Author: Ed Weathers

Rx FOR SCHOOLS: MORE CLOCK TIME, NOT MORE MONEY

Major motion pictures are often remembered for memorable lines such as “Show me the money!” or “Just put your lips together and blow.” Others are made immortal by riveting speeches such as Wilford Brimley’s star turn in Absence of Malice.

But one particular oratory sticks in my mind when I think of America’s educational system and our insistence on clinging to a nostalgic ideal of how our schools ought to be run. That speech is Danny DeVito’s address to the employees and stockholders of the fictional New England Wire and Cable Company in Other People’s Money. Gregory Peck plays the owner of this venerable company which is being targeted for takeover by the venture capitalist firm owned by Danny DeVito.

DeVito’s character is known for his ruthlessness and lack of emotion for anything but the bottom line. If the deal is consummated, the company will be broken up and sold off, destroying the life and the economy of the small town in which NEW&C has played a significant part.

In answer to Peck’s heartfelt plea to spare his employees because of the quality product they have put their lives into making, and the traditions and rhythms of small town life created by those employees, DeVito responds with pathos and pithiness.

His answer is that in the nineteenth century, there were thousands of buggy whip makers that fell, one by one, to the effects of increased mechanization and the advent of the automobile. DeVito muses to the audience that as superior as that last-of-a-breed buggy whip company must have been, he would have hated to be a stockholder clinging to the belief that the end wasn’t near. Implicit in his speech is the point that the world changes, and those wanting to survive in it must change also.

The leaders and citizens of Shelby County would do well to reflect on this Tinseltown tableau if we want to solve the problem of delivering education at a price we can afford. This is particularly true in the matter of high school overcrowding, where the proposed solutions are limited to deciding how much more or less money we are going to spend. No one seems to be interested in discussing whether we should be spending any of it on propagating more of the same inefficiencies.

The current squabble over expansion and construction of county high schools is not going to be adequately solved by more money, or even slightly less grand plans for that money, but in completely overhauling the way we look at providing the physical plants in which our adolescents are educated.

We can do it now, or we can do it later, but either way, we will have to adjust ourselves to a world where there are limited funds to run our schools–funds that are insufficient to continue in the hidebound traditions of our Baby Boomer past.

Throughout Shelby County, we have a seven-hour school day which begins in early morning and ends in mid-afternoon. No one has bothered to ask if we need to continue this arrangement. Whether it makes sense to shutter these buildings at about 3:00 every day, not to be reopened until about 7:00 the next morning. Whether our middle and high schools should lie vacant for nearly sixteen hours a day, regardless of the fact that the maintenance requirements are about the same whether the buildings are empty or full.

Although principals and teachers may come early and stay late, students, for whom the system is ostensibly operated, are not on campus at hours other than these. Therefore, they are not realizing the highest and best use of the multimillion dollar complexes that our county builds and maintains. And neither are their parents and other taxpayers.

My own Florida high school, faced with serious overcrowding in the early 1970s, found a solution to the problem of a dearth of time and money to build additional schools. Mainland Senior High School in Daytona Beach, Florida required its juniors and seniors to attend from 7:00 A.M. until noon and its sophomores to be in class from noon until five in the afternoon. Of course, such a change required that many longstanding high school traditions be reexamined including graduation credits, extracurricular activities, bus transportation, meal service, and faculty and staff positions.

But when I mention changing the school day as a solution to Shelby County’s dilemma, I am met with sentimental objections similar to the ones that faced DeVito in OPM. My response is that once upon a time we also taught girls to sew and boys to weld and when we abandoned these elements of the curriculum, few people seemed to cry out that tradition was going to hell in a handbasket.

To accommodate the change in Mainland High in 1970, the number of graduation credits for my 10-12 school dropped from 21 to 15. When officials examined the hours required for graduation, they realized that many of those additional hours were outside the core curriculum anyway and included study halls, physical education and enrichment programs such as music, art, band and sports. Therefore, streamlining the core offerings was accomplished with little damage to the basic educational program.

This did not prevent students from taking additional courses and participating in extracurricular activities. Band and football were taken before or after school, depending on class status. Bus transportation, however, concerned itself only with picking up and dropping off students according to their core schedule.

Bus transportation was compressed to fit the new schedule as well, with the yellow behemoths that transported the upperclassmen at the crack of dawn, going on to the elementary schools, just before picking up the sophomores for their trip at noon. These same buses picked up the juniors and seniors moments after the sophomores were disgorged, scooted by the elementary schools, and then picked up the sophomores for their ride home in time for dinner. Nary an empty bus rattling from barn to school and back with hours of downtime in between.

Meal service, too was altered to fit the new reality of a shortened school day, resulting in menu items such as ice cream, juices, fresh fruit and cold sandwiches being available to us. These foods were purchased from distributors or prepared at a distant commissary with the attendant efficiencies of such an arrangement.

Teachers and personnel were assigned schedules according to which student population they were serving: morning or afternoon. Some teachers and staff were more or less happy with this arrangement, depending on whether they liked arriving early or late, but there was a full complement of faculty and support personnel.

For those of us sitting in the classroom in pursuit of a diploma, the changes were hardly noticed–or welcomed wholeheartedly.

Next week: how Shelby County schools could adopt this plan.

BEAR NECESSITIES

The Grizzlies will wrap up their second season in Memphis when the final buzzer sounds Wednesday night in The Pyramid. Regardless of the final score between Hubie Brown’s Griz and the playoff bound Minnesota Timberwolves, it’s been the most successful season in the eight-year history of this franchise. Here are a few thoughts on the team’s future, near and far.

THE SLOW FUTURE OF IRAQ

Now comes the hard part. In Iraq, the fast-and-simple part is over. Now comes the slow-and-complicated part. Here in the United States, in the land of the 24-second shot clock and the 30-second news hole, we’re not so good at slow-and-complicated. We’d rather just change the channel, turn to another game.

The war in Iraq has been, so far, simple and fast. Simple: Saddam is bad, we’re good. Fast: Just three weeks of high-tech bombing, and we get to topple the statues. (One is tempted to compare this statue-toppling to the tipping of the loser’s king at the end of a chess game, except the scene in Baghdad, so carefully posed and mechanical, all winches and camera angles, had none of that kind of elegance. Donald Rumsfeld, predictably, compared the few dozen Iraqis who watched an American truck drag down Saddam’s statue in the center of Baghdad to the thousands of Germans who hammered in a frenzy of freedom at the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this comparison, he insulted everyone. Donald Rumsfeld, it’s becoming clear, even to his friends, is an insulting man. He keeps things simple, though, and Americans like simple.)

But now Iraq gets complicated, and things go slow. Some will point to today’s scenes of Iraqis greeting American troops with plastic flowers and say, “This is the future.” Others will point to the scenes of mass looting and violent vengeance and say, “This is the future.” We Americans want the future to be now. But the future in Iraq is still a long way off. When it comes, we Americans will almost certainly have changed the channel. (What channel was Afghanistan on, anyway? I don’t remember.)

The future in Iraq will come slow because there are so many players, each playing a different game. The Kurds fight the Iraqis. The Turks fight the Kurds. The Kurds fight themselves. The Shi-ites fight the Sunnis. The Americans, the British, the Republican Guard, the fedayeen, the Baathists, the irregulars, the suicide bombers, the Iranians, the Syrians, the Arabs, the Bedouin, the returning exiles, and all the various village and regional clans–all those players, all playing different games.

There’s the law-and-order game: Who will police Iraq now that the police are gone? Who will control the interim government? (We Americans hate “interims.” We want the finished product, now.)

There’s the democracy game: When will there be free elections? Who will be allowed to run for office? What if fundamentalist Shi-ites win?

There’s the rebuilding game: Can Oxfam and Unicef get enough clean water to Basra’s children to prevent epidemics of dysentery and cholera? Can the International Red Cross get medicine to Baghdad’s hospitals? Does Iraqi oil pay for Iraq’s rebuilding or do the Americans who bombed it do the paying? Do only American and British companies get that rebuilding money? Do only contributors to the Bush election campaign get that money?

There’s the global power game: Does the U.S. now get to use Iraq as a base–and a precedent–to invade Syria and Iran, too? Has the war injured the terrorists–or inflamed them? Will the U.S. victory bring secular democracy to the Middle East or more entrenched fundamentalism? Will Russia and France serve as the core magnet of a third major power in the world, a Eurocentric third weight to balance against China and the U.S., or will they slide into impotence and irrelevance?

It will be a long time before we know the outcomes of these games. Almost certainly, we Americans will have stopped paying attention by then. (Of course, there are some games we never pay attention to in the first place: for example, the game in central Africa that has killed over 2 million people in the last decade and left thousands of women and children with their hands hacked off–a half-century-long game far too slow and complicated for our attention span.)

We Americans love the 100-yard dash. (The 10,000-meter run? Well, we leave that to the Ethiopians and Algerians.) We love the slam dunk and the quick-launched three-pointer. (Working the shot clock while waiting for the give-and-go? Well, we leave that to the pointed heads in the Ivy League, who are hardly typical Americans.) We want our quick buck, our Speed Pass, our fast food, and our overnight dry cleaning.

We are, in other words, adolescents. Our impatience is our great national virtue and our curse. We have energy and verve and muscle, and we make things happen fast. It’s why we are the greatest inventors the world has ever seen. The French will take hours to prepare a meal, and then take hours to eat it. The Germans will sit not just for a three-hour opera, but for a twelve-hour Ring Cycle. The Russians–well, the Russians have been waiting in lines for centuries, and a four-hour game of chess is for them a pleasure. The Russians and the French and the Germans, you see, are grownups. But we are adolescents, and we hate to wait.

Some things, however, demand the long wait and the long-range view: great wines, for example, and global warming. And the wisdom of age. And world history.

As for Iraq, I’d suggest we all just stay tuned, but I don’t think we will.

BOWERS, CARSON BATTLE TO STALEMATE FOR DEM CHAIR

If politics really is like a sausage factory, then what we got here is a metaphor that’s out of date. The Shelby County Democrats’ biennial convention Saturday at Hamilton High School may have been a messy and shocking spectacle, but it was at times spicy and even delectable. And lots of fun. The only problem was that the process ended with no sausage.

Which is to say, no chairperson. Current chair Gale Jones Carson and her challenger, State Representative Kathryn Bowers, both ended up with 20 votes apiece — thanks to a sudden illness that forced a presumed Bowers delegate, Marianne Wolff of Cordova, to go home early. When various remedies for the standoff — including a proposed revote and an attempt to invoke a tie-break via Roberts’ Rules of Order — failed to come off, both contestants (and their backers) finally agreed to an adjournment and a runoff vote at a special meeting of the newly elected executive committee to be called later on.

Some of the contests that produced the 41 elected committee members in conclaves (based on state House of Representatives districts) held throughout the Hamilton auditorium were close in their own right –and self-sufficiently dramatic. For example, in District 85, one of several to experience a tie vote requiring several ballotings, a shoving match erupted at one point involving radio talk-show host Thaddeus Matthews, a Bowers supporter, and Carson supporter Jerry Hall. In the end, the majority vote went for Carson.

There were accusations and controversies a-plenty in other district conclaves. A Carson supporter in District 87 (Bowers’ home district) was city council member TaJuan Stout-Mitchell, whose credentials were challenged by Bowers booster James Robinson on grounds that Mitchell had not participated in last month’s preliminary pre-convention caucuses. Mitchell denied the allegation, and it was, in any case, moot that post-convention challenges to her credentials, and those of other voting delegates, could still be heard by the convention’s credentials committee, which had, however, been over-worked right up to, and including, game-time.

There were such accusations to be heard as one by delegate Nancy Kuhn that activist David Upton, one of Bowers’ floor leaders, had pulled credentials committee member Del Gill out of a meeting Friday, depriving the meeting of a quorum and preventing the adjudication, presumably in Carson’s favor, of a disputed delegate member. Upton said Gill was outside the meeting room by the time he encountered him Friday and had already determined to leave, on proper parliamentary grounds. “Actually, the Friday credentials meeting was improper because the rules state that all challenges will be finished four days prior to the meeting and parties will have two days to respond,” added Upton afterward in a clarifying email. Whatever the case, the contretemps was interesting in that it featured Upton and Gill, traditional antagonists, on the same side for a change.

Indeed, as Carson herself wanly noted toward the end of the proceedings, the old Arab proverb that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” was very much in play. There were all manner of unnatural alliances and combinations to be seen — with most known partisans of 9th District U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr. deployed on Bowers’ behalf, for example, but with at least one, field rep Clay Perry, on hand to give apparent lip service to Ford’s public statement on behalf of Carson.

That statement, made last month as some of Ford’s cadres apparently invoked his name on Bowers’ behalf, seemed clearly pro forma and the result of what some of his supporters saw as a panic reaction. A Bowers backer on Saturday remarked bitterly that the congressman had “left us high and dry” after earlier promises of support.

One prominent attendee, State Rep. Carol Chumney, continued her efforts to be influential without obligating herself, and she brought with her Saturday a form letter to whom it might concern denying any involvement in anybody’s campaign. Chumney, an attorney, had personally recruited a sizeable crowd of potential delegates at last month’s caucuses, and she found herself involved in what turned out to be the climactic act Saturday — an impromptu congress of lawyers who huddled on stage to determine a legal strategy for beating the impasse.

At that point, Carson supporters were insisting that Roberts’ Rules mandated a tie-breaking vote by the chairperson or — since Carson, in the apparent interests of propriety, declined to do those honors herself — the first vice chair, who happened to be one of her supporters, free-lance journalist Bill Larsha. The crucial argument was supplied by lawyer David Cocke, a Bowers proponent, who somehow prevailed on the other barristers to accept his interpretation that a motion to elect a chairperson was specifically exempted from that sort of tie-break under parliamentary rules.

Presumably unbeknownst to the Carson supporters was the fact that Cocke, a newly elected committee member and voter himself, was under clock pressure to get something done fast, inasmuch as he was due to attend the funeral of his mother-in-law Saturday afternoon. “We kept them from knowing that,” gloated Upton, who with another Bowers ringleader, John Freeman, had been involved in another time-sensitive mission, pleading on the telephone to the ailing Wolff for her return.

Kuhn had incurred suspicion among the Bowers contingent because she was known to be supporting Carson and it was she who had done the friendly duty of transporting home Wolff, who was suffering from nausea (presumably for reasons other than the raucous events at the convention). But Kuhn — who, to compound the irony, had been Wolff’s opponent for a committee slot in District 99 — proved her bona fides by dutifully driving Wolff back to the auditorium after Wolff finally said yes to her insist implorers. By then, the convention had adjourned, however.

“That was insensitive,” Carson said scornfully about the prolonged and insistent effort to persuade an ailing delegate to return. This was after the convention had finally thrown up its collective hands and adjourned (Carson concurring only because she had learned of Wolff’s then imminent return, some Bowers supporters charged cynically).

Insensitively handled or not, the Wolff mission was as nothing compared to the arm-twisting and cajoling and threatening and bribing that will go on (as all of it had for the several days of runup to Saturday’s convention) in the days remaining before the newly constituted committee is reconvened to break the tie.

Bowers is rated a slight favorite, if for no other reason than that Wolff, whose name was listed on the state representative’s official handout as a delegate for her, will presumably vote for Bowers (she reportedly so assured the state rep upon her belated return Saturday). But there may be shifts of other committee members in both directions.

Whatever the final result, the course of civilization at large will not be much altered. Clearly, a Bowers victory would gratify those Democrats critical of Carson or of Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, whom she serves as press secretary, or of Carson/Herenton ally Sidney Chism, blamed by Bowers and other legislators for recruiting election opponents for them last year. (Herenton, who showed the flag on Carson’s behalf at last month’s caucuses, was not on hand Saturday, though many members of his inner circle, including city finance director Joseph Lee, were.) White Democrats on the new committee seem mostly to be Bowers backers, testament to one of the convention’s subtexts, invoked subtly by Bowers in earlier remarks from the stage calling for more “inclusion.”

Just as clearly, many Democrats faithful to Carson’s cause (and the mayor’s) were among those who have traditionally been alienated from what they have seen as the party’s establishment — an ill-defined aggregate including partisans of the party’s Farris and Ford clans and, these days, members of the county’s legislative delegation.

In any case, the Democrats will take one more crack at creating a sausage when they meet again, and it will be disappointing — to outside observers, anyhow — if that attempt lacks the sizzle and spectacle of Saturday’s convention.

OF JACKETS AND GENDER