Dear Friends,

The American Federation of Teachers leadership in Detroit bargained what I think may be the worst school worker contract in US history (let's set aside the days before collective bargaining, meaning not 1931 and not the McCarthy era). I'm holding a contest to see if anyone can come up with something worse. Deadline is Sunday night.

The 2009-2012 agreement between the Detroit Public Schools and the DFT was ratified by a vote of 3,578 yes, 2,031 no. DFT has more than 7000 members.

Complaints about voting irregularities abound, typical of the DFT, but are unlikely to have much impact.

The contract was negotiated by top AFT boss Randi Weingarten and the somewhat befuddled DFT president, Keith Johnson--even behind the backs of their own bargaining team. Then the pair joined the Detroit Mayor, the local press, and the top bosses of DPS to force the rank and file of the DFT to vote to strangle themselves--using union money to prove that only complete surrender was possible.

We do not need unions to surrender. We can throw up our hands in defeat, alone.

But the DFT wants a contract, even if it is complete capitulation, in order to continue to collect dues. That is their project. They sell the labor of the members to the DPS bosses, get check off, and guarantee labor peace, using all the force they can muster. It's their sole purpose, just as banks only ideology (as with all of capitalism) is profits.

The sellout contract includes merit pay, a $500 per month pay cut (with clauses that make it look like a bracero program), a Priority Schools project that mirror the Strategic Hamlet schemes in Vietnam, huge health benefit loses, more regimentation of the curricula, etc. Background of this came to you in the post below, and more will come later. The contract includes the full grab bag of reactionary measures that have appeared in (mostly AFT) contracts, piecemeal, and puts them into one sweetheart arrangement lasting three years--unless DPS goes bankrupt and wipes out pensions, etc.

A $500 a month pay cut would hurt anyone but the contract will especially hurt young single moms who started teaching, bought homes or cars, and now find themselves unable to keep up. This criminal deal will spread all over the country, become a template, especially for AFT locals which will see it very soon on their own bargaining tables.

At the very same time, tonight, the Michigan legislature changed state law enough to appear to be in line with the Race to the Top (Ratt) money from the Demagogue, Obama (funded by AFT and NEA among others) and his marionette, Arne Duncan. The Race to the Money was led by the Democratic Michigan Governor who also appointed the Broad Foundation's ponce, Bob Bobb, to run the Detroit Public Schools.

Meanwhile, the Demagogue sends 30,000 troops and probably 50,000 more mercenaries to Afghanistan to conduct his imperialist adventure, using the children of the poor who cannot get jobs to kill other children of the poor on behalf of the rich in their homelands.

And the Democrats gut Medicare, pimp for the insurance companies, and pound down to get a "Health Care" bill that might offset the bills for GM and Walmart owners but will make health care worse for most people.

This is without question class war. but the poor and too many others cling to a quasi-religious view of democracy which no longer has any ground whatsoever. Capitalism rules over democracy every time.

I'm eager to discuss why it is that I should not rightly call the government an executive committee and armed weapon of the rich where they iron our their differences and then allow us to choose which one of them will oppress us best.

Or, why it is we should not consider the top labor leadership in the US (and their sappy counterparts in the professional organizations) enemies, not potential allies, to be treated as such--harsh measures.

The core issue of our times is the rise of color-coded inequality and the real promise of perpetual war met by the potential of mass class-conscious resistance.

We can see that national resistance is growing. At issue is whether or not people will make sense of why it is they must fight to live. If they do not, they will do nothing but lose, lose, lose.

The struggles headed for the March 4th strikes, followed by Mayday, are heartening, as are the building seizures, teachins, and street battles that students and teachers have joined. In that, there is hope; direct action and lessons learned. Rescuing education from the ruling classes will be the focus of the Rouge Forum Conference this coming August, connecting reason to power.

Bottom line; the Education Agenda is a War Agenda. Failure to grasp that means certain defeat. Detroit is only the injury that will go before an injury to all. Bet on it.

Good luck to us, every one.

And happy holidays,

r http://richgibson.com/edagenda_waragenda.html

 

> Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:55:14 -0800
> To: epata@interversity.org
> From: Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>
> Subject: Parents Encouraged to Blame Teachers for Low Scores
>
> Dear Friends, I've gotten a lot of inquiries about what is going on in Detroit, why test scores are so low, what's up with the DFT sellout contract, what is the rank and file doing, how about parents, etc. Just below is a note I wrote to our founder Susan Harman that gives some quick background.
>
> Hi Susan, I hope you are doing ok.
>
> No books might be one cause of Detroit's bad scores. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetjuniper/sets/72157603302647339/
>
> http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/schools-out-forever-625.php
>
> http://richgibson.shutterfly.com/26
>
> Many school libraries in DPS have been closed for ten years I am sure of. In too many elementary schools, the teachers have squirreled away their own little libraries, and that is it.
>
> I know hs teachers who, as of Nov 28 this year when I left, still had not gotten their texts. Those who did have texts were not allowed to let kids take books home.
>
> Kids at one high school three years ago staged a demonstration because they had no books. The cops beat, maced, and arrested them.
>
> An illiterate adult population (poverty squared) would be another. It's a reasonable and repeated estimate to say 1/2 the population of Detroit is illiterate.
>
> An absence of adult leadership is a very serious problem. The current elected school board is, to say the least, bizarre. One board member, for example, had his six children removed from his care by Protective Services. He's still on the board. This year, the new Czar (see the letter to the editor below) had the school doors painted blue to try to lure kids away from suburban systems, back to DPS. No books. Blue doors. Nice. The campaign, called, "I'm in," cost more than $500,000.
>
> Combine capitalism decaying in hyper-speed and the sharpest forms of racism, you get Detroit. It puts in harsh relief: community or barbarism.
>
> The charges of incompetence and corruption aimed at school workers have truth in them. Corruption has been rampant, the most severe reality is the student count, basis for funding, which has been inflated by about 10,000 for more than a decade. Everyone knows about that: everyone, from principals to top administrators to rank and file teachers to school secretaries to groundskeepers to the leaders of the DFT. It's still the Big Secret kept because people believe they all gain from it, rather like residents of tourist beach towns who keep the secret that the water is completely polluted.
>
> Nobody should believe any statistic produced by DPS employees. From my experience, the only time the stats are correct has been when the employee made a mistake.
>
> There have been and still are a lot of small time crooks in DPS, as with people carrying ineligible pals on their health insurance, principals stealing the schools' petty cash, etc.
>
> But the big time crooks, like the Takeover Board who stole a $1.5 billion bond issue giving no bid contracts to their pals to build new schools in a district losing at least 10,000 kids a year, go unnoticed. At least 13 new schools were built during the Takeover Board period, '99 to 2005.
>
> I visited 7 of the closed schools. They are completely stripped of everything, or almost everything. Books lie around, as do stripped computers. I believe there are more like that, and I know DPS pays a million dollars a year to fence them to keep "scrappers" out, but as you can see from the photos, the scrappers steal the fences. You also see photos of schools that were completely refurbished in the last decade, sitting empty in ruins.
>
> Elite Cass Tech High (smart kids magnet) was completely built entirely anew---at a cost of 3 times similar buildings constructed around the state. The Cass football fiels was built new too, but it turned out to be too small for a real football field. Gulp. Oops.
>
> Then there is the purchase of five floors in the lovely Fisher Building for School Offices, at a cost of more than was paid for the entire building about a year earlier.
>
> Teacher incompetence is a problem, as it is in many other places. DPS became a jobs bank for some people. In Detroit it is not uncommon to see open mass prayer in schools. It's uncommon, but not completely so, to see teachers hitting kids. Fights in schools between kids have become endemic, and, only recently, gangs became a serious problem in some schools.
>
> But teacher incompetence is endemic elsewhere. We have a generation of teachers now who don't know much of what to do but to teach to tests. If we judge them by what they do, that's an ineluctable fact. Fear, as you know, plays a big part in school life, fear based in reality or imagined. That is surely true in Detroit where anyone can walk two blocks and see what happens to you when you lose your job.
>
> Detroit is not unusual in the reality that a few good teachers and perhaps a good administrator hold entire schools together. Schools everywhere are missions for capitalism and the overwhelming majority of educators its missionaries. The analogy is near perfect.
>
> The real test should be: How is capitalism doing? No jobs, endless war. I'd give capitalism a D (science and technological advances move it up from an E.)
>
> The contract the DFT bosses are trying to force on their members is far worse than just the horrific $500 pay cut per month. It includes massive cuts in health and related benefits, and a Priority Schools project that reads to me to be something like the Strategic Hamlet scheme in Vietnam.
>
> If the DFT and the state management apparatus (the Dem Governor to the Dem Mayor to the Broad appointee Bobb et al) succeed in foisting this terrible contract on the rank and file, then that contract will be a national model.
>
> The contract combines everything we have opposed that has been taken on piece by piece in Chicago, NYC, LA, Miami, Milwaukee, etc, and puts it in one document. Then that contract adds a few things that are even worse.
>
> If you scroll through the lies of the DFT mis-leadership down to the link on the contract, you can see for yourself what is in, and is not in it
> http://mi.aft.org/dft231/
>
> Note, however, that the United Auto Workers Ford division rank and file this fall rejected a sellout UAW contract 60-40%. The UAW bosses then imposed that contract on the members anyway; the UAW's bogus constitution allows that. The rat who bargained that deal, Bob King, is about to be UAW President. I think the DFT's contract might allow such an imposition too. The AFT constitution is one of the worst, most undemocratic, in the US.
>
> So, it all falls on the rank and file members, parents, and kids, to defeat this terrible contract--their ability to shut down the schools, open freedom schools, and hand the combined enemies of the DFT hacks, the Gov, the Mayor, the Broad appointee, all the civil strife they can muster.
>
> Good luck to us, every one.
>
> r
>
>
> Letter to Detroit News 12-09-09:
>
> Let's apply journalistic questions to the real crisis in DPS:
>
> Who? Appointed by Democrat Granholm as Czar, Bob Bobb is loyal to the Broad Foundation, where he will return after Detroit. Now News columnist Burnam wants to make Bobb, "dictator." Think twice.
>
> DPS employees deserve some responsibility for the current DPS crisis, incompetence in academics and systematic corruption, but primary responsibility must lie with a series of corrupt and incompetent administrations (Takeover Board to Burnley to Calloway and the wacko current Board). Beyond that, a system propelled by greed and racism holds main responsibility for the ruin of civic life in Detroit.
>
> What? Doing school reform without doing social and economic reform will fail. Only the dull or dishonest reject that. Bobb rejects it. Bobb arrived to restore order and hope to DPS by regimenting the curricula, pushing anti-working class high stakes exams, demanding merit pay to pit teachers vs teachers, schools vs schools, and kids vs kids, exacting draconian pay cuts, through privatization; all cooked in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.
>
> Bobb wants to rebuild hope in DPS because absent school-based hope, rebellions occur. It's false hope. DPS will still be a pre-prison, pre-Walmart, pre-teacher, and for a very few, flight school district because that's where the combination of greed and racism that makes up Detroit's history leads. The key is discipline and order to create loyal, dutiful, and obedient youth, unlikely to rebel.
>
> When? Fast. No thinking, the huckster's tool.
>
> Where? This is a nation wide flim-flam. It's not just Detroit. It's D.C., LA, Miami, New York, every big city in the US. Odd that in a nation desperate for jobs, the merger of corporate heads, union bosses, and government officials want to eradicate the jobs of school workers.
>
> How: By attacking small time DPS crooks, ignoring big time crooks (contractors, developers, union hacks, top administrators), and going around the outright fools (the Board and many administrators) Bobb proves himself apt, but not honest.
>
> Why? Because the education agenda, a bi--partisan effort, is a war agenda. Inside the US, it is a war on educators, among the last people with fairly predictable jobs, health benefits, and pensions in the country. It is a war on youth, using bogus forms of science (test scores that measure little more than income and race), to deepen segregation and prepare kids for a life of no jobs, bad jobs, prison, or the military where they will be enlisted by the economy to fight other poor kids, on behalf of the rich in their homelands.
>
> People will resist. At issue is whether or not they make sense of things and fight back in ways that truly connect reason to power. We need no more dictators.
>
> Dr Rich Gibson
> Emeritus Professor of Education
> San Diego State University