Someone needs to tell the Post-Dispatch’s designated “black” columnist Sylvester Brown that it was his fault that his sporadically printed monthly – sometimes bimonthly, sometimes whenever-he-could-find-a-commercial-sponsor-for-his-front-page – magazine failed. It was not the fault of the St. Louis American or its publisher, Donald M. Suggs. Brown should admit defeat – finally – and move on to other subjects and targets.
Perhaps his editors should also review how often Brown uses the Post to grind his personal axe against this paper (as he did once again last Sunday) and consider how well the paper’s readers are being served by Brown’s obsessive airing of his personal grievances.
The Post’s staff race man also needs to learn how to distinguish an editorial from a column. In Brown’s column on Sunday, he blasted as an “editorial” what actually was a brief comment in last week’s EYE. The item in the EYE attributed then-state Rep.-elect Jamilah Nasheed’s call for the state Board of Education to conduct a public hearing on the report about SLPS issued by the Special Advisory Committee to her political inexperience.
Brown is not the most skilled journalist, but it is safe to assume that he can distinguish an editorial from a political column. Assuming Brown made that distinction, he apparently upgraded a brief item in the EYE to a full-blown editorial position in an attempt to drag the American into the mud.
This is important, because Brown further snipes that the alleged editorial doesn’t disclose that the paper’s publisher served on the committee in question. This point would be useless when made against an item in the EYE, which as Brown knows is an “inside baseball” column where things are not always spelled out in the more formal manner of a news report – or an “editorial.” We assume that readers of this part of the paper know the inside players.
Other than attempt to smear Suggs for taking as an editorial position what was only a little barb in the EYE, all Brown does in the column is cut and paste the talking points being distributed weekly by school board members Peter Downs and William Purdy. It would be helpful if Brown actually read and criticized the findings of this advisory committee, which were arrived at after a formidable investigative process that solicited broad input from this community and beyond.
Instead, Brown – the fearless advocate for city schools who lives in the county and sends his children to a private school – has becomes nothing more than a mouthpiece for a group of self-serving naysayers who over the past five years have not provided one cogent proposal to sustain and improve the educational outcomes of the 30,000 children who attend St. Louis Public Schools. You know, the folks who attack anyone who does not blame Mayor Francis G. Slay for the dismal academic failure of the public schools over the years.
Brown’s statement that much of the “district’s chaos” started in 2003 also lazily follows these talking points. The current mess in the St. Louis Public Schools began long before 2003, Sylvester. It began when past board members decided to hire caretakers as superintendents, instead of effective, innovative academic leaders. Slay is not responsible for pre-2003 MAP test scores that revealed that only two 10th graders passed the math and verbal skills portions of the test.
As for Nasheed’s “inexperience,” the point is that the advisory committee held its meetings in public, as required by law. Reporters from the American who covered these meetings did not see Nasheed nor Brown at these meetings. More meetings, scheduled after the committee has finished the work it was commissioned to do, would be a last-ditch effort to give nihilists a forum to showboat and emit more sound and fury, signifying nothing – or further the interests of special-interest groups, who are alarmed that the district will undergo needed systemic change that will disturb their current privileged status.
As for the claims that the elected school board is being sidestepped by the recommendations of the committee, maybe Downs and Purdy should go back and recount their votes, and copy Sylvester on their math. At the moment, a majority of the elected board members, led by board president Veronica O’Brien, support the recommendations of the committee.