One could believe it is David vs. Goliath when thinking about a mere mortal by the name of Brandon Jessup taking on Governor Snyder and democracy at its very core. Yet Mr. Jessup and his grassroots effort “Stand Up for Democracy” have done just that, and 161,305 signatures later the “emergency manager” law—a dictatorship in the year 2011—will soon go dormant awaiting the voters  ballot in November 2012.  

 Brandon Jessup has proven to all Michiganders that “We the People” can stand up for what is right.  We can challenge a Governor and Legislature that would have the audacity to take away our right to hold elected officials accountable in favor of dictatorial unelected rule in cities across our State. 

 Now it will be up to voters in November 2012 to reject and repeal a law that would ultimately destroy Michigan as we know it and replace it with potential tyranny and stifling autocratic rule. 

Detroit cannot be resurrected from 44 years of neglect by appointing an emergency manager. If no elected mayor or governor in more than four decades has understood that Michigan is not viable without a rebirthing of Detroit , what makes us think that a non-elected-governor appointed minion would be this city’s savior?  

America and Michigan are woven in a fabric of democracy.  Stand Up for Democracy is definitely a step in the right direction. Brandon Jessup should now channel his efforts along with the populace behind the 161,305 signatures and drive a November 2012 ballot initiative to rid Michigan of the 1992 term limit fiasco.  For we must restore Michigan voters’ rights to vote for legislators that will be in office long enough to return both Michigan and Detroit to viability.  

Term limits have held Michigan ‘s growth hostage to short-lived and short-sighted legislators. You don’t rid our State of ineffective legislators through restrictive term limits that would also remove legislators who are doing their jobs and representing their constituents. Repealing the emergency manager law is vital but without driving a ballot initiative to amend our Constitution and rid our State of the term limit albatross, is simply a tourniquet on a gushing main artery. 

Marcie Lipsitt

Detroit Free Press

Letter to the editor-

Delta is not only taking advantage of business travelers to Europe and Asia.  Delta’s hub premium applies to domestic flights, as well.  Where Detroit is the hub and no other carrier –let alone low cost–flies non stop to a city in the U.S. fliers for any reason will feel the pain.

I fly my child from Detroit to Boston every month and have for the past twelve years.  First Northwest and now Delta, remain the only airline carrier to fly non-stop to Boston.  We have always paid a higher fare due to the one-stop flying shop, but how does Delta explain the dramatic increase in fares since acquiring Northwest? They don’t have to.

Try calling Delta Corporate in Atlanta and getting a real person, director or decision-maker to answer the phone or accept a call. You won’t.  All calls to Delta corporate are rerouted to their reservation number. Trust me. I am tenacious as a pit bull and have tried.

Delta reflects the worst of what cold-hearted Corporate America has become over the past twenty five years.

There is no “mystery” to Delta airfares.  Whoever these corporate bean-counters are, perched high in their phone-less tower in Atlanta, they are coldly and calculatingly creating airfares based upon the power of having Detroit as a hub and knowing exactly which cities, states and countries have little to zero competition.

I could pay virtually 1/3 to 1/2 the cost in airfare flying my child for medical to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver and every other city where carriers compete for travelers.  I pay for an extra day in a hotel because the airfare savings Delta offers with a Saturday night stay is less than flying on a Sunday.

I would say shame on Delta for taking advantage of Michiganders held hostage be an airline carrier in a hub city but clearly no one is listening.

Marcie Lipsitt

Letter to the Editor, published January 25, 2011:

To the Editor:

The Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa gift President Barack Obama signed into law on Dec. 22, 2010, that will allow states to classify teaching interns (students earning teaching certificates and endorsements) as “highly qualified” was a giant lump of educational coal to our nation’s minority, low-income, and English-language-learner students, and students with disabilities (“New Law Labels Interns ‘Highly Qualified Teachers,’” Jan. 5, 2011).

The provisions on “highly qualified” teachers in the No Child Left Behind Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act have been nothing more than an egregious education Ponzi scheme since they were signed into law by President George W. Bush. The U. S. Department of Education has never enforced the highly-qualified-teacher provision. Teacher-interns and even long-term substitutes have continued to staff general education and special education classrooms, not only in low-income schools, but also in some of our nation’s wealthiest, in the case of special education.

Students are losing their educational lives due to their teachers’ poor training and incompetence in the classroom. We let students attending teacher-preparation programs staff virtually any class in school districts across America with counterfeit documents referred to as waivers, permits, and approvals. Do we let medical students perform open-heart surgery or prescribe medication? Clearly the answer is no. So why do we let students in teacher-preparation programs pretend to be teachers and practice on students?

Finally, there was hope across the United States for low-income and minority students, and those with disabilities, with the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that California had illegally classified thousands of teachers in training as highly qualified. Congress and President Obama have quietly killed a federal court ruling that would have been the impetus for states to redefine decades-old teacher-preparation programs and train America’s teaching workforce to provide a globally enviable education to all of our children in pre-K through 12th grade.

Marcie Lipsitt
Franklin, Mich.
Vol. 30, Issue 18, Page 24

Why is an “outsider” considered to be the Messiah for a State in the crisis of its Statehood?  Snyder would go to Lansing without a base of support and a virtual legislative illiterate, and that’s supposed to be good for Michigan?  He runs as “One Tough Nerd.”  Dr. Seuss first printed a modern use of the word “nerd” in his 1950 story, “If I Ran the Zoo,” talking about creatures and animals.  Newsweek then used “nerd” in an article referring to Detroit’s description of people considered to be “square.”   Merriam Webster dictionary defines a nerd as, “an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person.”  The Dictionary.com; “a stupid, irritating, ineffectual….”   Again, why do we want a Nerd to be our State’s next governor?  Brian Calley as a Lieutenant Governor is certainly no Dr. Seuss.  And while Rick Snyder “pretends” to be a candidate without a party affiliation; his choice of Brian Calley as his running mate speaks volumes to his pandering to the far right wing of the Republican Party.  Can you spell “disingenuous?” 

Synonyms for the word nerd include, “bookworm, dink, dork, geek, grind, weenie or wonk.  This is the portrait of a person we want to elect governor?  Rick says that Michigan is “broken.”  What, we think he is capable of putting Humpty-Michigan-Dumpty back together again?  I will agree with those who say that Democrat Virg Bernero would be nothing short of a puppet with strings pulled by the unions.  Still, Mr. Bernero’s positions on women’s rights, protecting our Great Lakes and rebuilding public education are akin to those espoused by a large majority of this State’s populace, Mr. Snyder’s are not.     

Personally, I am sick and tired of voting for what we refer to as the “lesser of evils” and that is what newspaper editorial boards are telling us to do.  Mr. Snyder wouldn’t get my vote if Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel rose from the dead to become his running mate.  I don’t want a nerd to be my next Governor.  I love Michigan and I’m tired of voting to make it erode further, and into a State of no return.   Fewer than twenty-percent of Michigan voters took the time to vote in the August primary and what did that get us?  We were left with the two worst gubernatorial candidates, perhaps in the history of our State.  Michigan is the most broken State in America.  On November 2^nd don’t make Michigan worse at 8:02 PM, than it was at 7:59 PM, by voting for a governor who will send Michigan down a path toward further destruction.  Think of your children or Michigan’s children when you vote.  Ask yourself which gubernatorial candidate can begin to return Michigan to a place that can offer its citizens a piece of the American Dream.  If you can’t answer that question then don’t vote for a governor.  Vote in all other races but don’t vote to make Michigan worse.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan referred to Detroit Public Schools as “Ground Zero” and the Michigan Department of Education still gave them a “meets requirements” for special education as recently as June 2009 in a memo from Dr. Jacqueline Thompson the recently retired State Director of the Office of Special Education.

 Parents are now supposed to believe Dr. Eleanor White the State’s newly installed Director when she says, “It is completely unacceptable for students not to receive the services they’re supposed to… These children have a constitutional right to a good education. It’s an entitlement. We take that very seriously.” (Detroit News 10-21-10)

The Michigan Department of Education under the leadership of Governor Granholm and Superintendent Michael Flanagan have done anything but take the education of our state’s 237,000 K-12 students with disabilities seriously.  It is not only Detroit that continues to fail in its obligation to provide a free appropriate public education to the students with special needs.  Why is the MDE ignoring Highland Park, Hamtramck, River Rouge, Ferndale, Inkster, Pontiac, Saginaw, Flint, Lincoln Park, Southfield, Ferndale and Oak Park?  And yes there are many more.  Detroit children with disabilities are not the only students being denied their civil right to a public education that prepares them for post secondary education and the global workforce.  More than 28% of Michigan students with a disability drop out of school after entering the 9^th grade. The achievement gaps are better than 50% points by the time these students reach the 8^th grade. 

Detroit children with and without disabilities grab the daily, weekly and monthly headlines due to more than 40 years of educational neglect and abuse, but they are far from the only K-12 students suffering in school districts, public academies and charters across a state that has not cared about a crumbling and archaic public education system in almost 50 years.   Our children with special needs are egregiously underserved…so why is only Detroit losing federal funds? How can the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education give the State of Michigan a “meets requirements” when Detroit has been found so out of compliance that $5 million in federal funds have been withheld.  When you have an answer will you please explain this to our 237,000 K-12 students who go to school and wonder when the day will arrive that their education and future will matter? 

- Marcie Lipsitt

The U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) requires state educational agencies to establish the criteria to be followed to determine the existence of a SLD and publicize the information on or before September 1, 2010.  The MDE’s “criteria” has extrapolated convoluted verbiage from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA 2004”).  Their “suggested parameters for establishing an academic skill deficit” includes; the child’s inability to achieve adequately or make sufficient progress to meet age or State-approved grade-level standards. The child can exhibit a pattern of strengths and weaknesses in performance, and or achievement, relative to age, and State-approved standards.

BUT, the only glaring guidance this document provides is that a child must be at or below the 9^th percentile on a norm-referenced achievement test, or on those 6 pesky data points on a CBM.  Requiring a student to be at or below the 9^th percentile is the bottom of low achievement.  This requirement is nowhere to be found in IDEA 2004 or in guidance from the USDOE, Office of Special Education Programs and Services. 

Michigan has 236,000 K-12 students identified with a disability and 35% identified with a SLD.

Presently, the 82,000 students identified with a SLD have been found eligible primarily through a decades-old “discrepancy model.”  A child is not achieving commensurate with his/her IQ.   Criticism of this model remains that many students are left in education limbo until old enough (typically 4^th grade) and well below grade level in academics.  Still, at least this educational safety net exists.  

Does the MDE think there is a difference between a discrepancy model and waiting for children to fall to the 9^th percentile; rock bottom of low achievement?  “Identification of LDs based solely on low achievement essentially equates LDs with low achievement….The LD construct is to identify a unique group of low achievers whose underachievement is unexpected…” (Learning Disabilities from Identification to Intervention; Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, Barnes, 2007)

IDEA 2004 defines a specific learning disability “as a disorder of one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken, or written, that may manifest itself in the imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, or to do mathematical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and development aphasia.”

The National Center for Learning Disabilities along with 50 years of published research defines learning disabilities as neurologically based life-long disorders that require early identification and intervention.  The Bad News for students with a SLD is that 24% of them drop out of high school versus 9.4% of students in the general population. (USDOE, NCES, 2005)

Research and current data (MEAP, NAEP, and MME-ACT) tells us that Michigan students with a SLD are not reaching their potential.  Less than highly qualified special education teachers; along with diluted implementation of research based methodologies, assistive technology and virtually no Universal Design for Learning leave these students in an educational lurch. Fewer than 25% are passing the MME-ACT in their 11^th grade school year.  The MDE’s answer is to give cash-strapped districts the impetus not to identify them at all.  Instead, let them fall through the educational cracks; into the dropout and correctional system abyss. 

MDE’s “criteria” for identifying students with SLD is their latest assault on an underperforming, underfunded cesspool of special education rules, guidance and policy.  Devastatingly, while a large majority of students with a SLD are not prepared to enter post-secondary education or the global work force…they know how to spell UNEMPLOYABLE and UNEMPLOYED.   If you have a child at risk or identified with a SLD, use your voice and pen.   Demand more from Michigan and the MDE, or put your child on a bus, train or plane, and send him/her to a state that prides itself on educating ALL of its students.

This simply is not true. It is not only children with autism who are in need of intensive speech and language services, behavioral interventions, social skills training and sensory integration therapy. So, why should health care insurance cover these services only for the child with autism and not the child with another disorder or illness?

Read more HERE

This is a President who made it clear that he views disability to equate inability. From my perspective this was a wonderful moment because it taught me and countless others, early into the Obama Presidency and these first “100 Days” that Barack Obama has a steep learning curve. Disability advocates/activists have our work cut out, if we are to see this President include our children and adults with disabilities in his vision of an America in crisis and America reborn.

Read more HERE