This cross-state unity is worth appreciating: "Detroit Public Schools fight our fight, too," says the headline on a Battle Creek Enquirer editroial Sunday.
"Detroiters’ agonies are far from self-inflicted," the paper comments, "and it is . . . willful self-deception to interpret the events there as irrelevant to our lives in Calhoun County. . . . Consider the long-term prognosis for Battle Creek Public Schools."
The takeaway from opinion editor Michael McCullough, who's also executive editor of the 15,000-circulation daily, is:
Detroit may be hundreds of miles away from where you sit, but it’s closer to home than you may realize.
The 13-paragraph editorial urges readers not to see "the Detroit Public Schools crisis — and every other problem in Michigan’s largest city — as a drama of its own making, a product of local corruption, incompetence and malfeasance."
It’s no coincidence that the majority of the children who attend these so-called failing schools [in Detroit, Albion and Battle Creek] have brown skin and come from low-income families. White flight, and the policies and systemic prejudices that enable it (think schools of choice), have decimated these legacy districts. And still it continues.
The diversion of public treasure to the creation of charter schools is not, as its advocates argue, inspired by a desire to give the victims of struggling schools an escape route to better educational opportunities.
It is, rather, one component of a broad and deliberate effort to dismantle public education and the labor unions that fight on behalf of educators who dedicate their lives and careers to teaching the next generation.
Those reminders of common challenges come at the start of a week when Michiganians will hear the governor talk in his State of the State address Tuesday night about the situation in Flint, and perhaps also in Detroit schools.
-- Alan Stamm
Detroit teachers protest this month.
