‘We are in a pitched battle over who controls the school system, and we have not lost’
I was appointed to the Detroit School Board in July, 2010 – the only Latina/o on the 11-member board. The elected board member was forced out by a minor scandal. The rest of the board is African American.
Due to the difficult fight going on over who runs the schools in Detroit – the citizens or the big educational foundations – it has not been easy to be appointed to the board.
Detroit is an African American city (85 percent), and Latino/as are about 5-10 percent. With a small number of white outsiders controlling the city’s economics, here on the ground we are fighting about ever-shrinking resources and about closing schools.
Closing schools drives more students out of the school district, and federal funding goes lower and lower. People move out of the neighborhood because there is no school, so the houses go empty and get foreclosed on. The tax base goes down, so the state revenues to the district go down.
The big educational foundations have set their sights on Detroit because chilthey and their charter schools can provide services to fill the gaps that public education is unable to fill. They can shape the schools however they want to and make money at it.
Detroit schools have been taken over by the state, and since then millions of dollars of bond money have gone missing. School properties have been sold – flipped two and three times over two-day periods while under state control. But none of the realtors, the attorneys, or their go-betweens have been investigated.
For the students, the situation is dire. Since front-office staff in many of the Latino schools do not speak Spanish, bilingual students have been rendered invisible. When parents go in, there is no one to greet them and ask them what they need.
Many parents go somewhere they are welcomed by other Latinos who speak Spanish and will not ignore them. Since the beginning of the year, hundreds of Latinos have left Detroit public schools and headed for charter schools.
Students in Detroit public schools sit in the auditorium or library for weeks at a time because the schools do not have teachers for required classes. At Western High School, students waited six weeks for a chemistry teacher.
All this is a byproduct of the privatization of Detroit schools. The effect that privatization has on us is very similar to the effect the International Monetary Fund has on small, poor countries like Haiti. We have to do what they say – lay people off, increase classroom size, break the unions, get rid of seniority – and only then will they give us some money.
But we will find a way out of this terrible situation. We are in a pitched battle over who controls the school system, and we have not lost. The foundations have not gotten what they wanted: mayoral control of the schools.
They control the mayor, so the school district would become a playground where they could run their favorite “goodneighborhood” and “excellent-school” initiatives until some hapless principal or city council member crossed them.
Then they could take their money and move on to another school. This practice has already destabilized the neighborhoods where these “great” programs went in for a couple years. Then the foundations move on to the next neighborhood and start the same courtship all over again.
As long as we have an elected school board, the foundations cannot govern us. The foundations have a profound influence, but there is deep resentment in the community toward them. We will fight privatization and charterization to the bitter end.
Even if we lose, our students will know that we fought this takeover and did not offer them up. It is a very hard time to be on the Detroit School Board; I am honored to be a member.
Hasta la Victoria Siempre.
(Elena Herrada is District 2 member of the Detroit School Board.)
