Shortsighted Reform

April 16, 2013

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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.”

In An Instant

August 4, 2015

The icebergs that enter the harbors along Newfoundland’s north shore started to form thousands of years ago. They broke from ice flows 10 times their size and then got caught in a current that carried them on a 1,000-mile, two-year journey to “Iceberg Alley.” Some of them drift into harbors and, with seven-eighths of their mass below the surface, they get grounded. Eventually they break apart and disappear.

My wife and I “discovered” one of these grounded ‘bergs near the shore of cozy little Coffee Cove. After a 15-minute hike, we got closer to this sparkling monster than third base is to home plate. We each snapped dozens of pictures.

Just as we were turning to begin our hike back to “civilization,” we heard what we thought was a loud gunshot. But what actually occurred was a portion of the iceberg breaking off and falling into the water.

What we had taken pictures of moments earlier no longer existed as it had at that time. In an instant, the iceberg had changed, without respect for the thousands of years in the making and the hundreds of miles of traveling.

A few days after we returned to Michigan, Rich Tompkins died, apparently healthy, just after waterskiing. Death came without respect for the miles Rich had traveled to serve student-athletes and coaches, and without regard to all the victories his teams had earned and MHSAA championships they had won.

I last saw Rich on Valentine’s Day at the first-ever Fremont High School Hall of Fame induction banquet where Rich and many of his athletes were honored. The pictures taken that night are of people and circumstances that can never be reassembled.

We need to more fully appreciate the miracle of such moments. They can be gone in an instant.