There were moments during her keynote speech at the Salute to Excellence in Education gala on Friday night when Atlanta’s Mayor Shirley Franklin seemed to be speaking directly to St. Louis’ Mayor Francis G. Slay.
The only problem is, Slay was not present to hear her.
Franklin said, “You can’t say you are the education president, education governor or education mayor, then cut funding for schools.”
Or, she might have added, more specifically: You can’t claim to be the education mayor then refuse to meet with a district superintendent simply because your political enemies hired her after dumping your guy.
Franklin didn’t say that. But she did add, after an almost audible gasp (from a room absolutely full of people following, blow by blow, the crisis in St. Louis Public Schools), “I’ve been reading your paper.”
Slay has earned a name among his admirers – and he has admirers – for being an education mayor, who stuck his neck out to help a district in crisis. At the moment, however, he runs a serious risk of being remembered as a sore loser who abandoned the public schools simply because they became his political Waterloo.
The EYE can admit to being a member of a not-always-popular minority group – that is, those that believed Slay got involved in the St. Louis Public Schools primarily because he wanted to improve teaching and learning in the district.
Forget, for the moment, the issue of black kids and whether or not the mayor cares for their wellbeing. It is the EYE’s belief that the mayor does care for the wellbeing of black children who live in the city, but you don’t have to buy that to believe that he sincerely wants to improve the city’s school district.
Like any urban mayor, Slay is charged with stimulating business and promoting local residency. Businesses need educated workers, and homeowners need schools they can trust. Undereducated people under-produce income and taxes and are more dependent upon public services. For these reasons, even if Slay were the racist dweeb that his fiercest black critics accuse him of being, it would still be rational, indeed essential, for him to want viable schools for the children of St. Louis, black and white.
Slay’s involvement in the public schools was sincere. It was also a failure. He and his appointed helpers, most notably Robin Wahby, were unable to put and keep in place a school board majority that was committed to needed reform. At this point, an endorsement by Slay is all but the kiss of death for an SLPS school board candidate. If Slay is going to ignore SLPS Superintendent Diana Bourisaw but continue to listen to Robin Wahby, then he is throwing good political credibility after bad.
(One also wonders, given how badly Slay’s political efforts in education have failed: If the person who had Wahby’s job were black, would that person still have the job? You don’t think so, either?)
Forget the Monday-morning quarterbacking as to why Slay and Wahby lost the mayor’s battle on behalf of the public schools. Just read the score and admit defeat. But, then, for the love of God and children, do not leave the battlefield – especially not if you plan to let the battle be continued by the state.
Slay has long fought for charter schools in the city. Now he is using the word “choice” an awful lot when he talks about education. “Choice” is the slogan of the school voucher movement. Ed Martin, a former treasurer for All Children Matter, a PAC aggressively pushing legislation that would siphon off public money to defray the costs of private education, now has the second-top job in state government.
A bitter observer of city and state politics told the EYE recently that there is no worry in the state taking over SLPS. He said, “The state of Missouri needs St. Louis public schools like you need a sore (penis).” The EYE shared this quote with Martin this week. Martin laughed and said, “That is a colorful quote. And that is part of the reality of the situation.”
The previously quoted bitter critic also said, “The problem is, there is nothing the city of St. Louis has that the state of Missouri wants.”
Martin vouched for his boss, Governor Matt Blunt, as “a public education guy” and said his own chief-of-staff gig would not further the agenda of All Children Matter. That raises an interesting possibility: Maybe the one thing the city has that some people in state government would want is the mayor’s political support for the school choice movement. But then, a mayor who can’t even elect a few school board candidates in his own back yard really doesn’t have much political clout to trade in when it comes to education, does he?