Death and despair.
A friend leafed through her family photo album for me. “Here’s my cousin Herbie. He got murdered. And this is Uncle Fred. He got himself killed. Sam here is in prison. Shelly got hooked on drugs. I think she’s a hooker nowadays.”
My friend grew up in the miserable desperate projects of Cincinnati. She learned to fall asleep to the noise of gunfire.
She grew up in the 1960’s. The situation has not changed much in 60 years. The poverty is there. The crime is there big time. The rotten inner-city schools are still rotten.
It is easy to find other big cities in America where the story is the same. The inner districts of so many seethe with violence. Murders, rapes, assaults, manslaughter.
Mobile, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, Oakland and various cities of California. They are disgusting. New Orleans, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Spokane, Kansas City, Baltimore, Newark, Chicago. They are disgracefully dangerous. You would not want to drive through some areas in an armored car.
This is not news to you. And that is my point. This is not new. When I delivered the Chicago Sun Times as a kid the front page might as well have been printed in blood-red ink. It so often featured murders. Nothing has changed over the years. Chicago and murder belong next to each other in encyclopedias.
The picture of inner-city public schools is just as bleak. In many cities dozens of public schools produce not a single student who is proficient in math. Or in reading. Not one. Yet they graduate 70, even 85 percent of their kids. They graduate tens of thousands who truly cannot read their diplomas.
Figuratively, Washington, DC public schools are toilets. They have the worst dropout rates in the country. And the worst math and reading test scores. And the worst median SAT scores. They are nearly the worst in percentage of threatened and injured school kids.
Spending is not the problem. DC spends more per student than nearly every state. Nor is it a problem in other cities. Some spend $30,000 per student per year. Baltimore spends huge amounts. It pays thousands of consultants, contractors and administrators over $100,000 per year. Thousands of them. I wonder how many administrators worked in the Baltimore school that had six murders in one year not long ago.
I cite such stuff to support a wild and crazy thought: Black lives don’t matter. Not to a lot of the leaders, celebs and politicians who take a knee to show us how much they care. They should stay on their knees and bow their heads in shame. For their cynicism and hypocrisy.
There is no mystery in how to properly manage big cities. No mystery in how to make them safer. No mystery in how to help kids perform better in schools. The mystery is how those who create and run our cities and schools absolutely refuse to do what should be obvious.
We have many safe and well-managed cities in America. They are run differently from the garbage cities. They offer lessons galore in how to manage.
Rudy Giuliani took over a rotten Big Apple. It was one of the most dangerous and worst-run cities in the world. He turned it into a shining example of urban reform.
For crime, he and his police adopted the broken windows theory. If you leave broken windows and do not fix them, eventually the whole building and the whole street will be destroyed. In other words, sweat the small stuff.
What does New York do today? The opposite. As do Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland and Baltimore. Giuliani wrote a book entitled LEADERSHIP. It was a blueprint, a textbook for how to run a big city. Just read and follow directions.
Does Mayor DiBlasio follow any of the lessons in the book? Does the bear spit in the Ritz? From the irresponsible way he manages New York, I doubt he can spell the word city. Unfortunately, he does know how to spell the words “defund the police”. He has done away with 600 plain clothes cops. Brilliant. Lately he is supervising the painting of BLM on the street in front of Trump Tower. Inspiring.
The lessons are out there, clear and concise. Men and women who run our failing cities ignore them. They have made themselves dumb-plum ignorant of knowledge that sits out there waiting for them to access.
“We” know how to run better schools too. Most charter schools outperform their public counterparts in inner cities. Vouchers work. They get kids out of cesspits and into better schools.
Parochial schools consistently turn out better students than public schools. In the depths of inner cities. Many zealous educators in a private schools turns out top-performing students. From kids from the wrong side of the underside of abominable neighborhoods.
There are no mysteries as to why they do. Their successful programs are transparent. They are filled with common sense and there for all those administrators, consultants, contractors and educrats to see. Yet they ignore them. Spin their wheels yet again on another batch of theories and experiments. They refuse to fight the stubbornness and stupidity of the teacher unions.
The painful truth is that our leaders don’t give a damn about black lives. Or about brown lives. Not the lives of the folks who have to live in our inner cities. Not those who have to send their kids to dangerous and useless schools. It is a truth. Our leaders don’t give a damn about the kids they sentence to mediocrity when they do nothing about the schools.
They have had decades to do something. They have had mountains of successful models to follow. They have done sweet little to change the atrocious conditions in their cities and schools.
Black lives matter to them? My foot!
From Tom…as in Morgan.
Find Tom at tomasinmorgan.com. You can write to Tom at tomasinmorgan@yahoo.com.