Hizzhonor's First Day of School Summit

For those of you who don't know, Mayor Karl (at least he spells his name right) Dean has been pushing to take over direction of Nashville's public schools for some time now. It's easy to understand why. L'onnisciente of Nashville have long proclaimed how bad public schools are. In the past this communal opinion was based upon highly reliable information gained from the neighbor of some cousin or another. Now, it is based upon a quick, but misinformed, reading of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) data. Under NCLB, the failure of a few can place the entire school in failure status.

While Nashville’s schools do have issues, they also provide an excellent education for any child who wants one. For instance, Nashville has 10 International Baccalaureate schools; schools that meet internationally set standards for excellence in education. There are more IB schools on the way. Students in Nashville public schools can graduate with hours of college credit. They can even graduate not believing that humans used to walk around with dinosaurs.

So, our progressive mayor wants to make sure that Nashville’s public schools are the best they can be. Good for him. He has watched as the previous Director imploded over NCLB and representatives of the State stepping in and telling him how to run his schools. He has watched certain school board members play out personal political games, or place other agendas above the education of students. He is naturally enough discouraged by some of the shenanigans that have gone on and he wants to help.

The Mayor, however, is not an educator. He is not trained as an educator and he has no experience as an educator; or with children who have attended public schools for that matter. So, he falls captive to the latest ideas that promise to fix the schools.

For example, charter schools. Charter schools let groups of concerned people work out experiments in education from which all other schools can learn. So far what other schools have learned is that attending school for longer hours and extra days can lead to better grades and that good intentions are not equal to good results. Charter schools recruit students and parents who are committed to a better education. That their results are better can as easily be linked to student and parent commitment as it can be to some brilliant new pedagogical method. New is not necessarily better. Remember New Math anyone? Also keep in mind that charter schools (and magnet schools) remove committed, bright, students from regular schools. If a good portion of the likely to succeed children are removed from a school, how logical is it to believe that the school will perform well?

That enchantment with trendiness has alienated the Mayor from those school board members who care about our children. It has also left a sword hanging over the head of the current director of schools, Jesse Register. Dr. Register has enough swords of Damocles hanging over his head without Mayor Dean hanging one as well. Nonetheless, the alienation has progressed to the point that the Mayor and the Board are now at odds.

The latest evidence of this is the Mayor's Education Summit. Here the Mayor brings in all kinds of interesting educators who could, no doubt, pass on important information and experience to our Director, our Board, our administrators, and teachers. And when is it scheduled? Why, on the first day of school. In fact, it is scheduled for the morning and early afternoon, just when all those stodgy public school types will be busy trying to educate our children - our future. A spokesperson for the Mayor explained that this was the only day when all of the presenters could get together. The spokesperson added that various religious and community groups were invited to the summit.

That's nice that religious groups and community groups were invited. The thing is, religious groups and community groups aren't responsible for teaching public school students. It is abundantly clear that they were invited not because they educate, but because they vote.

If the Mayor wanted to help schools he could. Instead, they Mayor chooses to further his personal political agenda, and his personal political future, even if it means that whatever knowledge this summit could have passed on to our public schools wasn't passed on to our public schools.

So, Nashville, ask yourselves, do you want a mayor who is willing to subvert the needs of our children to his own agenda running the schools? Do you?