Give Detroit Schools a Fresh Start By Grace Lee Boggs

Books by James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs

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Give Detroit Schools a Fresh Start

By Grace Lee Boggs

Recently, I enjoyed talking with Tonya Myers who is running for the School Board in District 1. This includes downtown, northeast Detroit, and parts of southeast Detroit and the west side.

Tonya is not just repeating the buzzwords of “smaller classes,” “parent involvement,” “certified teachers.” She is boldly tackling the critical issue of inner school dropouts, proposing substantive but at the same time do-able changes.

Åt 28, she is young enough to remember her experiences as a student in Detroit’s public schools. But since then she has graduated from college and law school, worked for a living and reflected on the changes in our world.

Inner city schools, she has concluded, are organized on the factory model. Students are trained to take in and regurgitate information, to do assignments and fill out work sheets so that they will be ready to take orders after they graduate. This factory model worked as long as there were enough factory jobs.

But since globalization, inner city students need the kind of preparation in critical thinking, leadership and thinking about the future that suburban students take for granted Our young people, she says, are as smart as suburban students. But they drop out because at a gut level they recognize the class differences between their factory-oriented "training" and the empowering education of the middle and upper class youth...

If we gave our kids more responsibility, if the curriculum were more engaging, and empowering, there would be fewer dropouts (40,000 since the state takeover five years ago!!) and parents wouldn¹t be withdrawing their children from public schools and putting them in charter and suburban schools.

Towards this goal, Tonya proposes:

More hands-on learning by doing. We should work with our children more to show them how the sum of the parts relates to the whole, and how the material presented in the classroom relates to them personally, to their community, and to the world around them.

We need a stronger civic involvement in our public schools. Children should be meeting with city and state government department heads. They should play a role in the democratic process.

Community-service, only a minimal requirement at this time, needs to be made more meaningful.. Our children need opportunities to do more positive things and to help create beautiful things. For example, community gardening (which Tonya did with Triedstone Baptist church after graduating from the University of Michigan) is a wonderful way of bringing people together, City children don¹t get enough opportunities to watch things grow.

Raise MEAP scores by actually engaging students in learning and leadership, not in preparing for tests.

Bring elders into the classroom. Many elders look on youth with disdain or are simply afraid of them. Young people often treat the elders as if they are irrelevant. Neither really understands the other. One of the programs Tonya helped organize with the Rosa & Raymond Parks Institute was called "The Civil Rights Generation v. The Hip-Hop Generation."

Increase the international focus of public school education.. . Our world is changing So our children need more exposure to different cultures and other ways of doing things. They need more opportunities to go abroad. A lot of our kids don¹t even get outside the city, let alone outside the country.

Give our kids the sense that "you can do anything you want to do, go anywhere you want to."
For more on empowering our children, read FREEDOM SCHOOLING; BRINGING THE NEIGHBOR BACK INTO THE HOOD, a Boggs Center pamphlet, $7 +$1 SH.

Source: Michigan Citizen, July 17-23, 2005 / Living for Change: An Autobiography by Grace Lee Boggs

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update 25 July 2008

Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer, and speaker whose sixty years of political involvement encompass the major U.S. social movements of this century: Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's and Environmental Justice.

Born in Providence, R.I. of Chinese immigrant parents in l915, Grace received her B.A. from Barnard College in l935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in l940.

In the l940s and l950s she worked with West Indian Marxist historian C.L.R.James and in l953 she came to Detroit where she married James Boggs, African American labor activist, writer and strategist. Working together in grassroots groups and projects, they were partners for over 40 years until James' death in July l993. Their book, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, was published by Monthly Review Press in l974.

In l992, with James Boggs and others, she founded DETROIT SUMMER, a multi-cultural, intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up which completed its ninth season in June 2000. Currently she is active in the Detroit Agricultural Network, the Committee for the Political Resurrection of Detroit, writes for the weekly Michigan Citizen, and does a monthly commentary on WORT (Madison, Wisconsin).

Her Living for Change: An Autobiography published by the University of Minnesota Press in March l998, now in its second printing, is widely used in university classes on social movements and autobiography writing. -- http://www.boggscenter.org/