Is school accountability too much to ask for?
By Edgar Gomez
I attended Detroit Public Schools my whole childhood. I always assumed that school was school. I never understood that my school was not receiving the same resources as other schools outside the city. We didn’t have little things that you would assume that a school would have for all students — anything from paper to pencils to updated textbooks. In high school, around 2007, I was on the robotics team at my school and we visited a suburban school. It was a shock. I thought why is this school so clean and brand-new? Why is my school so different?
During my junior year, my high school announced that it would close. The district was in debt and its way of relieving the debt was to close schools down. It caused so much confusion for students and families. I realized that it wasn’t just happening to me and my school but to thousands of students across the whole city. I was very upset with the district so I decided to try out a charter school that was the closest to my home. It was in a beautiful building, compared to Detroit public schools that are a hundred years old. When you see a nice building, you automatically assume it must be a good school because it’s brand-new. But I slowly started to notice the similarities to my old school, such as outdated resources. Some of the teachers weren’t even certified to teach.
After high school, I got involved in organizing for educational justice. It just doesn’t make any sense to close schools and send students to other schools that lack resources and expect them to do better next year. It’s understandable why parents would want to send their kids to charter schools because of all the damage that’s been done in public schools — parents don’t have trust in the district anymore. I’m not against charter schools, and I don’t think they’re the enemy. I just think there should be accountability, and that’s what we’re fighting for. I was hoping, along with many Detroiters, for a system where the community has a say-so in where schools should be opened. Unfortunately, you don’t see that accountability because the Great Lakes Education Project, which is funded by the DeVos family, was strongly against it.
It feels like they’re trying to charterize all schools in Detroit and make it a replica of New Orleans. The charter schools are run like businesses. You see fliers, posters, lawn signs — they’re everywhere trying to recruit students to new charter schools. They’ll say, “Register your kid and be entered in a drawing for a new television.” People are focusing on the buildings, but they’re not focusing on the education, and that’s a big problem. What I support is quality education for all students — I don’t care if it’s coming from public schools or charter schools as long as students are being served with an education they deserve. Is that too much to ask for?
Last year, I participated in phone banking to support school accountability. People who didn’t live in Detroit didn’t seem to care what was happening here. But now that Betsy DeVos is the education secretary, unfortunately it’s going to happen everywhere. All they have to do is look at our schools. The rest of the country needs to realize that if this damage happened in Michigan, it’s going to happen where you live. But the fight’s not over, and I’m ready to work.
Edgar Gomez is a graduate of Detroit public schools who now works as an organizer for the Detroit Hispanic Development Corp and the Urban Neighborhood Initiatives through a Detroit education nonprofit, 482Forward.
