[Fwd: Cops Assault Kids, Parents and Citizens at Detroit SchoolBoard Meeting.]

[Rick Parkany <rparkany@BORG.COM>]

Folks:  FYI <sigh...>   ;-} rap.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Cops Assault Kids, Parents and Citizens at Detroit SchoolBoard Meeting.
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 00:00:07 -0800
From: Richard Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>
To: ca-resisters@serv1.ncte.org

http://www.freep.com/news/locway/skul29_20020329.htm

Dear Colleagues,

Those who have followed the actions of the Detroit School Board in the last
three years have had a good lesson in the development of US fascism. The
elected board was abolished by the governor about three years ago (using
bad test scores as an excuse) and replaced with seven people, only one of
whom ever lived in the city or had anything to do with a public school. The
rest were, initially, local CEO's who lived in the suburbs. The chief of
the board now is the head of marketing for the failed Daimler Chrysler
corporation. When the new superintendent was hired, about two years ago,
there were two people in the system with salaries over 100,000 dollars a
year. Now there are more than 80, his cronies from his past. The sole
Detroit citizen on the board recently received a $3/4 million grant to
conduct leadership academies in the schools. About a dozen principals have
been tried and convicted for stealing school funds in the last two years.
The new board has looted a 1.5 billion dollar bond project, offering
corrupt deals to local contractors---this in a school system which has few
libraries, and facilities over 90 years old. The new board began to
meet----behind the presence of Swat teams and riot squads, often numbering
more than 200 Detroit cops. At the early meetings of the takeover board,
police snipers were placed on the roofs of schools were the board met, and
in adjoining apartment windows.

The Detroit police are notorious citizen killers, as the mayor has
admitted. Detroit citizens have repeatedly and peacefully protested the
abrogation of their voting rights. Two years ago the Detroit teachers led a
massive wildcat strike against the law, their sellout union, and against
the mayor.

Three weeks ago, more than one thousand Detroit citizens and educators shut
down the bogus board meeting with peaceful chanting. Now the cops are at it
again, arresting and beating citizens and educators who protest at board
meetings.

There is a clear and direct line from curriculum standards to high-stakes
tests to segregation to the regulation of knowledge to deepening inequality
to tyranny and the promise of perpetual war. To disconnect this line only
serves domination.

Teachers, students and parents/community people in Ontario, Canada,
Tijuana Mexico, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cincinatti have led massive
extra-legal actions in the last three years, pointing the way to the
appropriate rememdy for tyranny: Civil Strife. At the same time, the Whole
Schooling Consortium, the Rouge Forum, and the Detroit Summer project led
by Grace Boggs have also led alternative freedom schools for those students
who are seeking to struggle for truth in a world that seeks to do nothing
but mask it.

There is an extensive article on the takeover of the board and the wildcat
strike at
http://eserver.org/clogic/2-2/gibson.html

There are extensive links to popular press coverage of Detroit school here
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/DPScrisis.htm

This is a link to a definition of fascism
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/fascism.html

best, r

Rich Gibson
San Diego State University
College of Education
San Diego CA 92182
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson

        Life travels upward in spirals.
        Those who take pains to search the shadows
         of the past below us, then, can better judge the
         tiny arc up which they climb,
        more surely guess the dim
         curves of the future above them.

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