At last, someone is doing something to help the people of Flint.
300 union plumbers arrived from all over the state to install filters in the homes of Flint residents. They volunteered their weekend time to help.
“According to ABC12, not all the faucets in Flint can fit a filter, which each resident of the city desperately needs in order to get rid of lead in their drinking water. Some of the faucets are older and oddly shaped, making the installation of a filter nearly impossible.
“Local plumbers with United Association Local 370 in Flint have been going door-to-door making sure that faucets are filter ready since October, reports Michigan Radio. And last weekend, they got a boost from hundreds of union volunteers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
More proof that the American people are great. It is just the ruling people that make things really ugly. This story warmed my heart. Thank you and thank you plumbers and thank you unions
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Just like the teacher variety, another example of how unions are ruining this country.
Where’s Rick Snyder and Darnell Earley when you need them?
😏
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Damn those union members! You really have to wonder exactly WHY they are doing this. Undoubtedly it is to shore up public opinion of unions, because it can’t be an altruistic, decent act of kindness.
Not from union members.
(reprinted with permission from “SmartALEC”, a periodic newsletter from the American Legislative Exchange Council)
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Unions caring more about their fellow men than the oligarchs. Who’d a thunk it?
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With our disregard for the health and well being of our citizenry and our refusal to pay for infrastructure serving the common good, we are on a descent into “developing nation” status.
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More like a “declining nation” status. Developing sounds like a country on its way up. The U.S. is in a manufactured and manipulated retreat.
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This is amazing! Are they going to help out in the other Michigan communities, most of them intentionally hypersegregated, where children’s lead levels are actually higher than Flint’s?
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/01/27/many-michigan-cities-higher-lead-levels-flint/79438144/
I sure hope that they will, and that the Flint response isn’t motivated by politics.
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What are you doing to help Tim?
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I live 800+ miles away, and I don’t have a strict 9-5, weekends-off kind of a job (non-union). There are a lot of people in Michigan who need help after the decades of intentional neglect and marginalization that have occurred on the watch of both political parties. The outrage should not be limited to just Flint, or to the actions of the Snyder administration.
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Everyone is “motivated by politics” except for the noble and selfless ed reform “movement”.
They float above politics, because they’re just BETTER people than any member of any labor union.
The reason they’re in Flint, Tim, is because the Flint local organized it. They live there.
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In other words, Tim, you are criticizing the plumbers while making excuses why you can’t help.
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I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that based upon where the local is headquartered — in Flushing, MI, not in Flint proper — that not a lot of its members actually live in Flint.
It’s probably the same with Flint’s police, firefighters, teachers, and the civil servants at the state office building who raised holy hell when they learned they might be drinking tainted water and had bottled trucked in.
The collective amnesia is just startling: wait, decades of government sponsored white flight and the resulting segregation can lead to bad things? Uh, look over there, it’s a Koch brother!
Hopefully someone will pick up the ball for those other kids who are being poisoned but where there isn’t a clear connection to the governor.
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Tim, I don’t understand why you are so offended by the generosity of 300 plumbers who seek to help people in need.
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Speaking of dispassionate, haughty attitude. Like feathers of GOP Senates, Fox News, and their cheerleaders.
Your comment does neither provide meaningful perspective to support your position on private ed nor defend charter cheerleaders from political assault (framing man-made cause as ‘Fukushima’ syndrome). Too bad the more you dig in, the pitier you sound.
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Another predictable troll-spasm from Tim.
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Another missed opportunity from Michael Fiorillo to tell us what his plan is to devise meaningful, actionable solutions to reducing hypersegregation in traditional public schools. To scold us about trolling while he trolls himself.
I think we can conclude that Michael doesn’t really have any plans. Of course he is very concerned about the issue and pays it plenty of lip service, but he is content to run out the clock and rely on school assignment by street address to keep the warm bodies coming.
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Tim, in your view, the answer to hyper segregation is to open totally segregated charter schools. What Gary Orfield calls Apartheid schools. Or did you have another idea?
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Around and around we go: Orfield’s research does not show that NY charter-going students are drawn from better integrated schools. “The primary exceptions to increased student stratification [caused by choice] are in communities that are already so highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and income that further increases are virtually impossible.”
I have a lot of ideas about the steps that traditional public schools could take to desegregate. Chapter 31 of “Reign,” published nearly two and a half years ago, was an urgent call to action for districts to devise meaningful, actionable, wide-scale solutions. Perhaps it is time for a blog post to assess whether districts have responded, and I’d be happy to leave my thoughts there.
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Tim,
So many excuses! Not the best way to defend charters. Study the ALEC website for better ideas.
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Excuses?
Charter schools can be segregated without making the net state of school segregation any worse—again, see Iris Rotberg. You keep referring to Orfield’s report over and over and over again, but all it does is point out that many charters are segregated, not that they are drawing children away from better integrated schools (and inconveniently, it also identifies a handful of NYC charters that are intentionally and successfully integrated). NY charter schools are also required by law to make a good faith effort to have their enrollments mirror the characteristics of the district in which they are located. A segregated district is likely to host segregated charters.
Here is what we know, approaching the three-year anniversary of “Reign” and its chapter 31, which urgently called for traditional public school districts to devise meaningful, actionable strategies to address school segregation:
–in many places that experience extreme residential segregation, including the New York/New Jersey/Long Island metropolitan area, school segregation is actually even more extreme: http://insideschools.org/blog/item/1001049-report-schools-are-more-segregated-than-neighborhoods
–a body of scholarship and research has emerged to document that school segregation is not just a byproduct of residential segregation and “private market forces.” School segregation walks hand-in-hand with residential segregation and in some cases, including Flint, MI, it was the schools’ sorting and segregating kids that actually influenced residential patterns.
–integration is arguably the most powerful interventional available to at-risk kids: they have vastly better academic and non-academic outcomes (employment, crime, marriage, etc.) when they attend lower poverty integrated schools than they do at high-poverty non-integrated schools. Extra funding for isolated, segregated traditional public schools has comparatively little effect—one of the architects of the nation’s most successful and equalizing school funding lawsuits has admitted as much.
–while some districts and individual schools have taken steps to address segregation, it could be argued that they fail the “meaningful” test insofar as they are barely putting a dent in the problem. The number of black and Latino children who are isolated in high-poverty segregated schools is staggering.
So where are the meaningful, actionable solutions for America’s traditional public schools? If the solutions aren’t going to come from the districts themselves or from advocates of traditional public schools, then from where should they come? If districts and advocates of traditional public schools need more time to devise and implement solutions, exactly how long do they expect it to take?
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Tim,
You are stubborn. You are like a Bosox fan in the Yankees’ dugout. You will never convince me that the privatization of public education is in the best interest of children or of education or of American society. If you want to keep blowing the horn for charters, go right ahead. You pick a strange place to do it. You convince no one.
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“troll-spasm”
Great term.
Totally accurate.
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Wow, talk about turning non sequiturs and red herrings into a (bad) art form: Tim jumps from dissing acts of generosity by unionized (God Forbid!) plumbers, to demanding solutions to structural racism (conveniently ignored by him when practiced in other realms by those more ideologically-attuned to him) from a lowly public school teacher.
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This is great news!
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Do you suppose they can get a Gates grant?
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Boy, the noble, self-sacrificing members of the ed reform movement are sure handing out a lot of campaign cash:
“In all, labor groups and their key allies on education issues spent $8.3 million on political activity in 2015. Charter schools and their influential lobbying arms spent a little over $9 million, and tax credit advocates, $5.7 million, according to the lobbying and campaign finance reports.
For the second consecutive year, reform groups, including charter and tax credit advocates, outspent unions on lobbying, contradicting the argument often made by reform groups that unions dominate state education policy by pouring money into their lobbying efforts.”
I guess campaign cash is only icky and dirty when it comes from labor union members.
This campaign cash is pure and unsullied because it was filtered thru billionaires. Higher quality!
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2016/02/8590363/charter-tax-credit-groups-again-outspend-teachers-unions-lobbying
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Your comments are amazing and well documented. Tim should go silent if he cares about facts.
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This article published late last summer in the American Journal of Education is simply a fascinating must-read. It’s a detailed historical look at the causal effect Flint’s schools had on segregation, paving the way for white flight and the hollowed-out, distressed city it left behind. Contrary to what the whitewashers would have you believe, this occurred when Flint’s economy was booming, long before the plant closings and job losses.
Click to access Highsmith&Erickson_AJE_2015.pdf
Flint was particularly innovative when it came to “temporary schoolhouses.” As frequently as the school board tweaked and gerrymandered zone lines, often times they didn’t do it quickly or precisely enough, and they’d end up with an unacceptable number of black kids (i.e., more than one or two) living in the zone of an all-white school, or vice-versa. The solution was to build what they called “primary units.” The school board would buy a residential lot in the affected neighborhood and build a “school” that was indistinguishable from a typical single-family house. The kids of the wrong color would attend that school rather than the regular school they were zoned for, and when the need passed the school board would sell the “primary unit” as a home. Flint built 116 (!) of these primary units all told, most of them after the Brown decision.
It’s great that the plumbers are doing something to help. If the voters of Michigan decide to recall Snyder, that would also be great. If it turns out that Snyder committed a criminal act, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But what happened in Flint was decades in the making, and it is vital that the history is reckoned with rather than brushed aside. More Flints will occur as long as society is willing to accept and make excuses for warehousing poor people of color in isolated and segregated urban areas.
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And the takeaway?
Give public education over to private operators.
yeah, that’s the ticket.
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Tim,
A lot of talk about segregation as one of the culprits in this water crisis is bandied about here. The segregation process is decades old and is happening in all major cities across the country. This professor in this video clearly shows the decades old trend of segregation everywhere. This is the most scholarly treatise on segregation I have seen. This lecture series(conducted by University of Michigan, Flint campus, eight in total), two have been completed and the rest will be on a weekly basis. The people in Flint can attend these lectures, but for the rest of us the university videotapes and makes it available a week later on youtube.
This video on youtube is a must see if one wants to learn about segregation and the water crisis. Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulowd6DgS-k
Meanwhile,
1. There is an ongoing congressional hearing,
2. Attorney General of Michigan is performing his own investigation,
3. And the FBI is conducting a separate investigation,
4. Some of the EPA employees have resigned,
5. The Emergency Manager has moved on,
6. The Governor and the Emergency Manager have yet to testify under oath before the congressional investigation committee.
The main actors in this crisis (not in any particular order) are:
1. The EPA,
2. The Department of Environmental Quality of the State of Michigan,
3. Flint City Water Department,
4. Emergency Financial Manager appointed by the Governor,
5. The engineering firm that advised the Emergency Financial Manager before the switch of the water source.
It will take a long time before we hear the end of this sad story. But democracy in action, such as recall of the governor effort and investigations by various agencies and the outpouring of support by the rest of the people in this country is going on.
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Thanks for the link to the video, Raj–it’s super-informative, with obvious connections to education as well. Regionalism and consolidation are a way forward.
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Give the Plumbers some!
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