Wednesday, April 30th, 2008...10:56 am
Good News!
The four schools that were on the chopping block were granted a reprieve last night. In the end, the only school that any Tucson Unified School District board members attempted to close was Wrightstown. That attempt failed on a 2 -3 vote; the votes in support of closure were Bruce Burke and board president Alex Rodriguez.
Observers wondered if it was a good idea to be pursuing an action this sweeping, especially since the superintendent that proposed them is on his way out. This gives the new superintentent the chance to look things over and see if closing these or any schools is really necessary.
A bit of a sidenote here: I want to take issue with something that David Safier said in response to my last post on this subject. When I pointed out that Ochoa had strong grassroots support, he commented “Money talks, activism walks.” I know Safier is a committed political activist who has been helpful to many candidates (including me), but if he truly believes this statement, one has to wonder, why engage in any activism at all? I’m hoping that this was said in a fit of pique prompted by the hamhanded way that this issue was handled by members of the board.
1 Comment
April 30th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Ted, I taught some 30 years in the Portland, Oregon, area. Schools and programs were put on the block countless times. The first list always included a wide range of schools and programs. But the final cut left many more of the schools and programs favored by the well-to-do intact than those geared toward lower income communities.
I’m an activist and sometimes tilt at windmills (you and I have tilted at a few together) because I believe in speaking truth to power and fighting the power structure when I believe it’s wrong. But usually, I don’t expect to do much more than hold back a little of the damage. When I see some real success, I’m both surprised and elated.
Sometimes as a teacher, I felt like an athlete who protested a bad call, not so much to reverse the decision as to get a make-up call later. But toward the end of my career, another teacher and I spearheaded a move to get an ELL program in our school. (The students were being bussed to another high school for an hour of instruction, then bussed back.) We finally got a new principal who worked with us, and two years later, the school had an ELL classroom with a full time teacher and a community liaison. Outside of things that happened in my classroom, that is my proudest accomplishment of my teaching career.
So rather than disagreeing with you, I’m saying, I’m a cynical idealist, or an idealistic cynic — take your pick. I keep fighting the good fight, but it’s just a fact that money and power trump truth and right more often than not, in school district decisions and in the rest of the political world. Believing this doesn’t make me less active, but it makes me less heartbroken when I lose, and more willing to dust myself off and try again.
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