autism to physical disabilities, such as that described by De’Von Burt, the young Frederick Douglas High School student who has been a strong defender of public education and who himself is a special education student.  Bobb simply does not want to spend taxpayer monies on special education students and he has been wounds up like a toy by the public sector exectutioners to do the job.

Yet it doesn’t stop there.  Bobb has also been decreasing the amount of students who are sent for special education review, or Independent Assessment Programs (IAP).  He wants to dam the system that even looks to see if a child is in need of spcial education.  Robert Bobb is involved in ‘special education’ cleansing at all Detroit schools; that, when he is not busy closing them.  This man works to deny children an education and you pay him with tax dollars to do so.

You might ask, why would a government employee act in such a manner?  I have answered that in other articles and please go to ‘author’s at the Home page of www.dailycensored.com and click my name, Danny Weil, and you can see the extensive witing on Detroit.  However, the answer is simple: Robert Bobb has been hired by Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm in partnership with Eli Broad, the Sun Homes billionaire, to privatize education in accordance with Wall Street wishes and the wishes of Secretary of Mis-Education, Arne Duncan, the invisible but failed puppet who orchestrated the privatization and school closing tragedies in Chicago during his seven year tenure.

Privatize it!

Privatizing schools has been on the radar of the neo-conservatives, con-men on Wall Street, and venture capitalists for decades.  First they tried vouchers, most notably in Milwaukee where their experiment not only failed to rouse a nation, it failed period.  Knowing that they could not ‘sell’ the idea of privatizing education to the public through ‘voucherization’ the hucksters then, like predators looking for a host, latched on to charter schools as a Trojan Horse. 

What charter schools allow the financial capitalists to do is to not only destroy unions and public education, but also to contain students and the surplus population they know their economic policies have created.  With jobs shipped out to all corners of the world, the US produces nothing.  65 percent of all us wealth is financial wealth and this means that there are no jobs for young people, especially young people of color.  Setting up a containment plan that would at once allow the entrepenneurs to capitalize on their investments and at the same time cull students, sending those that did not make it in the new charter schools to the under-funded second provider, the public school system, assures a student a fast track to the prison industrial complex or at very best a second class, class-based, segregated education.

The investments are huge and the  link to the Race to the Top obvious (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/nyregion/10charter.html?pagewanted=all).  Neo-liberal government policy, that puts politicians in bed with financial thieves and then assures regulation in their favor and de-regualtion in their favor is the corporate-government connection, what one can call the monopoly finance system of capitalism.  With tax credits for charter school start-ups, tranfers of public wealth to charter school charlatans in the form of Average Daily Attendance (ADA) that each child recieves in federal and state and local monies, federal school lunch program monies, and various public troughs the private ‘welfare queens’ eat out of allows for a seemingly endless tributary of capital to the new educational entrpenneurs and their portfolios.  They are money managers and kids happen to be the commodity they trade, sell and feed off of.

These Wll Street anf privatization forces are bent on not just charterizing schools, but in so doing, assuring that private contracts are given to private businesses to handle ewverything from security to ground maintenance, from the cafteria services to the central adminstration and the testing regimes, the educational products.  What’s more, they can do this best as non-profits for then they set up boards that run the charter schools.  These boards are usually made up of privatizers, bankers, Wall Street executives, politicians and those cozy and in-sink with the cannibailziatin process that is eating our students.  Many of the public record laws exempt the Boards of these retail charter chains from any disclosure.  If they don’t, then like in D.C., Michelle Rhee simply states that Freedom of Information Act Requests will not be honored by the school district.  The secret parliament runs unregulated and unseen.  The Gift of Gyges.

The handpicked boards more than not have no public disclosure, they operate in secrecy with no public oversight or tranparency and they usually refuse to release public records when asked, forcing lawsuits and publicly funded adminstrative taxpayer time we pay to protect private interests detrimental to our kids.  The good old days of going down to your public school and getting the budget is gone.  The secrecy and contempt for the public can be shown in these charter boards’ unwillingness to allow for parental decision making at the charter schools; nor do they allow for true parental oversight.  Theys tonewall Public Record Requests.

Enter the coin-operated politicians

In order to set up what is only disguised with business suits as a racketeering conspiracy to rob children of a sound, public education and assure hefty profits for their investors, the Wall Street hedge fund firms, the banksters, the developers, and the venture capitalists need a petri dish to breed in.  To get this, they use politicians that they fund with billions of dollars and training, place them in positions of power after they have been schooled at their Superintendent Academies (Eli Broad Academy) in how to break unions, deal with the corporate media to lie, operate in secrecy while retaining high exposure, defeat students in their demands for an integrated and public education, and work to massage parents’ perceptions (by setting up phony parent groups), many who are rightly fed-up with the industrial model of education. 

The money changers need skilled manipulators, Machiavellians that can appeal to their constituency, manufacture their consent and ignore their questions.  This is why more and more one can see black and latino faces as those in positions of power, or shills for the white billionaire corporatists.

There is Kevin Johnson, the former basketball star and Mayor in Sacramento.  He is ‘boyfriending’ with Michelle Rhee, the Chancellor of D.C. Schools, both Eli Broad cnadidates.  Then there is Cory Boooker and De’Sean Wright in Newark, New Jersey, with their Newark Charter School Fund, the federal reserve for billions in private charter seed money.  Mayor Villaraigosa provides cover in Los Angeles along with Gloria Romero who is Latina, thus appealing to Latino voters. 

Picking favorite ‘minorities’ is the key for the grand business plans for the cities are segregated and these ‘Don Kings’ of education will do the ‘bread and circus’ that the hoi poloi, or so they think of the people, will eat up. 

You do not see this kind of movement in the suburbs do you?  Of course not, this is an urban financial plan tied to gentrification, urban removal, and gussied up in language a about osdur kids, when it is literally a conveyor belt to despair.

Sharpton walks the stage set with Gingrich, due to Joe Williams  out of New York who helped Sharpton avoid millions in back taxes .  Williams is a fixer extraordinaire for Joel Klein, Chancellor of New York schools where the battle for charters and privatized education is feverish (ibid)  Also see Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse . 

Billionaires and banksters along with venture capitalist pick up the cost for the politicians they wish to run or the initiatives they wish to promote, the phone banks, the mailers, the flyers, the voter registration all that is needed to buy an oligarchy they can live with; they do this city by city.  They then use their corporate sock puppet presses, city by city, as microphones for the new ‘leaders’ who cleverly hide their ventirloquists with lofty rhetoric about kids and learning, closing the achievment gap and ‘best practices’.  Once the superstructure is laid, the taxpayers finance its continuation while the locusts move to another location.

In Detroit, Robert Bobb wants to take the Dickensian politics further.  He wants to close one of two schools that serve the deaf; a school with an environment for mainstreaming and where all students and teachers and staff know how to ‘sign’.  Along with decimating schools for the deaf, killing all extra curricular activities from arts, music and drama to school bands for the rest of public schools, Bobb wants to close 45 public schools he says are either underachieving or do not have enough population to sustain them.  He wants to replace them with private charter schools and he needs the real estate, the land and the zoning process.

What the financial monopoly class has found is that they can easily conjure up the Robert Bobb’s and Cory Bookers and Kevin Johnson’s of the world and use them by parachuting them into urban cities where they put together staff with huge salaries, partially paid by the business elites themselves in tandem with taxpayers, to put together a ‘mob’ plan to pull a coup d’etat for capital and actually seize public property and either sell it off to private interests, or in the case of Los Angeles, simply to just sign the titles for the publicly built and publicly funded schools over to the new ‘turnaround artists’, as the ruling class eupehemistically likes to call themsleves; they will then be turned into for-profit charters with non-profit or for-profit faces.  It is a business plan and it involves gobblig up the future of children and teachers and the future of the nation as the cash guzzling maniacs live for nothing but control and profits.

With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) passed by a bi-partisan house in 2003, the plans for implementing such a business racket was quickly lubricated.  NCLB forced students to perform on standardized tests, thus setting up the ‘veal cages’ we see emerging today for our kids.  The consequences for schools not living up to the Hansel and Grettle policies of the business elite was grave.  It would include clsoing schools, bringing in private test prep companies, taking over districts, charterizing schools and the list goes on and on.  Children and their teachers were specifically set up to fail so the schools could enter into the hands of the privatizers, so they would no longer be public schools.

But it was Arne Duncan, the elite prankster and privatizer from Chicago that did more than anyone else could have to assure that the privatizers wishes were put into practice.  First, he had to re-name the onerous NCLB, Race to the Top, in an attempt to fumigate the sordid plan.  Changing the ‘brand name’ was the first step.  He then made sure that during and economic crisis when schools and teachers lwere bleeding on the pavement from cuts so deep even Al Capone’s scar would be jealous, he could then extort states and cities by pledging part of $4.3 billion he set aside with the use of government printing presses, by demanding that they basically live up to four assurances or five if you break them down:

1. they tie teacher performance to standardized tests; 2. they raise the caps on charter schools state by state if they had them; 3. they create a favorable climate for ‘capital investment’ meaning zoning changes from industrial to mix-use, or residential urban removal; 4. that they close public schools so investors could either confiscate the real estate with little or no cost and 5. by eliminating tenure and other collective bargaining rights won by unions, forcing them to become Wal Mart workers or at-will employees.

This is going on city by city, as we write and speak.  From LA to D.C. to Newark, to NY to Detroit – the game is being played out and schools are closing faster than Pay Day loans can open.

But not all citizens are lying down for the repeal of Enlightenment principles for a univeral public education.  Detroit is one city that is fighting back and BAMN one of the great groups that is dedicated, state by state, to put up their dukes and take on the mutli-billionaires and their insipid and savage plans for privatizing education and turning it into a commodity to be bought and sold on the market.

BAMN fights in the courts and in the streets

Bamn brought a lawsuit to Judge Wendy Baxter, not long ago, asking for a temporary injunction stopping Robert Bobb from carrying out the social engineering/ Darwinist plans of his bosses, the Waltons, the Gates Foundation, the Fischer Family (the Gap), Reed Hastings (Net Flix) and the Skillman Foundation and many, many more privatized faces that lie in wait for public education.  They brought the law suit in conjunction with the Detroit School Board and argued successfully, just a few months ago, that Bobb should not be allowed to make decisions for Detroit students and their parents and that it was the job of the school board, not Bobb to make policy.

However, the ruling was appealed and overturned and now, this Friday, BAMN and the Detroit School Board will go back to circuit court and ask for a permanent restraining order based on the merits of the case.

I was sent this notice today, by Detroit Federation of Teachers, Steve Conn and his wife Heather Miller:

“This Friday, 11 am., attend the first hearing in the DPS School Board lawsuit against Bobb over academic control.  The case will be heard before Wayne County Judge Wendy Baxter in room 1421 on the Coleman A. Young Municipal Building.  Hearings are scheduled every Friday for the next month. 

Our lawyers will be calling the expert witnesses listed below, who will demonstrate that Bobb’s so-called academic plan (school-closings, layoffs, shutting down fine arts and special education, etc.) is really a plan to destroy education for Detroit’s youth.  “Financial management” must be done within the context of the elected school board’s academic plan, which is a plan to build up public education in Detroit, including class size reduction, books and supplies, etc., not lay off teachers, shut programs, and close schools.

Also, the 9 am hearing before the same judge, in our challenge to the TIP / $250 “loan”, has been cancelled.  The other side (the Attorney General’s office) agreed that the Department of Energy and Labor’s Wage and Hour Division had no right to dismiss our claims this winter, and that they must schedule hearings. 

If you are one of the many DPS teachers who filed claims, you should be receiving another letter from the Wage and Hour Division before long.

Finally, the hearing on the lawsuit that challenges Bobb’s private salary is scheduled for this Friday at 9 am in front of Wayne County Judge Susan Borman, also in the Coleman A. Young Building.

The plaintiffs, BAMN and the Detroit School District will call as Expert Witnesses:

Pauline Lipman is a Professor of Education Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is also the Director of UIC’s Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education which has done extensive research on the academic outcomes and collateral effects of

Chicago’s Renaissance 2010, the school reform plan initiated in 2004 by Arne Duncan (now U.S. Secretary of Education), which is currently the model for the educational reform policies being advanced by “Race to the Top.” Professor Lipman’s research focuses on race and class

inequality in schools. She co-authored a 2007-2008 study on the effects of school closings and student mobility that was a major element of Renaissance 2010. She is the author of two books: Race, Class, and Power in School Restructuring (SUNY, 1998), High Stakes Education; Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (Routledge, 2004) and numerous journal articles.

Professor Myron Orfield is the Executive Director of the Institute on Race & Poverty, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and an affiliate faculty member at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He is also a Professor of Law and holds the Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota. In 2008, he published

a study assessing the performance of charter schools in the Twin Cities – the urban area in the state with the longest experience with charter schools of any state in the country. His analysis shows that charter schools have intensified racial and economic segregation and stratification, even in areas that are already highly segregated, and that charter schools performed worse, on average, than demographically

identical traditional schools.

Alex Molnar is a Professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Arizona State University. He is the Director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit and Education Policy Research Unit at ASU. Professor Molnar holds a Doctorate in Urban Education, a Masters in Social Work and a Specialist’s Certificate in

Educational Administration. Much of his recent research has focused on the effects of the increased role of market forces, business and commercialism in K-12 education. He co-authored “Evaluation of the Wisconsin Charter School Program 2000-2001.” In addition to publishing

extensively, Professor Molnar has served as an expert witness in dozens of legislative and legal hearings on issues of school choice, school privatization and advertising in schools and is frequently interviewed on educational topics by national news media” (Steve Conn, union leader for DFT).

Yes, the issue will now go back to circuit court and we can only hope that Joyce Schon and George Washington, attorneys for BAMN along with the attorneys for the District can convince the judge to grant a permanent injunction against Bobb and his wrecking crew.  Baxter left copious notes according to Donna in a written opinion defending her ruling which was overturned by the appeals court; a well-reasoned opinion that Robert Bobb has no authority to make decisions for Detroit sschools and their constituencies.  Stern says this sign is hoepful and she is herself keeping her fingers crossed for Friday’s hearing.

BAMN has sued independently from the District against Bobb’s school cleansing programs aimeed at special education students and the firings of arts, music and drama teachers, the clsoing of the school for the deaf due to Bobb’s privatization moves.  Stern argued that Bobb has no academic plans either at his own website or in his file cabinet.   All he has is rubbish and the cut and paste job he did from the right-wing think tanks and the Eli Broad Academy; talking points his masters have given him.

You can go to Bobb’s webiste and see how slogans and percentages are slanged around like crack cocaine, but there is no substance to the plans Bobb says he has for children other than dislocation and despair.  The same thing is going on in Newark, where Lady Liberty Charter School has no language arts curriculum, simply a master’s list of inebriated slogans and bulletted talking points.  This is true up and down this divided nation as charter schools fail to comply with laws.

What is to be done?

So what is to be done?  Well, according to Donna Stern and Joyce Schon, what needs to be done is to build a national coalition of working people, immigrants, people of color and those discriminated against by the privatization of education.  This colation must be large, it must be funded and it must have political savvy and leadership.  No court can win this fight for us, only the court of public opinion.  If we do not build a comprehensive movement for civil rights and social change we are doomed to battle state by state in a semi-coma state of bankruptcy.

One place BAMN is putting their efforts is in running Mark Airgood, a strong defender of public education and from Oakland, along with Ceresta Smith, a BAMN member from Florida, to the National Executive Board of the National Educators Association (NEA).  The convention will take place in July and these two candidates are positioned to take leadership from the NEA, which up until now has either held hands with Duncan (Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT comes to mind) or has quietly refused to fight the Race to the Top and the on the ground plans of the various politicians, state by state.

In New Jersey the NEA is in bed with the Newark Charter School Fund, Cory Booker and the Bradley Foundation’s 2008 Frankensteinian creation.  In Detroit, NEA is refusing to print or mail BAMN candidate literature to NEA members, of which I am one.  Why?  The NEA says that the BAMN literature is too ‘subjective’ and BAMN actually had to sit down with NEA lawyers to hammer out the member’s and candidate’s rights.  NEA doesn’t like the student walk-outs, the appeal to militancy, the teacher organizing, or the sit-ins.  this is union talk and the NJEA is more prone to management talk.

In California, David Sanchez, head of the California Teacher’s Assocaition, does virtually the same thing; he refuses to show support for teachers and their sturggle against the day-to-day battles they confront both inside and outside of class.  Sanchez himself rose on the back of his father’s reputation and has nothing but capitulation to capital in his heart.  He is smarmy and lacks leadership; he’s an invertebrate.

The bottom line, the teacher’s union leadership are caving and their rank and file generally uninformed and not allowed to appeal to their constituents, at least not with NEA funds.  This is true for both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA). 

The good news, Yvette Felarca, whom I have written about in her effort to stop the REALM charter school in Berkeley, is also a BAMN member and will run in the national convention against the harlot Randi Weingarten.  We must give her our support.

Summary

BAMN is undoubtedly the most committed, best prepared and multicultural activist organization in the counrty that is fighting for the rights of our students, teachers and futures.  Sin duda!  but they are also fightig for another society, a civil society owned by people, not by corporations.

Tomorrow, or the next day, I will put out a chart that compares for readers the vacuous and vicious policies of Robert Bobb with those of the Detroit School Board, the latter being what BAMN supports.  It should show readers in graphic detail the difference between a comprehensive educational system that is public and serves all students regardless of class background, race, gender or disabilities, and an illiterate and cobbled together profit-driven educational plan that is not only irrational but murderous and tantamount to patient dumping by private hospitals.  Just look at New Orleans for evidence.

While the Detroit School Board wants to increase art education, invest in music programs, invest in sound educational practices that are public and that do not divorce teachers from the conception of their lesson plans and their exectuition;  a plan that would build magnet schools to allure many populations to return to Detroit, not leave the city in abandonment and segregated, the privatizers dream of Teach for America Teacher Villages they can invest in, develop and collect rents from. 

The public plan is a traditional educational appraoch to learning, not one tied to the gross necessities of the text book industry (Marvin Bush, George W. Bush’s brother) and the testing industry (Nei Bush and Ignite! Inc. and others) and the developers and wild speculators on Wall Street.

Public education is a human right, it is not a commodity to be bought and sold on Wall Street or planned on the spread sheets of the banksters and hedge fund ringleaders.  It is a right that goes back to the era of the Enlightenment and has been the subject of struggle for more than 250 years.

When privatized schools decide special education students cannot attend their schools due to the fact the operators of the charters will not pay for bus transport, wheelchairs, special services such as nurses, aids and other acoutrements necessary for our children, then where will they go?  They will go into the streets; they will live in doorways of buildings; they will end up in tent cities; they will go to prison or the criminal justice system; they will join gangs and further atomize from society.  They will go the same place the uninsured patient goes when he or she needs public health care.  They will go to die and with them will go our society.

This is what we are up against, people, the Social Darwinists are cast as ‘philanthropists’ and ‘free marketeers’, when in reality they are democracy’s gravediggers and the white man’s schleppers.

One note:  BAMN cannot do all of this without funds.  They need your help, as does every other worthy organization.  The diffrerence is that BAMN has a track record, they actually get things done on many levels and they are one of the only groups, organizations in America that is standing up for our kids.  Please, consider donating some money, any amount to BAMN. 

BAMN organizers are working people like you.  They must work for a living and engage in their activism outside of their work.  The work they do for BAMN is public interest work, not paid work.  If you can help them or know anyone who can, please get a hold of Donna Stern, spokesperosn for BAMN at donnaestern@gmail.com.