The Local Area Watch

THE FLYING MONKEY BRIGADE

At the beginning of the week L.A.W. posted the article “Darwinism Isn’t Science”, in which I criticized the Michigan State Board of Education for mandating the teaching of Darwinism in biology classes as fact rather than conjecture as to how life evolved on Earth.  The board was plainspoken about the impetus for this decision.  They did not want Intelligent Design to also be taught as a competing explanation for evolution.  In fact, the board wanted to stamp out completely any possibility that children learn in public schools that Darwinism is not fact.  Hence they ruled, for example, that the Darwinian principle of natural selection is, rather than may be, the primary mechanism of evolution.

THE LYSENKOISTS

Of course, the members of the state board of education are political creatures and so politics influences policy.  They were certainly reacting to the atrocious intrusion of federal power into local school curriculum by U.S. District Court John Jones who declared by judicial fiat in last year’s Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision that Intelligent Design is not science and so is banned from public school science classes.  Without regard to the merits of his lengthy opinion about the status of Intelligent Design as science, Jones’s ruling assaults the First Amendment and the sovereignty of the states.  It stinks of Lysenkoism, in which the government dictates what will and will not be permitted in public discourse about science.

So, one might argue that it was politically prudent of the state board of education to scrub Intelligent Design from the biology curriculum in light of the expansive power of federal courts today.  No doubt the defense of a state’s sovereignty to sort out its own affairs, such as public education, is a lost cause in the current judicial environmental.  Yet, the board did not merely do that.  They went beyond Kitzmiller to enshrine Darwinism as the one and only explanation for how evolution occurred.  The problem is that as a matter of science it is not*, and so the board members who backed this decision in a unanimous vote are as much Lysenkoists as Judge Jones is.  They let politics and ideology dictate what constitutes science rather than sound broadly-accepted philosophical principles.

THE FLYING MONKEY BRIGADE

If there is any doubt that Darwinism has been wrapped into a particular ideology, consider what happened here at L.A.W. this week.  The flying monkey brigade of one such ideologue was loosed upon us and invaded the comment section of the “Darwinism Isn’t Science” article, because we had the temerity to question the exclusivity of Darwinism as the scientific explanation for evolution.  The ideologue is Ed Brayton, host of a ScienceBlogs website called “Dispatches from the Culture Wars”.  Much of the squawking of the flying monkeys was nothing but the recycling of jabs Brayton took at us at his website.  A cursory perusal of his website will clarify their agenda behind Darwinism.  For example, Brayton had this to say the other day:  “No, not every [Intelligent Design] advocate is also an anti-gay bigot, but there certainly is a great deal of overlap there. While there is no necessary relationship between the two positions, they do tend to appeal to the same audience of protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals. But the battle against both goes hand in hand for me.”

So it is this political animus against Christians that set the tone of Brayton’s minions in their comments here at L.A.W.  It is an irrational animus that blinds both Brayton and them to any reasonable distinctions that might be made by those who disagree with their agenda.  Case in point, L.A.W.’s criticism of the recent decision of the Michigan State Board of Education to mandate Darwinism as fact in public schools.  They do not grasp the possibility that a person can demur from teaching Darwinian natural selection as the mechanism of evolution in biology classes for rational reasons that have nothing to do with Intelligent Design, the supernatural, or religion.  Hence, the repeated refrain by Brayton at his website and his cohorts in L.A.W.’s comment section that I am stumping for Intelligent Design when I did nothing more than report what the state board of education was opposing.  For them the world is black and white.  Either you are a rational man of science, liberal politics, and secular culture or you are a hateful Bible-thumping wretch salivating to extinguish the flame of the Enlightenment.

THE FELLOW-TRAVELERS

While Brayton and his gang are extreme, their intolerance of a theistic worldview infects mainstream science, politics, and culture.  It manifests itself in the mainstream with a low-grade paranoia that any challenge to a secularized public square must entail a theocratic impulse to regiment society to the will of pastors and priests.  It justifies itself in the mainstream as a noble and enlightened defense of the wall separating church and state (which in fact our Constitution never built).  And so a panel of education officials in Lansing declares that Darwinism is the theory of evolution in our public schools to keep religion out of them, with a Lysenkoist ignorance of the actual grounding of the claims of Darwinism in science, a slavish abdication of independent thought to academic authorities jealous of their prerogative to dictate what constitutes science, and an obliviousness to a First Amendment that strips the government of the power to impede free speech and the free exercise of religion.

They do so, contrary to reason and law, because they are on a crusade to cleanse the public square of religion.  The members of the state board of education are not the shock troops, that’s the mission of the likes of Brayton and his flying monkey brigade to intimidate laymen from voicing their doubts about what some try to traffic as science.  Instead their fellow-traveling board members hold the ground so yielded by the general public and secure it with the bulwark of bureaucracy.  Therefore, what they do is more enduring and so more corrosive of our liberties.  That is why it is important to examine the state school board’s seemingly routine policy decisions, like this one.  It is Lysenkoism.  It falsely mandates Darwinism as the only explanation for evolution.  Thus, it prohibits within the public square of the classroom free inquiry as to how evolution transpired.  And so the state school board’s decision undermines the tolerance of divergent worldviews vital to sustaining a genuinely liberal society.
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* Darwinism isn’t science.  At least it is not a scientific theory of evolution, despite all of the howling to the contrary by Brayton’s boys here at L.A.W.  (See the footnote of our previous article on this subject for the distinction science makes between theory, hypothesis, and conjecture.)  One might say that the theory of evolution is the scientific explanation for the fossil record – i.e., the fossil record is the result of the descent of all organisms from a common ancestor through modification of form.  It is a sound explanation and no facts exist to refute it.  I will say however that it is not theory, in the sense that general relativity is a scientific theory, but it is a complex of hypotheses, in the sense that the standard model of the Big Bang is.

That said, Darwinism and its progeny are sets of conjectures as to the mechanism for evolution – in other words, what caused organisms to change form over time.  The only hard facts of evolution are the fossil record of past organisms and the biology of present ones.  These facts, at least our present understanding of them, do not let us draw any firm conclusions as to how organisms evolved over the past four billion years.  This is not say that evolutionary biologists are full of nonsense or that none of the conjectures they have put forth make any sense.  It is nothing more than the recognition of the gap between an explanation and its verification through observation or experimentation.

For example, the Galapagos finches are cited as verification of the Darwinian claim of evolution through natural selection.  We have indeed observed within historical time variation in those finches, especially their beaks in response to environmental pressures.  However, all this really tells is something already known.  Many species of organism are elastic within certain boundaries as to form, as the beaks of Galapagos finches have changed back and forth depending upon the available food source.  What we have not observed is a finch’s beak turning into a set of teeth so that it can start chewing, let’s say, grass and leaves.  In short, we have not seen a species “jumping” the boundaries of its form’s elasticity.  The fossil record certainly shows us it must have happened, but we have no theory as to how.  Only conjecture.

This is why mandating the teaching of Darwinism as the theory of evolution, rather as a conjecture as to how it might have occurred, is a gross scientific error on the part of the Michigan State Board of Education.

SPOOKS AND GOBLINS BANNED IN ROCKFORD

Doug Hoogerland, the principal of Crestwood Elementary School in Rockford, has yanked from the school the traditonal Halloween party, with the kids wearing spooky costumes and exchanging candy with one another, and replaced it with a "Fall into Fitness" campaign.  Hmm.  Sounds drearily puritan to me, though dumping Halloween tricks and treats for an endorsement of athletic vigor is certainly within Hoogerland's authority.  And it's good that he has that authority, because a principal should be free to make most of the decisions regarding his school.

However, I find it interesting why Hoogerland chose to eliminate the school's Halloween party.  He was concerned that the Halloween theme alienated some of the students and their families.  No doubt that it does, particularly among some Christians who think Halloween is nothing but a celebration of very un-Christian ideas.  Though I think an elementary school Halloween party is nothing but good ol' fashioned fun, I will not belittle those who find the holiday offensive to their religious beliefs.

What I will question is why the public square, in this instance a public school, must be sterilized of ideas and activities offensive to some who enter into it?  After all, isn't one of the supposed benefits of public schools, as the educrats keep telling us, that it provides children with the experience of encountering those who are different from them so that they learn the give-and-take essential to a tolerant, peaceful, and prosperous society?  How healthy a lesson is it for a kid to learn that what he deems offensive will be banned?  Isn't it a better lesson for him to learn how to deal with the offensive beliefs of others instead of enforcing silence upon them?

Well, of course, it is.  The same goes for those secularists who cringe at encountering any evidence of religious belief in a public school.  Their sensitivities do not deserve to be spared from offense any more than the handful of Christians who object to Halloween parties.  The sooner kids learn that there's a great big world out there with lots of ideas they don't agree with, the better citizens they will be.  Not because they will become conditioned to compromising their beliefs, but because they will acquire the skills to hold to what they believe is true while tolerating those who believe otherwise.  Therefore, Hoogerland's decision to ban Halloween is a failure on this score.

DARWINISM ISN'T SCIENCE

Yesterday the Michigan Board of Education voted 8-0 to mandate the teaching of Darwinism in science classes to the exclusion of all other hypotheses or conjectures about evolution, namely Intelligent Design.  The educrats piously committed themselves to ensuring that only science is taught in science classes.  Well, that's good.  The problem is that Darwinism isn't science.

There is a great deal confusion about evolution.  For instance, what does the word mean?  If evolution means that organisms have changed form over the billions of years since life originated on Earth, who can seriously dispute that?  Sure, there are the Young-Earthers who misread Genesis as a science text to draw the factually unfounded conclusion that our planet is only 6,000 years old.  The Board of Education rightly excludes from the classroom their psuedo-science which is refuted by the well-established facts of paleontology.

But if evolution is synonymous with Darwinism, then evolution is not science and should no more be taught in science classes than the creationism of the Young-Earthers.  Darwinism is a conjecture (not a scientific theory as it is commonly mislabeled) as to HOW living organisms first originated on Earth and then changed into other organisms over time.  As to origins, the Darwinist conjecture is that non-living matter combined in some manner to become living creatures.  As to evolution, the Darwinist conjecture is that natural selection, sometimes called "survival of the fittest", is the mechanism that forced organisms to change form over the eons.

As to whether or not these conjectures are correct, we simply don't know.  There is no evidence as to HOW life originated or HOW it later evolved into the plants and animals that now inhabit the Earth.  Indeed, the persistent failure of scientists over the past 150 years since Charles Darwin first published his conjectures to establish any scientific foundation for them suggests that Darwinism probably should be consigned to the same dustbin as phlogiston, phrenology, and the steady-state universe.

Nevertheless, the Michigan Board of Education yesterday ordered the teaching of Darwinism as scientific fact in our public classrooms.  The basis for doing so was taking testimony from experts who are professed Darwinists that Darwinism is science.  They get away with this by conflating Darwinism with evolution.  Nobody seriously disputes the facts of evolution.  There is, after all, an extensive fossil record that different creatures have existed on Earth at different times.  The Darwinists then smuggle in with this undisputed record their idea of HOW these observed differences in the fossil record occurred.  In doing so, they give their conjectures as to the origin of life and its evolution the same gloss of solidity as the facts of the fossil record.

However, what the fossil record is and what explains it are two separate subjects.  The first is science and clearly suitable for instruction in public classrooms.  The second is hotly contested and no scientific theory exists regarding it, only a lot of conjectures and a few hypotheses.*  To teach that Darwinism is the only scientifically valid explanation of the origin of life and evolution is to seriously misinform students.  Whatever one thinks of Intelligent Design (which if nothing else is asking fundamental questions that Darwinism has not answered) it is not the only challenge to the dogma of Darwinism.  Even if the American academy is strait-jacketed by Darwinism, this not so in Europe and Asia where scientists are exploiting discoveries in genetics and molecular biology to develop alternatives to the Darwinist account of evolution.  Even Lamarckianism, of all things, has gotten a new scientific respectability.

Suffice it to say that in our public schools science classes should teach science, and that science should only be that which is well-established and not seriously disputed.  Paleontology, the geological and fossil record of our planet's history, covers the basic facts of evolution and is suitable for public school students.  Darwinism and all the other competing explanations for evolution are not, at least not at the introductory level.  There is great scientific debate as to how life arose and evolution occurred, and if Darwinism is to be taught, it must be taught in its proper context:  One conjecture along with the other conjectures as to what accounts for the origin of life and its evolution.

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* In science, a theory is an explanation for a phenomenon that has been validated by observation or experimentation, such as Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.  A hypothesis is a proposed explanation that makes claims that are testable by observation or experimentation.  The standard model of the Big Bang is a hypothesis that could be reduced to a theory once there is sufficient astronomical observation of its claims.  A conjecture is another proposed explanation, uncontradicted by any known fact, that is not presently testable by any practical means.  So-called string theory is such a conjecture.  It is a fascinating explanation of what the fundamental bits and pieces of our universe may be, but it makes no claims right now that can be tested.

Darwinism is a conjecture in this sense, because we cannot devise any experiment that would prove life could never arise from non-life (you can't prove a negative), nor can we as a practical matter sit around for a few million years to observe whether or not natural selection causes current organisms to evolve into other ones.  Interestingly, Intelligent Design (which is whole 'nother kettle of fish from the creationism of the Young-Earthers) is more scientific than Darwinism in this regard.  It puts forth the hypothesis of irreducible complexity:  The idea that the basic component of life, the cell, could not originate from the blind forces of physics and chemistry bringing together non-living matter to produce it or any predecessor to it.  If scientists ever do create life from non-life, that would go a long way to shooting down irreducible complexity and so Intelligent Design.

Perhaps if Intelligent Design marketed itself as "irreducible complexity", like Darwinism markets itself as "natural selection", maybe the educrats could judge these matters more objectively as to their scientific validity (instead of mooning over Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow in "Inherit the Wind" and then fretting that Intelligent Design is a Trojan horse for all those backwoods Bible-beating stump-toothed rubes who want to extinguish the flame of the Enlightenment).  Then again, maybe those responsible for setting standards for public school cirriculum should just try to get straight the difference scientists make between conjecture, hypothesis, and theory -- and then decide whether anything more than scientific theory should be taught.

SCHOOL BOARD SANITY

Well, I must admit I'm surprised.  The Grand Rapids Press reported that the Grand Rapids public school board rejected a resolution to support the mandatory education spending referendum on November's ballot by a 6-2 majority.  Board vice president and regular L.A.W. reader, Lisa Hinkel, pushed for the resolution, but the majority said "no" for the sound reason that the proposal is bad policy.

In doing so, the G.R. school board resisted pressure from the educrat special interests who wanted to use the resolution as an underhanded (and taxpayer-funded) way of promoting the proposal to city residents.  Moreover, they stand nearly alone among their brethren in the state.  Only one other school board has also voted against supporting the mandatory-spending proposal.  Kudos to the G.R. school board for standing firm on fiscal sanity, even as the school district continues to face a funding crisis.

The school board was right that the mandatory-spending proposal is bad policy.  If passed, the state constitution would be amended to force taxpayers to not only guarantee a certain level of funding to public schools but to maintain automatic increases in spending every year.  The state legislature would be powerless to adjust spending priorities, while more and more money slushes into the pockets of the educrats.  These sort of constitutional mandates on spending are what sent California into an economic tailspin, and that state still hasn't recovered.  We certainly don't need to follow that disastrous path, as the defiant vote of the school board made clear.

LOW BIDDER FOR HUFF SCHOOL WALKS OUT ON DEAL

As you may recall, the Grand Rapids school board approved the sale of Huff Elementary School late last year to the Redstone Group, a residential developer, who offered $1 million for the property.  In doing so, the school board rejected a bid for $1.38 million from Mosaica.  They stiffed the taxpayers and signed on with the lower bidder because Mosaica is a charter school company who wanted to use Huff for its intended purpose -- a school.  That meant parents in the neighborhood might choose to send their children to a Mosaica-run Huff School instead of to a more distant Grand Rapids public school.  To protect its turf, instead of the best interests of students and taxpayers, our school board told Mosaica to take a hike and agreed to sell the school to Redstone for residential redevelopment.

This week Redstone has informed the Grand Rapids school board that it is renegeing on the deal.  It won't buy Huff School, because the company cannot make the school building fit into a financially viable residential project.  Meanwhile, Mosaica told the school board that it no longer has any interest in buying Huff School, especially in light of the treatment it received from board members and other school officials.  So the Grand Rapids public school district is stuck with yet another empty building and a lost opportunity to put some money in the district's declining coffers.

Expect more of these disappointments now that the school board has hired Bernard Taylor as the new superintendent.  Although Taylor was fired from his previous gig running the Kansas City public school district, his redeeming quality to our school board was his willingness to do battle with charter schools.  Instead of finding a superintendent who could innovate, knock heads within the public school bureaucracy, get the teachers union to reckon with reality, excoriate parents who think it is the public school's job to inspire their children to learn instead of them, brook no nonsense with the racialism corrupting the operation of the district, and truly put the kids first by harnessing the pressure for reform from outside forces like charter schools to make the Grand Rapids public school district better, our school board has hired a reactionary who will raise walls against the reformers instead of building bridges to them.

The collapse of the Huff deal is an omen of the ruin that the Grand Rapids school board is courting.

MANAGED SPEECH

The Grand Rapids school board is rightly disturbed by the raucus conduct at its public meetings.  The heckling, showboating, and insults by some attendees is disgraceful -- and should NOT be tolerated.

However, instead of taking the necessary measures to remove from the meeting members of the public who will not conduct themselves in a civil manner, the board, along with new superintendent Bernard Taylor's support, wants to manage public comment at school board meetings.  Their plan is to force a person who might want to make a public comment to alert the school board of that fact in advance of the meeting, provide his name and address to the board, and then receive instructions from school officials that comments not related to the meeting's policy agenda are prohibited.

Furthermore Superintendent Taylor wants to further restrict public monitoring of school board meetings by terminating their broadcast on cable TV's public access channel for education.  That reveals the real agenda of Grand Rapids school officials.  By itself, one might conclude that the board and the superintendent have merely taken a wrong path in controlling the crowd at public meetings with the proposed advance-notice rules.  But blacking out public viewing of school board meetings on cable TV, which has no impact whatsoever upon the atmosphere of those meetings, can only mean that the overall objective of these changes is to limit and control public input to and knowledge of the school board's decision-making.

The school board should reject this attempt to manage speech.  Keep the meetings open to spontaneous public comment.  Exercise judgment to cut the mike for those who are abusive, insulting, or out of order.  Eject hecklers who disrupt the meeting.  (Yes, I know these things require backbone from our school officials.  But is that so much to ask to maintain decorum?)  And, of course, keep broadcasting the school board meetings on cable TV.

HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER ...

Many of you have now heard about the brouhaha over the just completed mural in the Lee High School gym.  The Lee school board and the Lee sports boosters hired recent Lee High School graduate and current Kendall School of Art & Design student Arturo Araujo to paint the school's mascot, the Rebel, on the gymnasium wall for $4,000.  Araujo presented the board with a sketch illustrating what he proposed to paint, and they approved it.  The booster club advanced Araujo $2,000 and he got underway.  A month later his masterpiece was completed.

Then the trouble began.  A board member complained that the Rebel in Araujo's mural was not the same as the Rebel in Araujo's sketch.  Specifically, the Rebel was dark-skinned in the mural and lighter-skinned in the sketch.  Well, yeah.  But then the sketch was cartoonlike whereas the mural presented a more realistically human character.  As for the specific issue of skin color, the sketched Rebel had an orange cast, and I really doubt that the school board expected the mural to keep that color.

In fact, it would seem to me that the board must have understood that the completed mural would be somewhat different from the cartoonlike sketch.  The mural is significantly different from the sketch because it is qualitatively better than sketch, both in form and in color (and by color, I'm not talking about skin tone but the artist's technique).  The board must have known that there would be these qualitative improvements and so the sketch was only an approximation of the final product.  And if the Lee Rebel is now dark-skinned, I'm not sure that is such a leap from the orange-skinned sketch.

Nevertheless, some board members had threatened to withhold the $2,000 balance they owed Araujo if he didn't repaint the Rebel as a caucasian.  Araujo refused.  As a practical matter, why not?  He had the support of the Lee High School's principal, the student body, and the booster club.  Last night the Lee school board probably took note of this, too, and ended the showdown.  They voted 5-1 to pay Araujo the remaining two grand.  From a contractual point of view, the board made the right decision considering that Araujo did not submit to them a sketch intended to be an exact representation of his final product.

Even so, there is justice in the old adage that he who pays the piper calls the tune.  An artist works for his patron, and so it is the patron, not the artist, who is entitled to satisfaction at the end of the day.  Araujo will do well as a professional artist to keep that in mind.  After all, the customer is king.

RETURNING A FAVOR TO MS. HINKEL

Regular readers will recall Lisa Hinkel's recent participation in this forum.  Ms. Hinkel is a member of the Grand Rapids Board of Education who took exception to my criticism of her position on school elections.  However, she did grace me with her pity:  "I will definitely pray for the ignorance and white-male anger sy[n]drome from which you suffer."  I am grateful for that.

So I now want to return her kindness and alert Ms. Hinkel that someone under the false e-mail address "nicksajoke @ angrywhitemen.com" has been using her internet access to harass Nancy Capriglione and her husband in the comment section of our recent story on Corky Overmyer.  (The all-seeing eye of L.A.W. can track these things, you know.)  It seems that the intruder has been clever enough to make reference to "angry white men" to give the appearance that it is Ms. Hinkel who has been posting defamatory comments in response to Ms. Capriglione.  However, I think we can all agree that a public official of Ms. Hinkel's caliber would not engage in such loathsome behavior, especially under a psuedonym.

Furthermore, Ms. Hinkel and Ms. Capriglione were fellow members of the Board of Education.  No doubt that means Ms. Hinkel would have nothing but a sense of comity with Ms. Capriglione (despite significant policy differences), which is further evidence that the scurrilous remarks were made by someone other than Ms. Hinkel.  And I am certain that Ms. Hinkel would not abuse our forum for such a purpose because we had cause to praise Ms. Capriglione's positions in the past while criticizing hers.

Therefore, Ms. Hinkel, please take action and track down the intruder who has been abusing your internet access.  We do not want to be forced to block messages from your IP address if this miscreant continues to post malicious comments here.

[NOTE:  In the comment section, Ms. Hinkel's husband Bruce has admitted to posting the malicious remarks about Ms. Capriglione's husband.  Because my tone in the article above was clearly ironic, I apologize to Ms. Hinkel for insinuating that she was the culprit.]

CONTEMPT FOR THE VOTERS

As you know, Ms. Hinkel of the Grand Rapids Board of Education took me to task, because I criticized her opposition to consolidating school board and millage elections with the November general election.  In an editorial she authored for the Press, she denounced the campaigning typical of general elections as "ugly politics" which would only dirty the sanctity of school elections.  I noted here in response: " What this adds up to is that Ms. Hinkel, a public official, has quite an anti-democratic frame of mind.  Since when have school elections become contemplative, ivory tower affairs above the rabble-rousing of the hoi polloi?"  Ms. Hinkel then objected in the remarks section: "Contrary to your uninformed opinion, I do support the ideals of democracy, including free speech."

Well, apparently those "ideals" of democracy don't include letting the voters decide an issue.  On Monday Ms. Hinkel, along with her fellow board members, approved a resolution supporting the removal of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative referendum from the ballot in November.  The MCRI is a proposed law that would end racial preferences in public institutions, such as affirmative action programs in public university admissions.  Note that Ms. Hinkel and her cohorts are not calling for Michigan citizens to vote against the referendum.  She doesn't want you to even have an opportunity to vote on it.  So much for the ideals of democracy.

Of course, there's nothing high-minded about the grandstanding of Ms. Hinkel and the other school board members.  It's nothing but a craven sop to a vocal minority of the black community in Grand Rapids that finds a bigot behind every decision that doesn't go their way.  The fact that Ms. Hinkel and company are so quick to genuflect to a small faction that is utterly unrepresentative of the majority of voters and taxpayers in Grand Rapids goes to show how unrepresentative she and the other board members are of our community.  Just another reason why school board elections should be consolidated with the general election in November so that they get the full attention of the voters.

KEEP IT A SECRET

In the Saturday edition of the Press, Lisa Hinkel of the Grand Rapids Board of Education authored a statement that makes it clear that she is very annoyed that some of us would like school elections held either during the August primary election or (preferably) the November general election.  She is still peeved about the "complicated restructuring" resulting from the state legislature forcing school districts to hold elections on one of four specific dates during the year.  How complicated that can be makes me wonder, seeing that until the law was passed two years ago, school districts had gotten quite adept at holding millage elections on all sorts of oddball dates with little public announcement.  Why holding an election on a regular date should be difficult is not clear.

In fact, it's not complicated at all.  The truth, which the likes of Ms. Hinkel won't ever admit, is that school boards liked having the power to hold effectively stealth millage elections that only teachers, administrators, activists, and even voting-age students subjected to classroom campaigning knew about.  That way they could swamp the election with their ballots because of the resulting low public turn-out.  They resent having their wings trimmed by the state legislature acting in response to public disgust with unpredictable election dates.  Ms. Hinkel and her cohorts want quasi-secret elections with little fanfare, because that gives them the most control over the outcome.  And so, that's why Ms. Hinkel is protesting against any further consolidation of election dates.  She wants to preserve the leverage school boards have to hold elections in February or May, when elections are not even on the radar screens of a very busy general public.

What Ms. Hinkel does not want is a lot of public attention focused on school elections.  She is hostile to contentious debate over school issues, which she derides as "ugly politics" -- as though one of the largest drains on the taxpayer's wallet should not be subject to the political process.  Ms. Hinkel gives up the ghost when she writes:  "Moving school board [and millage] elections to November would introduce the kind of special interest endorsements, politics, and partisanship that we associate with general elections in November."  Translation:  Dammit.  More people and groups will get involved in the campaign over public school issues.  We will no longer get to campaign against silent opposition.

"This would be very harmful to an already fragile system."  Translation:  It will be a lot harder for me to keep my seat on the school board in a competitive election with heavy public turn-out.  It will be even harder to get millages passed to construct more new buildings in a district losing students by the boatload every year.

"Many special interest groups mail out their brochures before the November election endorsing a whole list of candidates that will surely keep the interests of that particular group in mind."  Translation:  Oh heavens!  I will now have to answer to well-coordinated opposition to my re-election.  Furthermore, we will no longer be able to force students to take home our millage propaganda without other groups responding to it.

What this adds up to is that Ms. Hinkel, a public official, has quite an anti-democratic frame of mind.  Since when have school elections become contemplative, ivory tower affairs above the rabble-rousing of the hoi polloi?*  An election is nothing without a campaign.  School districts, already in the death grip of the teacher unions, administrator associations, and identity politics, need more exposure to the disinfecting sunlight of a raucous and noisy campaign at the very time when the general public devotes its attention to the matters that must be decided by elections.  If a November election facilitates public participation, then every decent-minded school board official should get on-board with the program.

NOTE:  Read here how Lisa Hinkel and her fellow school board members voted to deny ordinary citizens the opportunity to cast a ballot on one of today's most important issues.

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* What?  "Hoi polloi" means "the many", so "the hoi polloi" is "the the many"?  Well, maybe so, but what do you expect from the public school education I got?

THE BIG LIE

Readers may find interesting this recent exchange I have had with "G Stuart" regarding the persistant myth that greedy taxpayers continue to poorly compensate public school teachers.  It amazes me how this nonsense is so deeply ingrained in the conventional wisdom, although every objective measure of the salary and benefits of public school teachers show that the taxpayers have greatly increased their compensation in real terms over the past forty years.

I raise this topic not to beat up on public school teachers, but to stop the denigration of taxpayers who have time and again footed the bill to meet the demands of the teacher unions.  If the unions and their flacks are beginning to sense resistance to further demands, well maybe that's because they are getting close to throttling the goose that has been laying all those golden eggs.  There is only so much that can be extracted from the taxpayers.  Remember, teaching is a public service.  Teachers work for the taxpayers.  The taxpayers don't exist to make life comfortable for teachers.

After all, if what the taxpayers are offering public school teachers really is a raw deal, no one is making anyone take it.  If public school teachers are as talented and remarkable as the unions tell us to justify further raises, they should have no problem finding work in the private sector which is always in search of the best people.  So enough of the big lie.  The taxpayers do give public school teachers a good deal, and if any of those teachers think otherwise, there's plenty of work available elsewhere.

WHEN WILL IT STOP?

When enough people of goodwill refuse to be intimidated by baseless accusations of racism and call out the racemongers as the evildoers who refuse to allow the wounds of bigotry, racial oppression, and segregation to heal.  I'm referring, of course, to the incessant refrain from so-called black leaders who decry as racist every public decision that doesn't cater to their special interests.

The latest example is a gang led by retired advertising executive Bob Crawford and, no surprise, Kent County Commissioner Paul Mayhue, who have vilified as bigots the Grand Rapids Board of Education for not selecting their choice, a black-owned firm, to supervise the school district's substitute teachers.  According to the Grand Rapids Press, Crawford was "absolutely appalled" by the board's decision as appearing "very racist in nature" and typical of a "white power structure [that] leaves us out of most of the governmental and business decisions in mainstream Grand Rapids".

What is actually typical of these disputes is that Crawford's charges are a calumny.  He and his group of activists offer no evidence of racism.  They simply cite the fact that the board didn't hire the black-owned firm they preferred.  Instead the board hired the same firm as seventeen other area school districts because the choice saved the taxpayers the most money.  That's it.  Zero facts to support the ugly charge of racism.  It is for this reason I cannot reasonably conclude that Crawford and Mayhue and their cohorts are acting in good faith.

I would like to think otherwise, especially because I have made common cause with Mayhue in the past on an important issue.  But accusing people of calculated bigotry is a serious matter, and I would be ashamed of myself to do so without a shred of evidence.  Could it have truly escaped the conscience of both Crawford and Mayhue that they are tarring the reputations of people without good cause?  I suspect they are so free with their strident denunciations of the Grand Rapids school board, because they don't honestly believe their own accusations and don't expect anyone of consequence to take them seriously either.  Not doubt there is also a healthy amount of end-justifying-the-means sanctimony in that mix, too.

If so, what they are doing is particularly reprehensible.

That's because, if for no other reason, Crawford, Mayhue, and company are refusing to let the wrongs of the past slip into history by stirring distrust and paranoia in the generation raised since the collapse of government-enforced segregation that is now coming into power.  They are poisoning the well of comity and exhausting the goodwill of those who have learned the lessons of the civil rights era.  I have already explained how this is so here and here, so I won't reiterate those points now.  Suffice it to say that I am not giving up on the ideal of a colorblind society and will continue to call out those who would derail us from that destination, even if that means I will be perversely labeled as bigoted or heartless or ignorant for doing so.

BIG BUCKS FOR NEW SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT

The Grand Rapids public school board is gushing over its offer to compensate Bernard Taylor $200K+ a year over the next five years to serve as the district's superintendent.  According to the Grand Rapids Press, the board members drove the pay package far beyond the compensation for outgoing superintendent Bert Bleke to top the offer the wealthy Forest Hills public school district made to its new superintendent.  If Taylor accepts the Grand Rapids offer, he will be the highest paid school superintendent in Kent County, perhaps West Michigan.

Interesting that what suburbanites living in McMansions outside of town have decided to pay their superintendent dictates what Grand Rapids taxpayers' should pay theirs.  Despite the inclination of board member Jim Rinck and board president Amy McGlynn to crow about the top-dollar deal they negotiated with Taylor, that's nothing to brag about -- especially when they guaranteed it for five years when the norm is a three-year contract.  After all, Taylor needs the gig more than the Grand Rapids public school district needs him.

Of course, officials like the board members of the Grand Rapids public school district are spending other people's money.  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised then that they think it's a brilliant piece of negotiating to give a man just fired from his last job a big raise.

THE WALKING DEAD

Last night the Grand Rapids public school board selected a candidate to replace Bert Bleke as the district's superintendent.  Under pressure from a vocal minority of the district's parents to hire on the basis of skin color, the school board caved and announced that Bernard Taylor will replace Bleke.

Taylor is black, as are two-fifths of the kids enrolled in the GRPS.  Considering Taylor's less-than-stellar performance as the ousted superintendent of the Kansas City, Missouri, public school system, it's hard to conclude that race wasn't the board's deciding factor in his selection.

Oh, you didn't know that Taylor was fired by the Kansas City public school board?  Of course, not.  Why should the Grand Rapids Press report that?  He was dumped after a five-year reign as superintendent during which the dismal K.C. public schools continued to lose students to suburban and charter schools.  Sound familiar?  In desperation, Taylor withheld from a group of charter schools a mandatory distribution of about $6 million in taxpayer funds and a filed a lawsuit to try to shut them down.  It appears coercing the competition into oblivion is Taylor's strategy for keeping students from fleeing a rotten school district.

Also keep in mind, folks, that for about two decades a Missouri federal judge has ordered both city and suburban property owners to pay huge sums in property taxes to the Kansas City public school district.  Force-fed these tax dollars, the district built palaces of educational luxuries and still parents kept going elsewhere for the education of their children.  Believe it or not, the district even began shelling out cash to provide taxi service to get new students to enroll.

Even today, the K.C. system remains awash in cash, about $200 million in various savings accounts and funds.  So money was not the problem in Kansas City, yet the decline of the city's schools and exodus of students continued under Taylor's watch.  (Well, there was an uptick in performance when he lowered standards for the students.  Does that sound familiar too?)

So, Taylor has indeed witnessed the sort of failure plaguing the Grand Rapids public schools.  But nothing in his record indicates that he understands it.  Whether the school board was pusillanimous in the face of race-mongering or took a liking to Taylor's status-quo educratic mindset, their selection of Taylor shows that they also don't understand it.

The model of public education -- that has fattened teacher salaries, benefits, and pensions, empowered the death grip the teacher unions have on one of the country's two major political parties, bloated administrative staffs, leveled and gutted all instruction to the lowest common denominator, infested every issue with the malignancy of racial politics, and despite all the rhetoric and hand-wringing has put the individual student dead last as a priority -- is the only approach to education of our kids that Taylor and the school board can comprehend.  All they know is that any challenge to this decrepit and rotten system must be destroyed.  Hence, Taylor's lawsuit and the school board's sale of Huff School to impede the expansion of the charter school system.

That is why school districts like Kansas City and our own number among the walking dead.  There is no vitality left in them, except the insitutional legacy that keeps them stumbling forward until each finally collapses once and for all.  They are only corpses to be scavenged for the taxpayer dollars that remain attached to them.  Neither Taylor nor the school board understand that also killing off competing schools will not do a single them to bring these corpses back to life.

CONGRATULATIONS TO MELVIN "SUGAR" MCLAUGHLIN

Your Executive Director would like to give a thumb's up to his old classmate, Melvin "Sugar" McLaughlin.  Melvin is well-remembered in town as a basketball star for Creston High School and Central Michigan University.  Today he is still in the game as a volunteer assistant coach at Creston.  This evening Creston is holding a ceremony to retire No. 15, Melvin's jersey number.  It is a long overdue honor.

I attended school and graduated with Melvin.  Unlike him, I wasn't much of an athlete.  But with his friendly encouragement to excel, even I of all people managed to letter at Creston.  So, congratulations, Melvin.  Plus the staff of the Local Area Watch also wish you a swift recovery on your knee surgery.

GUTLESS U-M CAVES ON BRONZES

For nearly sixty years the bronze sculptures of "Dream of the Young Man" and "Dream of the Young Girl" graced the entrance of the Literature, Science, and the Arts Building at the center of the University of Michigan campus.  They were the work of Marshall Fredericks who also produced the famous two-story high "Spirit of Detroit" sculpture in downtown Detroit.

However, the bronzes offend the pieties of the modern college campus, which today resembles something closer to a police state than a sanctuary for free thinking.  The sculptures have vexed campus feminists for some time now, and the pusillanimous U-M President Mary Sue Coleman has caved in to them.  The sin of Fredericks's work:  The male figure dreams of a ship at sea while the female figure dreams of taming the wilderness as a pioneer mother.  You'd think Coleman gets paid enough (she is the highest paid state official at three-quarters of million dollars a year) to tell the P.C. police to take a hike, but I guess not.

But give the gutless wonder some credit.  Coleman could've gone Taliban on the bronzes and blasted them to smithereens like the Islamists did to the Buddha figures carved into an Afghan mountainside.  Instead she had the dreamers carted off to a remote corner of the campus.  So art endures, if obscured, in her grotty little fiefdom of intellectual poseurs and petty inquisitions.

TEACHERS UNION DEFEATED

On Wednesday the Ingham County Circuit Court in Lansing booted a lawsuit brought by the Michigan Education Association, the union for public school teachers.  The MEA tried to get the court to shut down thirty-two charter schools operated by Bay Mills Community College, an Indian institution located in the U.P.  One of Bay Mills charter schools is Vista Charter Academy in Wyoming.

The MEA wanted the court to cut off state funding to all the schools chartered by Bay Mills that were not sited on the Indian reservation in Brimley.  Apparently the MEA thought that the Indian college should not have the same right as all other public universities in the state to charter a school anywhere in Michigan.  Fortunately, the court in Lansing put a stop to this nasty piece of business by the MEA.

The lesson from this is that the education of your children is not a priority for the teachers union.  The MEA will do whatever it takes to protect its monopoly on the public school teaching contracts in this state.  The union knows that monopoly is threatened by charter schools, so it files lawsuits like the one against Bay Mills to crush that competition -- even if it means arguing that Indians don't have the same rights as everyone else in Michigan.

When it comes to defending their turf and all the tax dollars attached to it, the teachers union will get as ugly as it needs -- and the kids and common decency be damned.

CALEDONIA'S CREDIT CARD CROOK

Last night the board of Calendonia's public school district suspended with pay Superintendent Wes VanDenburg.  VanDenburg is accused of embezzling from the school district sixteen thousand dollars over the past year by charging personal expenses to the district's credit card and billing for fraudulent reimbursements.

The suspected embezzlements were mostly nickel-and-dime stuff, like tanking up the family car or getting a couple of sandwiches at the Subway.  One has to wonder what drives a man the public is paying $170,000 a year to run a small suburban school district and only a year away from collecting a cushy pension to steal sixteen grand.  VanDenburg claims he was only being "generous" by buying meals for others.  Of course, the amount or the motivation aren't the issue.  VanDenburg violated a public trust.  He had no business being generous with the money the taxpayers entrusted him with.  He had a duty to spend that money as carefully as possible to educate the district's students.

However, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude from the evidence that VanDenburg is guilty of something more than sloppy bookkeeping of his generosity.  As illustrated on the front page of the Sunday Press, a receipt for $6.97 spent at a cafe doesn't turn into one for $36.97 without someone making a deliberate decision to put a "3" in front of the original amount.  The school board has a duty to the taxpayers and the residents of Caledonia to punish this wrongdoing, including criminal prosecution.

Well, it looks like the school board, after some hemming and hawing, is getting serious about dealing with VanDenburg.  Board President Dennis Atkinson certainly has been on point about VanDenburg's graft, despite significant opposition from some board members and the community.  Some of the most vociferous support for the disgraced VanDenburg has been from Board Treasurer Ken Yonker.  I find that interesting, because isn't it Yonker's job to be the watchdog of district funds?  His position is like that of a security guard arguing to go easy on the thief that broke in during his shift.  Plainly it is in Yonker's political interest to whitewash what happened instead of explaining how money was stolen from the public on his watch.

Voters in Caledonia might want to keep that in mind in the next school board election.

WHAT THE GRPS CAN LEARN FROM K-MART

School choice is the law of the land in Michigan.  No longer are parents compelled to send their children to a particular public school based upon where they live.  If a school in another district has room, their kids can go there.  Now that parents have this liberty, school choice has been a bane to the Grand Rapids public school district, hemorrhaging hundreds of students each year (nearly a thousand just this fall) to suburban districts – and the seven grand in annual state funding which follows each student to his or her new school.

The huge loss of those tax dollars has put the GRPS on the verge of bankruptcy.  So school superintendent Bert Bleke has demanded that at least a portion of that $7,000 should stay behind to fill the coffers of declining districts like his.  He complains that the “sudden” departure of students each year makes planning tough and so the GRPS must retain some of the state funds for the departing students to pay for the “transition”.  Hmm.  I’m not sure what is sudden or unpredictable about any of this.  The exodus each fall of city kids to suburban schools is well-established, so one wonders why Bleke and company simply don’t budget for the smaller student population.

Indeed, decline can be profitable.  Consider the example of K-Mart.  It lost out to tough competition from retailers like Wal-Mart, Costco, and Meijer’s.  It had to shut down stores by the score, but in doing so, the failing retailer had a lot of valuable infrastructure to sell off.  So much so, that K-Mart ended up with enough cash to buy that most venerable of all U.S. retailers, Sears & Roebuck.  The opportunity for the GRPS is not as dramatic, but it is similar.  But instead of exploiting apparent misfortune to slay sacred cows and innovate, all Bleke can do is moan that the taxpayers aren’t rewarding him sufficiently for the failure of his school district.

What should we expect?  This is the same man who thought it was a better deal to sell Huff elementary school to a developer who will demolish the building instead of a 40% higher offer from a company that would have kept the school open to local residents.  This is the same man who privatized the bus drivers but would never open the teaching contract to competitive bidding.  This is the same man who is going to stick with the GRPS for only five years, but will hang on long enough to double dip by drawing both a pension and a consulting fee from it.

Further proof that educators are the worst-suited people to run our public schools.

BLEKE CHEATS TAXPAYERS

According TV8 news yesterday, Bleke got the Grand Rapids Public School board to go along with him to reject a $1.38 million cash offer for Huff School from a charter school company, Mosaica.  Instead the board accepted a $1 million offer from the Red Stone Group, a developer who plans to demolish the school building for a new subdivision and condos.  So Bleke and the board cheated the taxpayers out of over a third of million dollars to stomp out competition from another charter school.  Further proof that the first priority for the GRPS is protecting the jobs of administrators and teachers, not students or heaven forbid the taxpayers.

UPDATE ON HUFF

New information on the GRPS’s sale of Huff School.  Mosaica, the charter school outfit from Atlanta and the high bidder at $1.38 million, extended the deadline for accepting its offer until Thursday, November 17th.  So Superintendent Bleke caused an unnecessary panic by calling an emergency school board meeting on Wednesday to respond to Mosaica by its old deadline.  It appears that Mosaica had already made clear that its deadline was extended by that time.  Furthermore, it looks like Bleke didn’t tell the board that Mosaica gave the GRPS the opportunity to sponsor the charter school it wants to run out of Huff School.  Making Mosaica look as bad as possible, because its charter school would compete with the city school system, is consistent with Bleke’s backing of the $1,000,000 from the Red Stone Group, which would demolish Huff School and build residential housing there.  The bottom line, folks, is that Bleke, by hook or by crook, will protect the GRPS establishment at the expense of the best interest of the students and taxpayers – and it doesn’t look like the school board is prepared to do much about Bleke’s misfeasance.

HUFF HIJINX

The shrinking Grand Rapids public school district has a surplus inventory of elementary schools on the northeast end of town.  So, it only makes sense to sell one of them, the old Huff Elementary School and its eleven acres of grounds along Ball Avenue.  An outfit from Atlanta, Georgia, called Mosaica Education put in a $1.38 million cash offer for the property to re-open it as a charter school.  Not bad, especially when the other offer was for only $800,000, 57% of the Mosaic offer, with no payment for a year and a half from Midwest Housing, which would demolish the school and erect low-income housing in its place.

No brainer, right?  Wrong.  The GRPS board has been tussling with how to rationalize taking the offer from Midwest Housing, in which board member David Allen has an interest (though he recused himself from the process), instead of the Mosaica offer.  The board has been more concerned about protecting turf for the GRPS from further charter school competition than its obligation to balance the books by raising cash from the sale of unused buildings.  However, it looked like the board wasn't going to be able to square that circle.  The difference between the two bids was too large.

But at the last minute on Friday, the Red Stone Group came in with a $1 million cash offer for the Huff site to build mid-range condos and homes.  Oh sure, the feel-good sop of building low-income housing would be out the window, but the financial terms were a whole lot better than what Midwest Housing was offering.  Maybe so, but Red Stone's out-of-the-blue offer still stinks compared to Mosaica's.  Mosaica is offering the taxpayers 38% more cash and will keep a school intact on the property in a neighborhood that would otherwise be devoid of any community hub.

The Mosaica offers expires today, so it'll be interesting to see how far the GRPS board will go to screw the taxpayers to raise a barrier against further competition.

THE PROBLEM WITH TEACHERS

I grew up on the northeast side of town.  Thirty-some years ago I attended Aberdeen elementary school.  So it was with some nostalgic interest I read about GRPS Superintendent Bert Bleke's plan to consolidate my alma mater with North Park elementary school because of the continued flight of students from the city's public schools.  Where there were once six public schools for all the kids in my neighborhood -- Aberdeen, Riverside, Crestview, Wellerwood, North Park, and Huff -- there will now only be one.  Oh well, if parents are sending their children elsewhere, Bleke's gotta shut down empty buildings, right?

Right.  Thus his plan to consolidate that last two remaining elementary schools in the upper northeast end of the city.  That's sensible enough, except that instead of using one of six empty buildings for the last of the students -- three or four of those schools aren't much older than I am -- Bleke wants to build a new school for them.  The GRPS is near financial ruin, classroom performance is in the dumper, and students are bailing out of the district at a record pace.  So Bleke's solution is to build more schools!  Insanity.

This is the problem with teachers, principals, and administrators -- i.e., the educrats who rule over our public schools.  They think money grows on trees.  Worse, they have this strange sense of entitlement that the taxpayers always owe them more and more.  Therefore, ingrained in the minds of the educrats are lunacies such as they are underpaid and that we greedy taxpayers are starving them of the funds they need to educate our little darlings.  The fact is, our public schools are wallowing in tax dollars, most of which goes to pay the premium salaries and benefits of the educrats (who still can't get enough and double dip) and to construct new digs for them to drill our children in the latest p.c. nonsense.

Recently, Jay Greene and Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute completed a study that puts the lie to the propoganda that our public schools are impoverished.  In the U.S. the federal and state governments spend nearly a half a trillion dollars for public education every year.  That's more than we spend on the defense of our country during a shooting war.  That spending averages out to $10,000 per K-12 student annually.  Adjusted for inflation, that per student figure has doubled since I attended dear ol' Aberdeen School.  Yet, achievement scores in math and reading remain flat over that period, while science and social study scores have fallen.  Worse is that graduation rates have also dropped.  Bottom line:  The taxpayers keep spending more and more on education, and they get less and less.

And where does that money go?  To fatter teacher salaries and benefits.  The next time someone rants about how poorly public school teachers are paid, keep this in mind.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics collected by Greene and Winters the average pay for elementary school teachers is $30.75 an hour, not including benefits.  Compare that to firemen who average only $17.91 or cops at $22.64 -- and they put their lives on the line for us.  Among professionals Greene and Winters point out that teachers are better paid than biologists ($28.07), mechanical engineers ($29.76), and chemists ($30.68), and do almost as well as dentists ($35.51) and nuclear engineers ($36.16).  Yet our public school teachers do not have to measure up to objective standards of performance like any of these other professionals do.  With the solid grip their unions have on our public school systems, all teachers have to do to get paid better is stick around for a raise every year and in the meantime collect a next-to-useless masters or PhD in education.  With an easy ride like that, no wonder teachers battle taxpayers against merit-pay proposals.

Among the educrats there is a complete disconnect between spending money on themselves and the effort taxpayers must expend to make that money.  Only in the la-la land of the educrats can teachers think they are underpaid while receiving wages at a rate nearly double that of our firemen and can our very own Superintendent Bleke put forward nutty plans like constructing new schools in a shrinking system.  I have to wonder if the only thing that'll remove the scales from their eyes is the widespread collapse of our public schools.  After all there are only so many more dollars the taxpayers can feed the educrats while educrats in turn produce lousier results every year.

P.S.  Read here for my caveats regarding the good apples in public education, the limits of what teachers can do, and the lack of causation between more money and better-educated students.  That should address the routine complaints of my criticism of the public school system.

SCHOOL DAZE

The Grand Rapids Public School Board of Education must be in a daze in light of its recent infighting over inconsequentials while the system is unraveling under its poor performance, loss of students, and budget cuts.

For example, half the board is up in arms, “appalled” according to boardmember Jim Rinck, because Superintendent Bert Bleke gathered information for a plan to close down schools before they gave him the go-ahead.  Keep in mind, all this is about is the collection of data for a possible response to the shrinking school system.  Nothing Bleke has done has committed the board to any course of action.  I’m no fan of Bleke, but it borders upon the unreal that boardmembers are rioting over his failure to get a “pretty please” from them before doing what you’d think he was hired to do.

Meanwhile, boardmembers are at each other’s throats with charges of racism and tokenism flying back and forth over the mundane matter of hiring a search firm to find a replacement for Bleke, who is stepping down at the end of the school year.  Boardmembers Arnie Smith-Alexander and Catherine Mueller were engaged in mortal combat because Alexander thinks the firm Mueller favors isn’t sufficiently “diverse”, while Mueller thinks the racial composition of a firm is irrelevant to its performance.  Mueller’s right of course, but that still begs the question of why the board is spending $18,000 to hire consultants to do the job it was elected to perform.

And so it goes as the Grand Rapids Public School District continues getting sucked down a black hole of failure.

NAME GAME GREENLIGHTED

While twiddling its thumbs over the huge loss of five percent of the student body in the space of one year, the Grand Rapids Public School board of education approved the hackneyed renaming two elementary schools after union-organizer Cesar Chavez and civil rights leader Martin Luther King.  Come Fall 2006 Sibley School will get the Chavez moniker and Henry School will be MLK.  If board members were sincere in this name game, they could have found local icons to honor.  They do exist and speak well of the city’s progressiveness regarding race.  But that’s not the reason for the renaming.

Using the names of Chavez and King, two men who have had nothing to do with River City, the school board is playing to the P.C. mindset that bows to the racial grievance industry in town.  By throwing these bones, somehow the board members must’ve thought it would make up for the GRPS’s spectacular failure to deliver a decent education to inner city residents of Grand Rapids.  This pointless exercise in the politics of the craven will do NOTHING to help the students stuck in the city’s underperforming public schools.  And, as this year’s plunge in enrollment shows, it will do even less to attract new students to the GRPS.

Only when we can get past race-mongering to discuss honestly the failure of our public schools, especially urban systems like the GRPS, will we find the will to make genuine reforms.  Stunts like the GRPS’s trivialization of race with its name game does nothing good and sets us back.