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5A OPINIONS/ Cliarlatte $ost Thursday December 18, 2003 School reform: Rock or hard place? By Neal McCluskey SPECIAL TO THE POST The United States is slid ing toward dictatorship in what many regard as the bulwark of American democ racy: our public schools. It’s not a jackbooted-thug dicta torship; rather, a massive concentration of power in a few hands. For instance, in Detroit, Michigan, and Washington, D.C., debates are brevring over stripping control of schools from boards of education and con solidating it in the hands of mayors. In cities hke New York, Boston, and Chicago, it’s already been done. Why this trend? Because, like the dilapidated institu tions that have given rise to autocracies throughout his tory, many of our school dis tricts are broken, and demo cratic bodies-school boards- are largely to blame. Tbo often these boards are mere rungs on the career ladders of pohticians trying to make names for themselves. Photo opportunities and pos turing are allowed to trump education. ‘What we have today in the local school board,” writes Denis Doyle and former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education Chester Finn, “especially the elected kind, is an anachro nism and an outrage.... We can no longer pretend it’s working well or hide behind the mantra of local control of education.”’ With confidence in elective bodies lost, school systems have increasingly turned toward mayoral control, exchanging the paralysis of school boards for the efficien cy of consolidated power. In many cases, it seems to be working. Since Mayor Richard Daley took over Chicago’s schools the per centage of education-money going to instruction has increased and the dropout rate has fallen. Boston has experienced modest test score increases since its schools came under the con trol of Mayor Ibm Menino. And Sol Stem reports in the City Journal that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein “have dismantled the dysfunction al old bureaucracy, put the teachers’ and principals’ unions on the defensive, and created a streamlined administrative apparatus to funnel a bigger shce of the systems’ $12.5 bilhon annual budget into the classroom.” Unfortunately, there is a dark side to this success. As Stem reports, there is a decidedly dictatorial turn in New York City, where the mayor is “micromanaging teachers and principals to an extent unprecedented in American K-12 education. Agents of the chancellor (euphemistically called ‘coaches’) operate in almost aU of the city’s 1,200 schools to make sure that every edu cator marches in lockstep with the Department of Education’s approved peda gogical approaches. There is now only one way ... to teach the three R’s in the schools.” Arguably, chief among the sources of discontent in the Big Apple is the mayor’s imposition of a reading pro gram called “Month by Month Phonics” in all but a few schools. Critics of the curriculum argue that despite having “phonics” in its title, the program pro vides Uttle such instmction- a potential disaster for struggling city students. Unfortunately, with power consolidated in the mayor’s hands, no one in New York City can block the program’s implementation. It’s a situation that iUus- trates the danger of vesting power in one person: Everyone must abide by his dictates, wise or not. When ■wise, the results can he posi tive. But what happens when it’s the latter? In New York City’s schools, if the critics are right, it could mean illiteracy for thou sands of children. Historically, we know that the consequences of unchecked power can poten tially be worse. But if mayoral control is too dangerous and school boards are too ineffective, what can be done to save failing districts? The answer: Govemment-the source of the problem-can be bypassed. Parents can be empowered ■with school choice, and schools them selves can be given autono my. Parents and schools, not ineffectual school boards or unfettered mayors, can be put in control. While no totally choice-dri ven district exists in the United States, the e-vidence is clear that where even lim ited choice is available, it’s working. Academically, numerous studies have shown that students whose parents have exercised choice do at least as well as their public school peers. More telling, the sort of deep dissatisfaction that has fueled drives to exchange inept school boards for dicta tors is nowhere to be found among choosers. Polls con sistently show overwhelm ing satisfaction among par ents who choose their chil dren’s schools. As school districts have failed, parents have typically been offered only two options: leave power vrith bumbhng school boards or concentrate it in the hands of a single person. History has shown both options to be dangerous. Fortunately, choice offers something bet ter. NEAL McCLUSKEY is a poli cy analyst with the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute (www.cato.org). William Raspberry Cause of death: A police beating in Cincinnati Jesse Jackson Sr. On the Thanksgiving Sunday, Nathaniel Jones, a black man, died from a police beating in Cincinnati; his death was ruled a homicide by the coroner. The official response seems almost scripted. The pohce chief defends his men. The union president says that the pohce, caught on tape repeatedly beating the vic tim -with their aluminum nightsticks, “exercised restraint.” The mayor defends the pohce chief The coroner rules that the ■victim had drugs in his system. But this is Cincinnati. The victim was the 18th black man to die in custody of the police since 1995. In the same period, only one white man has died. Only two years ago, Cincinnati was shaken by riots caused by a White policeman shooting an unarmed black teenager who was running away. Tiy to imagine what would hap pen if a white man died after being beaten on tape by black pohce officers, after 17 other white men had died in custody of a largely black pohce force. The governor would step in. The Justice Department would act. The national press would descend. The pohce have released a ■videotape tape that shows an angry Jones, a 350-pound man, lunging and taking a swing at a pohceman. That tape answers all questions for many in Cincinnati. “I wouldn’t say he got what he deserved,” said one anony mous caller on a radio caU in show, “but he got what he started.” But for those who knew Nathaniel Jones, it doesn’t make sense. Jones was known as a gentle man, a church-goer, attentive tc his teenager sons who hved in Cleveland. He had just returnej from Cleveland early on a Sunday morning. He went to a White Castle, where he was a regular, to meet with two waitresses who were his friends. He was not a threat to them. He was not armed, and not hos tile. Due to drugs or fatigue or illness, he started acting funny, dancing and jumping around. He went outside and passed out. The restaurant called for emergency medical assistance. By the time the paramedics arrived, Jones had been revived. The paramedics thought Jones was acting erratically and called the police. Police arrived, the camera running in the cruiser. But in the tape that police released, there is a one minute and 37- second gap. Something hap pened in that gap to turn a jovial gentle man into an angry one, ■vrilling to take a swing at an officer. Pohce claim that the camera was turned off because they were certain that everything was under control and then turned on again when it went out of control. Given Cincinnati’s history, it would take a heroic act of faith for the African American com munity to believe that. More telling, the para medics left the scene when the police arrived. That probably caused Jones his life, since they were not there to dehver CPR or ren der other assistance, and the police left him lying on his face, his hands handcuffed behind his back for crucial minutes without moving to help. Did the firefighters leave because they didn’t want to witness the beating that started to take place? Jones’ aunt and his grand mother object strongly to the way the media has por trayed Nathaniel Jones. He was “never ■violent,” says his grandmother. He was a “lov ing man,” says his aunt. They want to know what provocation made him so angiy. They want an investiga tion and justice. But they have also called on Cincinnati to learn to live together, and called on the African-American communi ty to stay calm. The city’s ministers cancelled a planned protest march to honor the spirit of their con cerns. Surely, the relatives of the victim should not be the only responsible people in the city. For African-Americans, pohce brutahty is stiU too widespread. Justice is stiU too scarce. The pohce who beat Rodney King in Los Angeles walk free. The pohce who shot Amadou DiaUo in New York walk free. The pohceman who shot Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati walked free. Eighteen blacks killed while in custody of police in Cincinnati. A minute and 37-second gap on the pohce tape - a gap at the very moment of provoca tion. Mayor Charhe Luken has responded with a pubhc rela tions campaign, urging the media to play the tape, jumping in defense of his city. He seems obh^vious to the fears of the black com munity. “We’ve gone through a culture change in Cincinnati,” he says. “We still have a problem in Cincinnati,” says Juleana Frierson, staff director of a leading cml rights group, “We need a cultural change in the pohce department. These policemen are still allowed to khl.” The gulf between those statements speaks for itself. It is time for the Justice Department and the gover nor and the mayor and the pohce chief to exhibit the same kind of concern for the city as Nathaniel Jones’ grandmother and aunt have shown. It is time for them to act to bring the city together. The way to do that is not to wage a public relations cam paign, but to wage a cam paign for justice and .accountabihty for the citi zens of Cincinnati. After the riots two years ago, Cincinnati started down the path of reform. But clearly it has a long way yet to go. JESSE L. JACKSON Sr. is founder and president of the Chicago-based Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. A supreme conundrum If you think last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision on campaign finance pleased no one, just wait until the justices weigh in on congres sional redistricting. The specific issue on which the coiirt heard arguments last Wednesday is the 19-dis- trict map of Pennsylvania, drawn up in 2002 by the Republican-controlled state legislature. Democrats, with a statewide voter edge of 445,000 over Republicans, hold only seven of the 19 seats. The reason is obvious — and admitted. The Republicans drew the dis trict boundaries to maximize their political advantage. The court, which has long held that it’s perfectly fine to take politics into account in drawing congressional and other districts, is being asked by Democrats to say the Pennsylvania plan is too political. It is, of course, but it’s har^ to see how the court could bring itself to do any thing about it. Which doesn’t mean it won’t try. Asked a decade ago to consider whether the North Carolina legislature was too race-conscious in producing a districting map that gave the state its first black U.S. representatives since Reconstruction, the court said yes. The shape of the district from which Mel Watt (D) was first elected — in some places no wider than Interstate 85 — was, to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s mind, unconsti tutionally ‘"bizarre.” Subsequent clarifications seemed to say that while leg islatures are forbidden to engage in racial gerryman dering, they may draw dis tricting maps calculated to satisfy any number of inter ests, including partisan advantage and protection of incumbents. What the court seems not to have counted on is the increased sophistication of computers, which now are capable of slicing and dicing states, as National PubHc Radio’s Nina Tbtenberg put it the other day, ‘"block by block and even house by house . . . [based on] party registration, previous voting patterns, income, charitable contributions, subjects of interest and even buying patterns of the people who live in those houses.” “The result is that the designer can tell with near certainty which way those voters will cast their ballots,” Ibtenberg said. Will the court tell legisla tors they can’t use this pow erful information? A couple of states have tried to reduce blatant parti sanship by giving the redis tricting task to either non partisan (Iowa) or bipartisan (New Jersey) commissions. Both try to keep districts reasonably compact. Iowa tries where possible to respect county lines. But these efforts at biparti sanship and civility are not easily written into a judicial decree. Give the district drawing power to politicians, and you’ve got to . expect a political result. Should new districts, drawn after each decennial census, be as little changed as possible from the old? Should there be a require ment to draw them in a way to elect representatives in proportion to statewide party registration? bill? I can’t wait. WILLIAM RASPBERRY is a Washington Post columnist.
The Charlotte Post (Charlotte, N.C.)
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Dec. 18, 2003, edition 1
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