The Columbus Dispatch discusses Dayton and…
That’s about it. Gawd I hate these news stories that are not news. They talk to Nan Whaley and Rhine McLin and paint their doom and gloom picture and ohbloodyhell! Where’s the beef? Do they offer solutions? No. Oh wait, let me guess. That’s going to be in Sunday’s Edition.
There is a problem with the State of Ohio, and it trickles down to Dayton. It’s education, Stoopid. Columbus- are you listening? All your hand-wringing and lip service mean nothing. That’s nothing as in: . See? It’s nothing. School funding is unconstitutional. Fix it already!
Okay, obviously Columbus isn’t listening, which probably means one of two things: Either they’ve forgotten about us, or they don’t give a flying f-. However, the good news is that it means it’s just us here. So we can talk amongst ourselves and make our own solutions. Dayton artist Bing Davis is quoted in the article:
“We thought we could escape, but we can’t run,” he said. “What I’ve come to learn is we’re all in it. What is happening in the heart of the city is going to impact all of us.”
And since Columbus is not listening, we can do whatever we need to do to turn things around for ourselves. Grassroots. Bootstraps. No red tape. No bull. How do we do that? We run and we write- pick your poison.
I read the article and if one reads between the lines, it is very clear. The White Community are getting exactly what they wished and hoped for – Bankruptcy of the African American communities. Too bad that whitey’s rush has been met with fiscal reality. It is a classic article without the true interpretation. It has all the elements that brought Dayton to its current position. It is not education, it is pure unadulterated bigotry. Let me write the Headlines for each part.
Dayton Factory Owners Refuse to Hire African Americans and Instead Bus in Southern Sympathizers to Take Factory Jobs
Johnson’s Great Society hands Blacks Power, but White’s in Dayton have a Plan – Use Money and Influence to Build White only Communities. Blacks Cheer, but Preachers and Undertakers Does not A City Make. Whites vow revenge and agree to Bankrupt City
Whites continue Plan – Extract Hundreds of Millions for White Development South and East while Trumpeting 10 Million Spent on Wright-Dunbar
Doctors and Medical Institutions that have Grown Fat on Medicare and Insurance are Daytons Last Hope – OY – Doctors to Save the Day?
If you read the article McClin takes the correct political solution without the name calling by calling on funding for blight over greenfields. Of course if that approach would have been taken then African American communities would have benefited over white ones and whitey cannot have that. Instead the whites built sprawl and leveraged that debt all over the world. Nice Job. Unfortunately we are stuck with decisions of the past and whites and blacks are paying the price, but not quite the same. The poor are barely eating, while the wealthy are eating out less.
There is only one solution to this issue – County Government for Schools and Administration, with the caveat that not one new road, telephone line, power line or water treatment plant can be built. Use the infrastructure you have first. Solve the Race issue and the Education Issue will solve itself.
So, The Columbus Dispatch is a joke too.
Nothing like the indepth insight for 3rd grade level readers.
And we wonder why education funding isn’t a priority in the State of Ohio?
The article was somewhat incorrect about manufacturing. Industrial decline started in the 1960s at least, within the city limits, and I think the big NCR layoffs were in the early 1970s, so hard times were already hitting by the mid 1970s.
The statistical sidebar was a lot better than the article. There is some hard-to-find information in it, with time series going back to 1950 in some cases, which means one can see long term trends.
What do you all think of Lela Estes’ quote, particularly that second part:
“”We’ve got to start thinking different,” she said. “Everybody is afraid to try anything….”
Greg, you need to expand on your “only one solution to this issue.” I don’t understand how you see that “County Government for Schools and Administration” would work in practice.
The sentence in the Columbus Dispatch article that pops out at me is this: “For most of its history, Dayton prospered on the spirit of entrepreneurship passed down from inventors such as the Wright brothers and Charles F. Kettering, inventor of electric ignition and starters for cars.”
It is an interesting to think how Dayton could build on this spirit of entrepreneurship and how that spirit could be employed to help revive Dayton. Here is the model: Kettering and the Wright brothers provided leadership by making inventions that filled specific needs. Their work brought them personal prosperity, but also prosperity to all of Dayton.
Finding and filling a need is part of the spirit of entrepreneurship. One need I see, crying out to be filled, is the need to develop an effective educational system. It makes sense that the ideas and energy of entrepreneurs, ideally, should become focused on understanding and fulfilling this need. A strong educational system would lead Dayton into becoming a community of thoughtfulness, insight, creativity. A city that became known as a learning community would attract entrepreneurs who put a premium on thoughtfulness and who would be attracted to the notion of living in a thoughtful, creative community.
A lot hinges on reforming and fundamentally changing our current system of public schools. My idea is that we need to be thinking about how to attract the best educational thinkers to Dayton and how to empower them to make the quantum leaps of improvement our system of education needs. My article, Strickland Should Use Charter Schools To Help Fulfill His Promise: “Reform and Renew the System of Education Itself,” expands this idea.
To make Dayton itself a learning community DaytonOS has a huge potential contribution to make. I wrote the following in “How to Make the Big Leap Needed To Become An Effective Alternative Media?”
“I think we could appeal to the whole Dayton area that the effective use of technology is consistent with Dayton’s reputation as a city of innovation. For our times, what it means to be a city of innovation is to use technology creatively and effectively. Creating an authentic learning community via the internet — that unites the region in meaningful civic education and in meaningful discussion — would be a great goal for any city, and for that reason, I’m thinking that, if DaytonOS can establish itself as a viable entity, it may receive unexpected support.”
All of these inventions occurred before the Auto Age, when entrepreneurs fed off of each other at places where they met and bounced ideas off of each other i.e. Engineers Club. A recent comment concerning Dayton History where Metromark compares the Deeds to the people running Dayton today. I scoff at this assertion. There are no such Giants running Dayton today, the people with horsepower to get any change done. Just a bunch of ham handed business men and politicians running little fiefdoms for their own benefit.
It is easy to fix public schools, pay the teachers what they are worth – 100 grand per year to start. Look the Vietnam War taught the lesson, talented males entered the teaching profession because of the deferment, giving rise to higher salaries (male teachers had families, while previous educational spinsters did not) and better teachers, because these teachers stayed in the system. Data would tell you that this slug of male teachers are not being replaced with high quality individuals.
In addition technological advances have had little impact on the one on one teaching required to advance students in the k-12. The advent of technology has aided productivity in all parts of business and manufacturing, but these advances have only increased educational costs as we have replaced chalk, with expensive devices. Rant away, but education will not be aided by these charter schools as it still is the student to teacher ratio and the quality of the teachers. Thank God we have a plan for the undereducated in Ohio – Jail. We just put the uneducated and unlucky in Jail and then as the budget pressures rise put them to work on the
slavechain gang.Hey — I’m part of that “slug of male teachers,” you speak of, deferred from the Vietnam War.
I agree that charter schools as they are implemented in Ohio have been ineffective. But I think charter schools represent a huge opportunity — particularly for our Democratic Governor.
You seem to be saying that in your opinion charter schools have no chance to be effective because charter schools could not attract quality teachers nor could they have an effective teacher/student ratio. Wow. You need to grant that your opinion is based on how Ohio’s current charter schools are organized — not how they could optimally be organized.
You are suggesting that by offering huge starting salaries to teachers, $100,000, and by “paying teachers what they are worth” that somehow public school would be fixed. No. There exists no reasonable argument, I can think of, that such an “easy fix,” by itself, would actually work. You’d end up with highly paid teachers defeated by the system. I’m reminded of an article telling about the frustrations experienced by a Harvard math graduate who, for his first job, accepted a position as an inner city high school math teacher. His talent and passion were wasted. It would not have mattered whether he was receiving three times his pay, his talent still would have been wasted. There are many talented and passionate young people who put a lot of effort and money in becoming credentialed to teach — but who leave teaching within five years, not because of low pay, because the system has defeated them.
The system itself, as Strickland said, must be reformed. The organizational structure must be transformed so that teachers can fulfill a role of authentic teaching and mentoring that the present organization system of public school profoundly diminishes.
I brought up the communist East German car, the Trabant, as an illustration about the importance of organizational structure. Tripling the wages of Trabant workers would not have effected the quality of the Trabant.
Yes, the opportunity for entrepreneurship for Deeds, Kettering and Wright Brothers and other Dayton inventors was different than the opportunity is today. My point is that certain principles of entrepreneurship are still very valid and that these principles should be applied to one of the greatest needs that the Dayton community and the entire country is trying to answer: how to create a system of effective public education, how to become an authentic learning community.
There. I have ranted on. This is my third extended comment reply today. Two to this article and the first was in response to Teri’s article, Solving Dayton’s problems: Whiners and wimps need not apply
But you did not answer my question: I don’t understand how you see that “County Government for Schools and Administration” would work in practice.