A letter to DPS staff

                

                

 *I don't have a lot of confidence that this memo was distributed as it should have been. So far it's been a real tug-of-war between me and EM Roy Roberts getting him to acknowledge and accept my role in the administration. Anyway, for those of you who would like to know, here is the letter that should have been distributed to all DPS staff from me last week.

                 DETROIT PUBLIC SCHOOLS

                                   Office of the

          SUPERINTENDENT OF ACADEMICS

To: All DPS Staff

From: Dr. John Telford, Superintendent/Academics

Date: August 23, 2012

Subject: General Announcement

As school is about to open, it has been no secret that the Emergency Financial Manager on one side and the duly elected and recently re-empowered Board of Education and the Superintendent on the other have been frequently entangled in lavishly publicized legal and political wrangling over which one of us—Roy  Roberts as EFM, or I as Superintendent of Academics—has authority  over which DPS departments.  These disagreements have now even extended again to whether the two of us have joint administrative authority over all physical facilities—specifically including school buildings.  Wayne County Circuit Court Judge John Murphy has put me in charge of all things academic, and he has put Mr. Roberts in charge of all things financial.  The Judge ordered me and Mr. Roberts to collaborate and administer Detroit Public Schools in the best interest of our students, and this is exactly what I for my part have been trying very hard to do, and this is what I intend to continue to do.  I expect all schools to open on time and to open appropriately staffed, and I expect the Division of Instruction’s academic plan will be followed to the letter in all classrooms.   

Accordingly, all of the following will be promptly forwarded to Judge John Murphy for his review and approval: In compliance with the Hon. John Murphy’s ruling, it must now remain my legal (as well as logical) expectation that all academic administrative personnel are to report exclusively to me.  These personnel specifically include Dr. Karen Ridgeway, Mr. Doug Ross, and any and all academic administrators over whom they have direct or indirect oversight.  Thus, the staff who occupy the cited positions include all of the assistant superintendents, principals, assistant principals, subject-area coordinators and supervisors, the district athletic director, security and attendance staff, parent/community liaison, etc.  The Board of Education has now directed me to inform all DPS staff that either the Board members or I will be the only individuals to correspond and interact with the Emergency Financial Manager (with the exception of staff whose job descriptions are clearly financial).  The Board and I are the exclusive conduit between the office of Emergency Financial Manager and all instructional or instruction-related personnel.  Some departments—to include but not to be limited to H-R, Communications, General Counsel, Facilities, and IT—will have dual reportage to the EFM and to me.  However, it is noted here that all employees should feel free to contact the office of the Inspector General if they observe any waste, fraud, or abuse within the district. 

Let me emphasize that we do not wish to distract the Emergency Financial Manager from his foremost role and responsibility of rectifying the financial emergency.  I trust that Mr. Roberts is continuing to work very hard to eliminate the deficit, and I have begun to work just as hard administrating the academic side of the house.  I intend to meet with every principal and be in every DPS school within the months to come.  Let us put any and all of our differences aside and join hands now in total unity to ensure the successful opening of school on September 4, and let us all continue to focus entirely upon offering the very best education to our children.           

Contrary to critics' perceptions, Detroit School Board not the problem

   

When I read Detroit Free Press Editorial Page Editor Stephen Henderson's extremely misguided attack on me and the Detroit School Board, School Board President Lamar Lemmons and I didn't have much choice but to respond and quick. The text of our letter to the editor is below. If you want to see the Aug. 17, 2012 published version, click here.

While it is difficult for me to overemphasize how far off base Mr. Henderson's comments were, I nevertheless appreciate the willingness of the Free Press to publish our response in a relatively timely manner.

To the Editor:

We read with extreme interest the Detroit Free Press’ August 10 editorial “AG’s school board suit misguided.”  We agree with its statement that Attorney General Bill Schuette should desist from now trying to disenfranchise Detroit voters retroactively by manufacturing a possible path to nullify the Supreme Court’s decision to place the challenge to PA 4 on the November ballot.  This unconstitutional law has disenfranchised every Michigan citizen.   However, we disagree with the editorial’s assertion that Detroit’s interim superintendent and school board are wrong to establish a curriculum that is antidotal to so-called “Ebonics” and other “non-standard” dialectical and syntactical speech patterns.  Like it or not, standard English is the language of the marketplace.  (See A Life on the RUN—Seeking and Safeguarding Social Justice, Harmonie Park Press, 2010, and the published writings of WSU professor Geneva Smitherman and the distinguished Nigeria-born linguist James Ogbu.) 

Further, your editorial itself was misguided in implying that the newly-elected and up-until-now disempowered DPS board is “bad.”  Like the current board, other various DPS boards have also been virtually without power, and this has been the case for eleven of the past thirteen years.  When the state took over DPS in 1999, the district had a $93 million surplus.  DPS test scores most certainly are now in need of vast improvement, but in 1999, the district was scoring near the state midpoint.  No other district at or below the midpoint was taken over, so why us?  PA 10 placed DPS in an ill-fated “reform” experiment that by 2006 had turned the surplus into a $250 million deficit.  Test scores plummeted.  The dropout rate escalated.  At that point, DPS was returned to local governance.  A newly-elected and thus inexperienced board inherited personnel and policies left to them by the agents of the state.  When that board couldn’t return the district to positive footing, the state once again intervened due to the deficit that the state itself had created.  

  Enter EM Robert Bobb, who sold off millions of dollars-worth of DPS assets and increased the deficit to $350 million via reckless spending and blatant cronyism (see white paper by Library Commissioner Russ Bellant).  Then came EM Roy Roberts, who as an agent of the state incidentally authorized and even boasted openly about financing the school board election, which the city clerk and the bureau of elections duly and legally conducted with absolutely zero interference from an attorney general who now wishes to challenge it for clearly partisan political motives.  Mr. Roberts has systematically dismantled DPS by jettisoning our students into charter schools and illegally handing over fifteen of our schools to the bogus state “Educational Achievement” Authority (EAA) which, in a clear conflict of interest, he simultaneously chairs, thus forcing us into court to seek judicial rectification and justice for Detroit’s schoolchildren. 

A sword to be used against turncoat liberals

Yes, O long-suffering readers, this old poet is about to inflict yet another poem upon you.   I penned this poem in the form of a brief ballade and sang it over the air on my little Sunday afternoon radio show on WEXL 1340 AM and on my Wednesday evening television show on Channel 33 Detroit Comcast 20.  The poem addresses public-school segregation--just one more of the many issues that the so-called “liberal class” which the liberal, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges accuses of becoming self-servingly chameleonic in his scathing indictment of faux or turncoat former liberals in his 2010 book Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, New York).  As you read it, imagine it in musical form:

De Lay of de “Liberals”:

A Deliberately Brief Ballade

Since ‘Fifty-four.

With sadly meager fuss,

Brown vs. Board

Was bumped beneath the bus.

To post-pone desegregation

Is cowardly procrastination—

Indeed, to delay until even next Saturday

Remains dirty, way low-down, immoral maggotry!

(I whimsically subtitled this poem “A Deliberately Brief Ballade” instead of “A Deliberately Brief Ballad” for no other reason than that the French ballade sounds fancier than ballad, and I made the ballad brief because the backtracking “liberals” have given the cause short shrift.)

The word maggotry in the last line is a neologism (Republicans, check your dictionary, if you have one.)  Also, for the information of any of you WASP affiliates of the GOP who may actually be trying to struggle through this poetry-laden epistle and are haltingly able to decipher and perhaps even appreciate some of its less nuanced verse, the first two words in the first line of the title have a double meaning: delay, as in procrastinate, and lay, which means an ancient ballad. 

And no, Republicans!—a lay isn’t the tumble in the hay that roving Democrat dogs customarily indulge in with your Elephantine wives.  In Medieval English, a lay is a narrative poem intended to be sung.  The word evolved from Old French and originated in the Latin. 

In addition, the entire first line in the title is couched in bitterly self-mocking and (what is now called) Ebonic dialect.  My use of the term self-mocking would evidently appear at first blush (given my genetic heritage) to be inaccurate, but even though I am a first-generation Scottish-American, I have always identified closely with African-Americans—particularly  in this specific cause—perhaps even more than some of them do with this democratically crucial cause any longer, themselves. 

Another double meaning in the poem can be found in the use of the word bus, which has implications for the noble but failed cross-district busing endeavors of the 1970s to achieve racial integration of the public schools.  This is one of the egalitarian causes that contemporary so-called “liberals” have sold out during their decades-long descent into economic collusion with corporate crocodiles.  In addition to turning its back on school integration, the so-called “liberal class”—even including some black leaders within it—has succumbed almost entirely to abject opportunism.                     

Much of the liberal class has failed to fight and indeed has joined forces with the corporate hijackers and plunderers of our public schools and the exploiters of our public schoolchildren—particularly in urban school districts.  It has cravenly and un-creatively and subordinately failed to defy and root out corporate criminality not only in our schools and colleges, but also in our municipalities, in our legislative and judicial bodies, and even in our churches.   

And, out of weakness and fear, it has betrayed and exiled from its ranks those few truly Creatively Insubordinate liberals like me who have remained defiant and in many instances have paid a heavy professional and personal price for that defiance.    (“We who put conscience above our careers / Are dying as a breed and are deep in arrears…”)

Finally, for the information of you numerous Repubs who may not be aware of this—or if you are, you disapproved of it: The “Brown vs. Board” line in the poem does indeed refer to a landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that racially separate but  ’equal’ public education is inherently unequal, immoral, un-Constitutional, un-democratic, illegal, and unjust.  In that large and wild public high school in Detroit where I returned to administrate and teach between 2003 and 2008, no one would have been able to discern from observing its student population that as an American public school it was required by Federal law to be racially integrated.  The students who attended the school were and still are 100% African-American, as are the students in most other schools in the city—as well as in hundreds of other urban enclaves all across America, which is indeed undemocratically susceptible to becoming again the “Land of the Fee and the Home of the Slave.”  Most of America’s public schools that house African-American students are overwhelmingly and illegally segregated, separate, and extremely unequal 58 years after the Brown vs. Board decision of 1954.    

Political correctness can conceal truth

 Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada)

Note: This post originally appeared as a column in the April 2012 edition of the Detroit Native Sun

 

By John Telford

    Black (and many white) reactionaries are still calling Nevada Senator Harry Reid a racist for simply stating a probable truth — that many of President Obama’s white (and some black) supporters were swayed to vote for him because he’s light-skinned and speaks "standard" idiomatic American English.　

     It’s known in southeastern Michigan that I’ve battled white racists throughout my career and called them what they are in print, in board halls, and over the air.　

     As I said regarding Rochester’s resident racists when I was the deputy superintendent there, and as I said again two decades later on television regarding Madison Heights’ racists when I was the superintendent there, "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, you can be pretty sure it’s a duck."　

     Sen. Reid is a liberal Democrat with a record of supporting African-Americans.　 A "duck" he definitely isn’t.　　

     This brings to mind the Dale Lick case of 1993. Dr. Lick was the Michigan State University governing board’s favored candidate　for the MSU presidency, until word got out that he had said blacks are innately superior in some aspects of athletics. When confronted with that with that statement during the interviews, he refused to recant. By all accounts, he was the best candidate.　　

     Many mainstream publications, including Runner’s World in a 1992 article, have stated the obvious in asserting that athletes of West African descent are generally faster sprinters than are athletes of purely European descent. Throughout the past half-century, Track & Field News’ annual listings of the world’s 100 top times in the dash races confirm that 95 percent of them were usually clocked by Caribbean or American blacks, who some anthropologists hypothesize are collectively stronger and faster due to innate muscular-skeletal traits, plus hybridization and slavery’s brutal "natural selection."  In the 1950s in national and international competition, nearly all of my toughest opponents at 100, 200, and 400 meters were African-Americans or Jamaicans.　　　　

     Dale Lick’s statistically supported statement cost him the MSU job, even though he had also made this relevantly redeeming remark, "Just because Blacks are superior in athletics doesn’t mean they’re inferior in something else."　

     When we insert the word "intellectually" in place of the words "in something else," we reach the crux of this issue.　 I taught black youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds who with what in those bygone days was a good Detroit Public School education became top academicians. They included Southeastern High alumnus john powell (uses no caps in his name), a former Harvard professor and national legal director of the ACLU. I encouraged them to be able to switch from dialect to the "standard" English spoken by leaders like Obama when the situation requires it.　

     Also, as Sen. Reid implied, favoring lighter-skinned blacks socially and politically remains a discriminatory practice of many Americans, both white and black.　 Reid simply told the truth.　 So did Dr. Lick.　

     "Political correctness" shouldn’t supersede plain truth or plain justice.　

　　　　　　

     Contact Dr. Telford at 313-460-8272 or drjohntelford@mi.rr.com. 

A word to the revolutionaries to come

Dear predominantly liberal and a few conservative friends,

As most of you know, I was an All-American and world-ranked sprinter in my checkered youth, and now in my mid-seventies more than half-a-century later, I am about to finish my metaphorical leg of a relay race in which I now pass the baton to you progressive, mostly younger, mostly liberal  "runners" who will run what may well be the societal anchor leg--the last leg for the remnants of us true liberal all-American activists.  I invite you to forward this post to sympathetic liberals and indeed even to conservatives of your acquaintance who care about the future of American-style democracy.

 Much of the American liberal class has essentially sold out to the corporations.  Now we must pray that President Barack Obama will grow some huge cojones and stand up to the cowardly Philistines in his own party that has an ass as its symbol, as well as to those in the pachydermous party of the Republicans who have briskly set about dismantling our democracy with their unwillingness to tax those among us who are the most fortunate--with the accent on "fortune."  You relatively few individuals whom I address in this post (plus some additional individuals whom I shall perhaps address in subsequent forwarded emails, as well as in additional communications) are progressive activists or potential activists who have the interest, brain power, and drive to reactivate and redirect the "liberal class."  As most of you know, it is as a member of this class that I have been a revolutionary anti-establishment, anti-institutional, counter-corporate member for all of my life.  (So were my freedom-loving Scotland-born father and grandfather before me--at considerable economic and indeed sometimes physical cost, I might add, to all three of us.)  

Many conservatives, numerous affiliates of the Tea Party, and others who are politically right-of-center either worship the power-elite uncritically (and thus self-sacrificially) or else are themselves clinging--albeit precariously--to the lower fringes of the power-elite.  What is less known but is becoming starkly and increasingly recognized (and regarding which I therefore feel I must emphasize now and sound a relevant clarion warning bell) is that the American LIBERAL class as we have known it is indeed selling out now as well to the mega-corporations that control the world's wealth and that loot, exploit, and oppress the common man, the downtrodden, children, women, and the aged, infirm, and impoverished in Detroit, in Michigan, across America, and indeed throughout our planet.  This makes me worry about the futures of my son Steve and my daughter Katherine, and the futures of my grandson RJ and my granddaughter Tori--as it should also make you worry about the futures of your children and grandchildren and indeed the future of our embattled country.  

Let me exemplify for you a (seemingly) relatively insignificant symptom/result of this (I will doubtless cite other symptoms in later emails), to wit:  

Frighteningly, the Republican Governor of Michigan has appointed an emergency manager for the imploding Detroit Public Schools and afforded him dictatorial powers to void legally-agreed-upon contracts and dissolve the union--thus simultaneously disenfranchising Detroit voters, including me.  This process could presently be duplicated in other school districts and municipalities--and ultimately perhaps even in some state governments throughout the nation.  I submit that this violates the United States Constitution and sets a perilous precedent that enables the encroachment of totalitarianism in the United States of America.    

Relatedly, the toadying corporatization of numerous members of the once intellectually independent and vigorously activist liberal class, among whom have historically numbered  academic, municipal, faith-based, trade-union, arts-based, financial, political and indeed Democratic leaders, has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from a print-based culture to an image-based culture, as Dr. Chris Hedges, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and I have both been asserting in recent years.  Hedges correctly observes that the decline of newspapers--along with that of book-publishing, coupled with the degradation of our educational system for all but the elite few--has created a culture in which verifiable fact, which is rooted in the complexity and discipline of print, no longer forms the basis of public discourse.  It has been supplanted by the blogosphere, the various arms of the Internet, cable TV, and corporation-dominated and domesticated "newspapers" which now have become virtual trade journals.  Print-based culture--in which fact and assertion can be traced and distinguished--has ceded to a culture of "emotionally-driven narratives" where facts and opinions are interchangeable.   

As Hedges observes, once reality is disconnected from print, it is no longer placed in context.  This has left dissidents like me (and some of you) speaking in a language that will often be unintelligible to the wider society and prevent us from being able to guard against threats to the well-being of ordinary Americans.