From: Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>
The publicly-elected school board for the city of St. Louis has been
completely stripped of power. A three-member board will take over
the schools on June 15th. Of the three members, one is appointed by
voucher-loving and pro-privatization Republican governor Matt Blunt.
Another is appointed by voucher-loving and pro-privatization
Republican mayor Francis Slay.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070322/ap_on_re_us/st__louis_schools
Current St. Louis Public Schools Board member Peter Downs wrote an
eloquent history of the current situation and a powerful defense of
the democratically-elected board. Find it here:
http://www.stltu.org/readmoredownsletter.html
A lot of people framed this issue as one concerning a dysfunctional
board, i.e., it was largely a matter of personalities and people not
being able to get along. What they forget is that the board was in
the middle of regaining control from Mayor Slay. They forget the
havoc that Slay had created in bringing in Bill Roberti and his crew
and dismantling the board once before. (Roberti and his company are
now at work in New Orleans -
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_14/b3978082.htm -
doing to it what they did to St. Louis) They forget that it was
going to take a long time to undo what Slay and Roberti had done.
But they were making slow, steady progress. Had the board not been
rendered powerless by the state's usurpation, the elections in April
would doubtless have completed the process. The people of St. Louis
spoke last year and kicked two of Slay's candidates off the board.
They would have completed that work this year, leaving Slay with no
more puppets on the board.
Rather than risk this, Slay helped to orchestrate this coup d' etat.
This is naked political aggression, pure and simple. It's framed as
an attempt to help the schools. But when any attempt runs directly
counter to the expressed will of the voters, one has to wonder about
the real motivations behind these actions.
What troubles me most about these attempts to "help" -- in St.
Louis, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Oakland, in New York City --
is the extent to which they mirror the racist prejudices seen in
"the white man's burden" typical of colonial rule. The British
colonialists of the 19th and early 20th century were not explicitly
racist in their beliefs and practices. Far from it. But their
actions belied their inherently patronizing and self-serving
ideology that consciously and unconsciously framed "the colonial
other" as inferior. Clearly, in the eyes of the state board and
everyone who supports this take-over, the people of St. Louis are
incapable of governing themselves and solving their own problems. It
just so happens that the majority of people in the city of St. Louis
are black, and the vast majority of students affected by this
decision are black.
Such an act would be literally inconceivable in a district where the
majority of students were white.
Peter