FORUM
City /County School System Lemon
There is something wrong with the
city/county school system. It's putting out
lemons and I. the problem is not just with the
administration and teachers. The problems
faced by the school system includes the prob
lems of our communities. I could continue to
pose questions about the problems, but that
would not serve any real purpose. We have
enough people asking questions and it is a fact
that, if you are not a part of the solution, then
you are a part of the problem.
Most of us are good at our jobs as adminis
trators, teachers and parents. But as living emo
tional adults, we are using the children of
schools as pawns in a chess game of life, a
game that our children are much too young to
understand.
Our children are our future and, it's our
goal to obtain a future with a strong educational
base and cultured harmony, then perhaps this is
a chess game of life we don't need to teach our
children. What is the game? Oh it's a racial
concern, and racial issue deal with emotions
and, emotions prob
tools they need to become educated, indepen
dent thinking adults. When an automobile goes
through the assembly line and someone fails to
properly install a pan, the company produces a
car that will give someone trouble. The school
system is no different. A child that does not
receive all the tools he or she needs to function
in life is going to give someone trouble. The
auto industry made provision for identifying
their faults before they impact the community.
Perhaps that's a pan of the process we need to
take a closer look at. When we buy an automo
bile that has slipped through the system and.
it's giving us trouble, we don't blame the car,
nor do we blame one or two persons of the
manufacturing company. No, we blame the
company, which includes everyone that stands
behind the name. But when a child is failing in
the school system, we think differently. The
parents blame the school and the teachers
blames parents. If we are to be a company
devoted to the education of our children, them
we are all the blame.
iems are very com
plicated- even for
adults.
Education is a
business and maybe
it would help if
everyone treated it
as such. The school ?
system, parents and
the communities should work together as one
business company. An effective business per
son deals in making sound logical decisions
that will be profitable for the company, its
shareholders, employees and the community. Is
there any reason why the school system should
be different from any other business? The good
and the bad activities of a business will have an
affect on its community.
I guess Henry Ford had a brighter idea
than he realized. Henry Ford developed a sys
tem for taking a basic frame and assembling
parts_ on it to_produce an automobiie^Tht
school system takes children and teach then the
GUEST COLUMNIST
BY ART BOONE
1 guess the fact that everyone in the auto
industry gets blamed as a company, they have
an incentive to take on the responsibility of
amelioration of their product. There goal is to
send out a good product no matter what color it
is, because a bad product of any color is a neg
ative reflection of the company.
A lemon sitting on the side of the road is
an eye-sore to any community and a lemon is a
lemon, whether it's a white car or black car, or
a white child or black child.
(Art Boone , a resident of Winston-Salem,
is maintenance supervisor at RJ Reynolds.)
Why Dinkins Lost: Part 2
' Black people never confused David Dink
in# with Harold Wakhth?t6h. The crusading
mayor of Chicago during the 1980s, Washing
ton symbolized an unyielding commitment to
the empowerment of African-Americans and
the poor. Dinkins as mayor was neither deci
sive nor conflict. He favored backroom negoti
ations over street protests.
But African-American voters haye never
had the luxury of a short attention span. We
collectively remember the murder of Yusuf
Hawkins by a white mob in Bensonhurst, only
a few years ago, a chilling reminder of racist
vigilantism from the Deep South a generation
ago. We remember the killing of Michael Grif
fith. as he fled before an angry white mob in
Howard Beach. And we know that in the recent
mayoral election that Howard Beach's Assem
bly District N. 23 voted overwhelmingly for
Rudy Giuliani over Dinkins ? 29.000 to 5,500
votes. Or that Brooklyn's Bensonhurst Assem
bly District favored
Giuliani over Dink
ins by a ten-to-one
margin.
in order to posture as a "Law-and-Order"
Democrat, he was forced into disastrous policy
choices, such as the freeze in the hiring of child
caseworker, or the cutting of the education
budget by $94 million. Municipal unions,
which had been his staunchest allies four years
earlier, became extremely alienated because of
Dinkins" budget cuts.
Even more importantly, Dinkins never
really launched a campaign of political educa
tion and mobilization within his core con
stituency ? union members, African-Ameri
cans and most Latinos, and low income
people ? to explain the reasons for the city's
economic and social crisis. He never inspired
them to fight back, or articulated a viable alter
native for a multicultural agenda of urban
empowerment. One measure of this failure is
the fact that there are one half million unregis
tered black voters in New York City ? and
that if only one-ninth of that group had been
voters, that Dinkins would still be mayor.
We remember
the vicious slaying
of Eleanor Bumpurs,
the 66 year old
ALONG THE COLOR LINE
By DR. MANNING MARABLE
grandmother, by
police during an
argument over her
eviction. And we also vividly remember the
thousands of daily grievance, large and small,
that virtually every black person experience in
this city ? from empty taxi cabs speeding past
our outstretched arms, to the banks which
unfairly reject our loan applications.
This was the racial context in which David
Dinkins broke the color barrier in the mayoral
race four year ago. African -Americans realized
that David Dinkins was not perfect. As an
administrator, he was mediocre at best. He
seemed often out-of-touch with the practical
details of the city's massive bureaucracy. But
the mayor pulled the plug on irresponsible
racial rhetoric, for which former mayor Ed
Kock had become notorious. He genuinely
sought to reach out to Jews and other white
voters. In the Crown Heights controversy, he
committed errors of judgment. But on balance,
Dinkins gave the city back its self-respect.
However, in Dinkins' effort to appease
white upscale voters and downtown corporate
interests, he lost touch with his own core con
stituency by moving toward the center. He
refused to launch an ambitious redistribution of
the city's resources toward working class and
poor neighborhoods. Because he was criticized
as being "soft" on crime, he supervised the hir
ing of 3,800 new police during his tenure. But
The mayoral victories of Giuliani in New
York and conservative businessman Richard
Riordan in Los Angeles earlier this year sym
bolize a racial and class backlash against non
whites and the working poor in urban Ameri
can. In the wake of the Los Angeles racial
uprising of 1992, white middle America is
searching for order and stability. But in reality,
Giuliani will fail to create social peace in New
York, no matter how many police officers he
hires or how tough his rhetoric may be.
Because behind the racial conflict in New York
exists an even more threatening division ? the
massive gap between the interests of the rich
and poor. In both New York and Los Angeles,
according to a recent study in the Los Angeles
Times, the top twenty percent of society in
both cities has at least 18 times the wealth of
the bottom 20 percent of the population. Tens
of thousands of additional low-income families
will soon become devastated by Giuliani's
Reagan-style commitment to the privatisation
of city service. The inevitable result will be
more racial confrontations, crime and
social unrest.
( Manning Marble is professor of history
and political science and director of the
African' American Studies institute at
Columbia University in Sew York City.)
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A Hard Christmas
Several weeks before Christmas, a homeless Washington,
D.C., woman died overnight at a bus stop, huddled under blan
kets and surrounded by shopping bags that contained all her
worldly possessions.
That's not usually deemed worthy news; it happens so
often that the media often ignore it.
But this time, the death of a lone, homeless
woman was noticed because she died directly across
The same holds for the job situation. We as a societyseem^
willing to pay the huge social and economic costs associated
with high levels of unemployment, but we refuse to make the
investments necessary to create new jobs.
And when we do spend massive amounts on human
resources, such as on education, we don't target those expendi
the street from the headquarters of the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, the Cabinet
Department which has identified the problem of
homelessness as a major concern.
When the body was discovered, news accounts
said there were 16 official vehicles at the scene ? an
ambulance, police cars, even a fire truck.
A HUD employee, observing this, was reported
to have said: "It's just strange to see how many
resources a person gets after they die ? not a fraction
of that beforehand."
Isn't that the story about American's entire social service
delivery system?
After a disaster occurs, tremendous resources materialize
from nowhere, but there are few resources available to prevent
the disaster.
Crime is now a hot topic, with more demands for more
prisons, stricter sentences, and expanding the death penalty to
cover more crimes.
But for a fraction of this vast expenditure, we could have
the school-based juvenile counseling centers, the drug treatment
centers, and the community-based preventive programs that
would help people avoid criminal behavior.
\
Ml
TO-BE EQUAL
By JOHN E. JACOB
tures to the people most in need of them.
So wealthy suburban children go to new schools with lav
ish equipment and high per-pupil expenditures, while poor chil
dren go to crumbling old schools with far fewer resources.
That disparity between our willingness to bear the high
human and financial costs of inequality in our society is some
thing we need to reflect on during the holiday season.
For Christmas is a season to settle accounts with ourselves.
It is a time to think about what public policies are needed to
make ours a more humane society in which such horrors as peo
ple dying alone in the streets do no occur.
And it is a time to think about what actions we can take
ourselves to set things right.
\