Mary Anne Hering interviewed by WWMT

Mary Anne Hering, Working Class Party candidate for Michigan State Board of Education, was interviewed by WWMT News. Her responses were posted to WWMT.com and are reproduced below.

Occupation: Community college teacher since 1973

Hometown: Born in St. Paul, Minnesota; has lived in Detroit and Dearborn since 1975

Years in elected office: None

Political experience: Politically active, in the working class, since 1975. This activity has not been on an electoral level, but on being in the service of workers trying to organize, on a day-to-day basis, in their workplaces, for their rights. Starting in 2014, I ran for the Dearborn School Board, and obtained 20 percent of the vote. In 2016, after several dozen of us collected 50,000 signatures to obtain ballot status, we got a third party on the ballot: the Working Class Party. Despite being a new party, we won almost a quarter of a million votes. And we did it without money from wealthy people who run this society and with little attention paid by the big media.

Qualifications: We wanted to put up more candidates to reach out to a larger part of the ordinary working population so they have a way to express their concerns politically, in unity: black and white, old and young, women and men, immigrant and native-born. I am one of 11 candidates with the Working Class Party this year. We say that we can’t change the situation with an election, by itself. It will take a fight, a social response, from the laboring population. But we can use this election to make the voices of working people heard.

Top issues:

• Educational voice: Who knows better the problems of the schools than those who teach in them and those who have to struggle to learn in them? So as a long time teacher, along with my running mate, Logan R. Smith, this year’s graduate from Cass Tech High School in Detroit, we can give voice to those problems.
• Serve ordinary people: To tell the truth. To take no personal privilege. To organize the forces necessary to address the problems that ordinary people face.
• Resources: Politics as usual has meant decades of commissioning expensive studies to prove what children need in order to learn. We know what that is: It’s resources; it’s money. The highest scores are in the wealthy neighborhoods that receive the highest per pupil foundation allowance, not to mention all the other resources that exist in those communities to foster children’s cognitive, physical and cultural growth. We need resources, and lots of them. The money is there. Our top issue would be to organize parents, teachers, students, other school employees, to fight for their right to have decent pay, decent schools and all the resources necessary for children of the working class to have a quality education. And that means a fight to take back the money we pay in taxes, from corporations, real-estate speculators, and for-profit charter school businessmen, that could be used for all the public services we need and the excellent schools all children need.