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.”
RESPECTING RULES
November 20, 2015
For nearly a full century, the high schools of Michigan have stood in opposition to national high school athletic championships. As they existed in the early years of school sports, and even today, such events have very often exploited students and benefited commercial sponsors most. Such events are beyond the limited resources of most local schools; and allowing one school to participate tends to require other schools to go to the same extremes to remain competitive, creating the kind of arms war in school sports that now drives college sports further and further from their academic mission.
A decade ago, Michigan school districts added the following language to permit participation in national scope tournaments by individuals and groups of young people who had no connection to or similarity with a school team on which they had participated during the school season. The full and complete rule states:
A national high school championship includes any athletic event, regardless of title, which attempts to draw to it or its qualifying rounds only the top place winner or winners from more than one state high school association championship meet or is based upon high school regular-season or postseason tournament performances. A student may participate without loss of eligibility if all of the following conditions are met:
a. The event is not called or promoted as a national high school championship;
b. Qualification is not based on performances in the high school season or MHSAA tournament results;
c. The event is open to all non-school teams or individuals who qualify directly through one or more non-school events, or the event is without qualifying standards and is open to any individual who pays the entry fee;
d. If a team event, teams are not to be made up of students from a single MHSAA member school;
e. Teams and individuals do not represent an MHSAA member school; and
f. No MHSAA member school uniforms, transportation, funds or coaches are involved.
It is important to note that included in the universe of unapproved events are those tournaments, regardless of what they are named or for which there are qualifying rounds, which ATTEMPT to draw the best performers from the high school season. Whether or not this attempt is successful ... whether the event attracts the best performers or only the second-, third-, fourth- or worse performers ... the student-athletes of Michigan school districts may only participate if there is compliance with ALL SIX elements listed.
The intent of part "d" of the rule is to help assure that the participating teams from Michigan really and truly are NOT school teams, and to assure that no school team is masquerading as a non-school team but really extending the season beyond the limits agreed to by all school districts, thus undermining the fairness that other schools expect.
This 10-year old rule has been applied to every circumstance brought to the MHSAA's attention and to countless more where school districts knew and followed the rule without guidance from the MHSAA. It is such respect for rules that we honor and encourage, even as the organization facilitates a thorough vetting of rules prior to school districts joining the MHSAA by local board of education action each year.