commentary on St. Louis schools takeover

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

A Cruel Hoax

by Peter Downs
St. Louis Public Schools Board Member

William Danforth and his Special Advisory Committee on St. Louis Public
Schools . . . showed that they care nothing for the children in St.
Louis Public Schools. That is when they unveiled their shocking
recommendation to put city public schools back under the oversight of the
man most responsible for their financial and academic crisis,  the man whose
failed education policies were decisively rejected by the voters of St.
Louis, Mayor Francis Slay.

Four years ago, Slay; the Danforth Foundation; Danforth's co-chair on the
Special Advisory Committee, Frankie Freeman; and fellow advisory committee
member Donald Suggs, hatched a plot to take over the St. Louis Board of
Education. They succeeded in getting their representatives elected to the
school board. In the three years they controlled the school board, they
refused to balance the budget, and even adopted a five year plan of growing
deficits to bankrupt the school district. Over the same period, they took
the district from near full accreditation (64 points on the scale the state
department of education was using to measure the performance of school
districts) down to an unaccredited level (39 points). They oversaw the
growth of violence and instability in the schools, and blithely ignored
state regulations.

Holding them accountable for their failures, the voters roundly rejected the
first of Slay's candidates to come up for reelection.

Now Danforth, Freeman, et al say that financial stability and academic
performance will be best served by going back to that failed regime for
another six years. Technically, their proposal is that Slay partner with his
friend the governor, Matt "Send 'em to Private Schools" Blunt to run the
schools through their appointments to a three-person "transition board."
(Veronica O'Brien is running around saying she is going to be one of those
appointments. Whether Slay has been playing her to buy her off, or he really
will appoint her, only time will tell.) The third person on the transition
board would be powerless window-dressing from the president of the board of
aldermen.

How can anyone say with a straight face that the man who approved a plan to
bankrupt the school district will bring financial stability if given a
second chance? Or that the man, who still defends the decisions that drove
the schools' performance downward will bring improved performance? It took a
brazen act of moral and intellectual dishonesty.

As human beings, we want to know why things happen, so we can do better the
next time. In school, we constantly are taught to learn from the past and
learn from our mistakes. Figuring out what we did wrong is what allows us to
progress and do better.

Danforth's committee explicitly rejected the idea of learning from the past.
They stated they were not interested in why the city's public school
district slid so rapidly into financial and academic crisis in recent years.
They were going to make their suggestions without understanding how the
district got to where it is.

That is intellectually dishonest. If your car's motor stops running, you
want a mechanic who will figure out what is wrong with it , not one who just
tells you to drop a match in the gas tank to see if its empty.

Why wouldn't Danforth & Friends want to look for the causes of the
district's problems?

Perhaps because then they'd have to come face-to-face with their own role in
destroying St. Louis public schools, and that is not something they want to
do. And that is morally dishonest.

Danforth's transition board proposal has nothing to do with improving
schools for city children. Just the opposite, it would sacrifice the
possibilities of education for city children to the possibilities of greed
and patronage.