'Blowing up the system' -- Roberts confesses

Roy Roberts was told to "blow up and dismantle" Detroit's school system 

When Michigan'sTea Party Gov. Rick Snyder brought in Roy Roberts in May, 2011, to replace the Robert Bobb/ Barbara Byrd-Bennett school management team in Detroit, he was told to, “blow up the district and dismantle it.” At least that's what the Detroit Free Press reported in an article that has since been revised and no longer includes such comments.

Roberts, a former GM exec, who was managing director of the Chicago-based private equity investment firm Reliant Equity Investors,.began his smash-and-grab assault on the schools by throwing out the collective-bargaining agreement and imposing top-down authority, using the power given him by SB4. He announced this week, that he is leaving the district.

Roberts' statement brings to mind the opening line in A Nation at Risk, written 30 years ago as the seminal document of the modern corporate school reform movement:

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” the report said. “

I would paraphrase it this way: If a terrorist group threatened to "blow up and dismantle" our public education system, we would most definitely consider it an act of war. Roberts' now-deleted unsolicited confession shows corporate reform has declared war on public education. .