Detroit Sees Flurry Of Mid-Year Departures From Teachers

Gee, here's a shock - Detroit's got a teacher recruitment/retention problem:

Three months into the school year, Detroit Public Schools is facing a teacher shortage and also seeing what union officials say seems like an unprecedented number of midyear retirements and resignations.

In early November, there were at least 170 teaching vacancies. DPS spokesman Michelle Zdrodowski said Wednesday that the number has been reduced to 135 by reorganizing some teaching assignments based on enrollment numbers from the fall student count day.

The shortage has pushed other academic staff, such as instructional specialists and school service assistants, into teaching roles. About 115 substitutes have been assigned to fill empty spots.

The problem isn't new. In late September 2014, there were more than 100 vacancies.

The problem is expected to get worse because of some vaunted new education reforminess coming down the pike:

Teachers are facing an expected spike in health care costs and heightened uncertainty about the future of the district itself. Gov. Rick Snyder has proposed sweeping education reforms for Detroit that could potentially take effect in 2016.

Those factors — plus stagnant pay — have pushed some teachers who were on the fence about retiring to finally take the plunge, said Patrick Falcusan, financial analyst and retirement counselor for the Detroit Federation of Teachers union.

"Virtually every day, somebody calls me and wants to quit or retire," he said. "A number of teachers aren't coming back after Christmas.

"What is driving this is the concern (about education reforms) and whether the new school district is going to be part of the retirement system. Some people just want to get out while there's still a DPS, while there's still an HR department, while there's still a payroll department to process stuff."

Starting salary as a DPS teacher is $36,683.

Teachers haven't gotten a salary step increase since 2011-2012.

And soon they'll be paying more for their health care and perhaps losing their pension benefits.

I can't imagine why teachers would be leaving, retiring, resigning, etc.

Bloomberg: Send All Illegal Immigrants To Detroit

The neo-liberal plan for Detroit and other financially-strapped cities is becoming clear.

With Detroit in financial straits, a corporate manager has been put in charge of the school system to close down half the public schools in the city and replace them with for-profit charters, tear up the union contracts with teachers, fire every teacher in the city (and only hire back the ones willing to take steep pay cuts) and raise class sizes to 60 in traditional public schools, but not charters.

Gee, that sounds like a fantastic plan guaranteed to, well, guaranteed to make money for the corporate education reform movement that will run the charters.

But it certainly doesn't sound like it's going to improve the Detroit schools system, improve the lives of the children there or help bring population back to a city that has lost a quarter of it in the last ten years.

In fact, it sounds like the people who haven't fled Detroit already may decide they can do better than this and run screaming from the city.

Perhaps that will happen, but neo-liberal dictator of NYC Michael Bloomberg has a solution:

Mayor Bloomberg has a fix for the nation's immigration debate: Send 'em to Detroit.

"If I were the federal government," Bloomberg told David Gregory on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday morning. "Assuming you could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five or ten years."

Detroit has suffered a devastating population loss in recent decades, losing 25% of its citizens since the last census.

Meanwhile, immigrants are clamoring to enter the United States.

Bloomberg says he can fix both at once.

The immigrants would arrive in Detroit, "start businesses, take jobs whatever," Bloomberg said. "You would populate Detroit over night because half the world wants to come here ... You can use something like immigration policy - at no cost to the federal government - to fix a lot of the problems that we have."

Wow - now all these corporate takeovers of bankrupt municipalities in states like Michigan really comes into focus - the corporate overlords who own the country plan on using them as dumping grounds for cheap labor - the illegal immigrant kind.

Hey, that's one way to bring back factories and manufacturing to Detroit and STILL keep labor and production costs dirt cheap for multi-national corporations like Apple and Microsoft who usually prefer places like Sri Lanka and China to pursue their slave labor needs.

Add hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to Detroit, bring back the 12 hour/7 day work week and start manufacturing again.

Wow - what a fantastically evil plan.

No wonder Bloomberg is articulating it.

But you know, I say why not dispense with the whole "freedom" thing entirely and just call the illegal immigrants Bloomberg wants to use for cheap labor in bankrupt cities like Detroit the correct term for what they'll be - "slaves."

And why not change the "democracy" moniker we still anachronistically use to describe the United States to "feudal system instead?

That's where we've been heading anyway, and now Bloomberg has revealed the next step in the feudalization process.

How ironic will it be when American jobs start getting outsourced to American cities that contain special "illegal immigrant" entrepreneurial zones where illegal immigrants, afraid of deportation, will work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, churning out ipads, xboxes and whatever other corporate crap our overlords decide to manufacture there?

CROSS-POSTED AT THE DAILY KOS