Shortsighted Reform
April 16, 2013
Our posting of March 29 (“Hit Again”), about the mistakes being made in the guise of reforming education, struck a nerve with readers. And since then, writers with wider audiences have offered similar commentaries, including DeWayne Wickham writing for Gannett as his words appeared on LSJ.com on April 3, 2013:
“The fight against public school closings has become the new civil rights battle in this country – and rightfully so. Faced with a billion dollar budget deficit, Chicago’s public school system is the most recent urban district to announce a massive closure of schools. The city intends to shutter 61 elementary buildings, nearly all of them in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
“That’s a penny-wise-and-pound-foolish decision that condemns the neighborhoods surrounding these soon-to-be-boarded-up schools to further decline. ‘We have resources that are spread much too thin,’ Todd Babbitz, the chief transformation officer (no kidding that’s his title) of Chicago’s troubled school system, told the Chicago Tribune. Over the next decade, school officials predict that these closings will save the school system $560 million. But first the city will have to spend $233 million to move students into classrooms elsewhere.
“Even if the school closings actually produce savings, the damage they will produce to the neighborhoods left without public schools will be catastrophic. While poverty and crime have decimated the population of many inner city neighborhoods, shutting down schools in those troubled areas will depopulate them even faster. The result will be a growing expanse of urban wastelands that could well deepen the budget deficits of the cities that are closing public schools.
“Politicians and school officials must be challenged to justify their school closing decision beyond the deal making of Chicago’s City Council. The U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights division is investigating complaints that claim the decisions of several urban school districts amount to a civil rights violation. If the school closings don’t violate the letter of the law, they sure seem to trample upon its spirit. For example, officials in Chicago and elsewhere should turn these school buildings into hubs for nonprofit organizations and other public services. Why not use the empty space to house police substatations, public health clinics, recreation centers and a mayor’s station?
“School systems in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Detroit and Newark have announced plans to close public schools, and in every case blacks and Hispanics will bear the biggest burden of these cost-cutting measures. These decisions signal an indifference to the damage such policy decisions will have on the neighborhoods.
“‘If we don’t make these changes, we haven’t lived up to our responsibility as adults to the children of the city of Chicago,’ Mayor Rahm Emanuel said. That’s a pretty shortsighted analysis of a problem that will render large swaths of Chicago’s black and Hispanic neighborhoods uninhabitable education wastelands.”
Basketball Tournaments on the Move?
March 3, 2017
It is uncertain where the Michigan High School Athletic Association Boys and Girls Basketball Tournaments, currently at the Breslin Center of Michigan State University, will be conducted in 2018 and 2019; and after that, there are questions of when they will be conducted.
The most serious of several concerns is that MSU can no longer guarantee Breslin’s availability for the MHSAA Semifinals and Finals. This is the result of a change in the format of the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament that assigns its 16 regionals to the top 16 seeded teams.
That schedule conflicts with the MHSAA Girls Basketball Semifinals and Finals in 2018 and 2020, and with the MHSAA Boys Basketball Semifinals and Finals in 2019.
In 2016, when MSU’s women’s basketball team was highly seeded, it had to travel to Mississippi State University because the MHSAA girls tournament was occupying Breslin. The contract that guarantees MHSAA priority ends with this year’s tournament, March 16-18.
The MHSAA is proceeding on two tracks. First, it has just distributed a “Request for Proposal” to MSU and other potential hosts for at least 2018 and 2019. There are options for venues to submit proposals for boys, girls or both.
Second, the MHSAA has begun what is likely to be a long discussion regarding dates. For example, if the girls season started and ended one week earlier, the NCAA conflict may not occur. However, this would likely require a one-week earlier end to the girls volleyball season in the fall, which some people have advocated but others are certain to oppose.
A flipside variation of this idea is to start and end boys basketball season two weeks earlier than is the case now, and to delay the start and end of girls basketball season by one week. This is a means of reducing the volleyball/basketball overlap for girls in November, and it would avoid that March weekend when the NCAA Division I women’s tournament can be a conflict.
Another option is to start the boys season one week earlier, extend the girls season one week later, and conduct the two tournaments simultaneously over four weeks – different days of the same weeks for Districts and Regionals; with Semifinals for both genders around the state on the weekend when the girls tournament has ended in the past; and then Finals for boys and girls at a single site on the Friday and Saturday when the boys tournament has traditionally ended.
Unless things change at the NCAA level, none of these models guarantees a schedule that is always free of conflicts with both the boys and girls MHSAA tournaments. Therefore, other innovative but possibly even more intrusive, changeable and tradition-breaking calendar adjustments could also be investigated that might provide a better long-term solution than merely changing venues.
Venue decisions are the responsibility of MHSAA management and should be made by early May. Calendar changes, if any, will be membership driven and may take more than 18 months to finalize.