Colleagues also have been murmuring that Nasheed’s bill to change the law that enabled the current move for the state to intervene in the administration of St. Louis Public Schools is pointless. A change in law could prevent this process from happening again, but at this point a court injunction is needed to stop the process that is already underway.
It is also ironic to note that the “stop the takeover” movement actually may have hurt its own cause and the best interests of the district’s students – if activist pressure can be given any credit for the advisory panel’s recommendation for a partial, rather than a complete, state intervention.
Some public school advocates operating on reason rather than adrenaline have pointed out that a complete state intervention would have put the city schools in the hands of the state Board of Elementary and Education, which is at the moment run – not by evil monsters who eat urban children for breakfast – but rather by a cohort of strong public school advocates. The partial takeover, on the other hand, gives two of the three appointments on the transitional administrative panel to known proponents of privatizing education – Mayor Francis G. Slay and Ed Martin, chief of staff for Governor Matt Blunt, who clearly wears the pants in this governor’s mansion.