Columnist Jamala Rogers
Some would argue that the state Board of Education’s decision to take over the St. Louis Public Schools is a die that has been cast. Such doom suggests that the decision is irrevocable, and that is not true.
What appears to be truer is embedded in Commissioner D. Kent King’s statement at the recent board meeting that, to paraphrase him, important people want this to happen. Those people wouldn’t be the hundreds of parents, students, teachers and other concerned citizens who oppose the takeover.
A myriad of responses by angry citizens have been offered, including law suits, school shutdowns, teacher strikes, disruption of events like next month’s NCAA game at the Dome and other tactics to stop a runaway train.
The decision by the King (that’s what he’s acting like) reminds me of a few other societal issues whose underlying bullish motivations are revealed over time.
The illegal invasion of Iraq under the pretense that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction took on a living lie of its own. In the meantime, billions of tax dollars have been wasted, thousands of U.S. and Iraqi people have perished and the lives of many others forever altered. The reasons have changed until none make much sense except that there’s oil in dem der Iraqi ground that Bush and his cronies want.
The death penalty was supposedly enacted to punish the most heinous of murders. Years of work by death penalty opponents has exposed that is the poor, people of impaired mental and emotional states, people of color, etc. who were the victims of an unjust system. An innocent person being executed was only the cost of doing business. And speaking of costs, it was proven that life without parole is less costly than a death sentence. What’s left standing looks like some kind of sophisticated ethnic and class cleansing of who the state deems undesirable.
There is irrefutable evidence that state or mayoral takeovers are not a silver bullet to the crisis of urban school districts. The miraculous upswing in the accreditation process under Superintendent Diana Bourisaw is irrelevant. No real facts are being seriously considered.
What many have concluded is that the mayor and others are trying for a New Orleans-style school district whereby the preferred white citizens of the city will be given their own school district. The majority of poor and working class students will have to figure out their own fate as district resources are put in the hands of an elite effectively re-segregating the district.
King has asked for impossible tasks for the district to comply with such as supplying printed programs from past high school graduations.
This is like a fairy tale where the King doesn’t want his beautiful daughter to marry a certain man and sends him out to find a five-leaf clover at the top of the Himalaya Mountains. Or that his daughter must find the right toad to kiss that will turn into a handsome prince. The only way either of those will happen is if the fairy godmother intercedes of their behalf, guiding them to the designated person to satisfies the ridiculous requirement.
For the children in the St. Louis Public Schools, this is anything but a fairy tale and there are no fairy godmothers. We stewards of public education are not fairies, but we must fight for a fair process and just outcomes for our children and our future.