Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools, just announced that he plans to shut down 70 of the city’s 142 remaining public schools in oder to close the much-talked-about $327 million budget gap. This move, he acknowledges, will bring high school class sizes to approximately 60. I’d like to write a wonderful, thoughtful post on what this means for Detroit and the rest of the country, but it’s late. So, I’ll just leave you with this question… Who in the fuck would teach a class of 60 high school students, in Detroit, or anywhere else for that matter? And, here’s an even better question. At what point do the people of Detroit take to the streets and demand that their children be given the same opportunities that the students of Ann Arbor are given? Putting 60 kids in a classroom is a joke. It’s an insult. I’m sure some right wing consultant will point to Harvard lecture halls where one professor lectures to a classroom of 200, but let’s be realistic. The inner city high school isn’t Harvard. Even in the best of circumstances, if none of the kids have discipline issues, and if they all have perfectly healthy family lives, with supportive parents, the math just doesn’t work. Teachers cannot effectively teach in an environment where they have less than a single minute to spend with each student per day. This is warehousing. This isn’t education. And the only thing it’s going to accomplish is better revenues for our for-profit prison industry. One way or the other, we’re going to spend money on these kids. I cannot believe that we’d rather pay to house them as criminals than teach them as children, but it looks like that’s the choice we’ve made. If anything, in my opinion, areas where the kids are most at risk should have the smallest class sizes, not the largest. There should be a law… I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m incredibly pissed off right now.
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