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National Town Hall Meeting Detroit

by Susan Ohanian

The flyer on the Detroit Federation of Teachers website trumpets:



Education Education Education
If It Ain't About the Children,
Then Get Out of the Way!
Education is the Key!

Keynote Speaker: Al Sharpton
President and Founder National Action Network
Host of MSNBC Al Sharpton Show

Moderator: George Curry
A syndicated columnist, Curry appears on Sharpton's radio show every Friday.

Featured Panelists include:



Mr. Ben Jealous, National President NAACP




Mr. Roy, Roberts, Emergency Manager, Detroit Public Schools




Dr. Julianne Malveaux, President Bennett College/author




Mr. Keith Johnson, President, Detroit Federation of Teachers




Dr. Deborah Hunter-Harvill, Past President, National Alliance of Black School Educators



The brochure lists www.FreeInst.org but the link doesn't work.
You can Google the founder, Rev. Wendell Anthony, to learn about his Detroit corporate/political/financial entanglements. Rev. Jesse Jackson officiated at his 2005 wedding. Here is a cached description

The brochure does not mention this letter from DFT president Keith Johnson to teachers:



Dear DFT Members:

Emergency Manager Roy Roberts informed the DFT and other union and non-union employees of the concessions he was imposing effective July 29, 2011. Among these was a 10 percent pay cut that is to be reflected in paychecks beginning Aug. 23, 2011. . . .




Take a look at the NAACP archive of Press Releases on Education, Nov. 17, 2009--July 28, 2011. Draw your own conclusions.

Pardon me, while I point out that nobody from Black Agenda Report is on the program. At Black Agenda Report, Bruce Dixon wrote Send In the Clowns: 3 Stooges, Gingrich, Sharpton & Duncan Hit the Road For Corporate 'School Reform'. Quite separately from each other, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Rev. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich have long ago forfeited whatever credibility they may once have had. Taken together, they are simply a bad joke: three grown men publicly eye-poking and slap fighting each other while they all come together to sell us high-stakes testing, charter schools, educational privatization and the whole package of corporate "school reform."

Go to the Black Agenda Report website for the article and a great cartoon. Leave them a donation. They are one of the very few organizations tracking the destruction of public schools and daring to name Sharpton. And Obama.

Dixon observes:



Instead of an honest public examination of the disastrous impact of No Child Left Behind, and its attendant decade of creeping educational privatization, corporate media, the Obama administration and its bipartisan allies are sending in the clowns with a 21st century three stooges remake starring the Rev. Al Sharpton, along with Republican former Speaker Newt Gingrich and Obama Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, elbowing and slapping at each other, yukking it up about their supposed political differences while they all come together around the corporate elite's version of "school reform."




Detroit the city and Detroit the school system have suffered corporate/political/institutional ravage, corruption and devastation almost beyond description. Inviting Al Sharpton to keynote an education event speaks ill of any hope for change.

I wonder when they will hold a Fight Back assemblage.


— Susan Ohanian

2011-08-17
http://www.detroitblackexpo.com/

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