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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.”

Scheduling Controversy

November 14, 2017

A dozen years ago, I asked our counterpart organizations in other states if they scheduled their schools’ regular-season varsity football games. Very few did so.

More recently, I’ve realized that I didn’t ask enough questions. It turns out that few statewide high school associations tell schools who they play each week of the regular season. However, many more give schools the group of opponents they may schedule. They place schools in leagues and/or districts and/or regions and instruct schools to schedule from among those schools only or predominantly.

I have been waiting for the tipping point where a sufficient number of high schools in Michigan are sufficiently stressed over scheduling football games that they would turn to the MHSAA to solve the problem.

I’m anticipating this might occur first among schools playing 8-player football, and that success there will lead to our assistance for 11-player schools.

One approach – the simpler solution – would work like this:

  • All 8-player schools within the enrollment limit for the 8-player tournament would be placed in two divisions on the basis of enrollment in early March. About 32 schools in each, based on current participation.

  • At the same time, each division would be divided into four regions of about eight schools.

  • In April, the schools of each region would convene to schedule seven regular season games for each school.

  • Based on current numbers, schools would still have two open weeks to fill, if they wish, for games with schools in other regions or of the other division or in neighboring states.

A second option – the date-specific solution – would provide every school its weekly schedule for all nine dates, or weeks 1 through 8, or weeks 2 through 8, depending on local preferences. This would not be difficult in concept once there is agreement on what criteria would be used and what value each criterion would have.

For example, one important criterion would be similarity of enrollment; another of great value would be proximity. Perhaps league affiliation would be a factor with some value. Perhaps historic rivalries would be another factor with a value. Then the computer spits out schedules for each school for every week for two years, home and away.

I don’t campaign for this task because, frankly, it will produce complaints and controversy. But if this organization exists to serve, then this is a service that today’s chronic complaints tell us we should begin to provide soon.

I suggest we do this for 8-player football for the 2019 and 2020 seasons (with a paper trial run for 2018). If it proves successful, we could expand the service to 11-player schools as soon after as they are satisfied with our efforts for 8-player schools.