If You Have to Call Al Sharpton for Help With Your Own Mayor, You Have No Power

Al Sharpton is in my town of Indianapolis.  He's here at the urgent behest of local ministers, some of whom pastor the largest black churches in Indianapolis, to help them pressure Mayor Ballard to meet with them regarding the police beat down of a teen during an arrest.

Sharpton is scheduled to make several appearances around town and give a speech this evening at 7:00 at Eastern Star Church.  I'm not sure I can conceive of a more visible display of political impotence and irrelevance  on the part of  these ministers.  If you have to call in an out of town race hustler like Al Sharpton in order to get the attention of the mayor of your own city, you are irrelevant. 

I don't understand the logic of the the Baptist Ministers Alliance, composed of some 50 odd pastors.  If Mayor Ballard is not interested in talking to you, ministers and voting citizens of his own city who also influence other members of the voting public, what makes you think some minister from out of town is going to make him behave any different? Its non strategic, nonsensical thinking.  When it does not work, then what are you going to do?

This is not the first time the Baptist Ministers Alliance has stepped forward publicly to pressure an administration.  They did it a couple of years ago during the Peterson administration, pushing for money for anti-crime initiatives.  What was lacking in that effort and is sorely lacking in this one is a continuing lack of strategic leadership on an issue.  This is all reaction that will not result in significant change and stands as an example of how faith leadership in Indianapolis fails to expand and develop the strategic value of their connection to thousands of people. Clearly Indy's faith leadership has influence and political clout and working together to leverage that clout is a viable stratagem. But where faith leadership consistently fails is in recognizing that their political leverage arises from the people they in theory represent. To truly wield this clout, they must be able to ORGANIZE  and move the people of their congregations to consistent, unified, strategic action. It is not a sufficient condition of change for faith leadership to make demands which cannot be backed up by significant consequences, political or otherwise.

When you call Al Sharpton in from out of town just to have a conversation with your own Mayor, you are missing the boat.

Horror to Horror: Dunbar Village, Meet Phoenix Apartments

The federally created and locally tolerated misery incubator known as the Dunbar Village housing project unfortunately has a cousin in Indianapolis, the Phoenix Apartments. This 12 acre complex of 328-units at 4004 Meadows Drive is made up of nine brick buildings containing 224 one-bedroom and 104 two-bedroom apartments of approximately 600 square feet. Yes, thats right, 600 sq. ft., a crackerbox by any name. As you might imagine, thats not a terribly marketable apartment unit. What keeps this wretched apartment complex afloat? 20 year project based section 8 contracts and 10 year housing choice vouchers from the local housing authority that guarantee the owners of this crappy complex market rate rents.

This lovely residential locale is making the news again in Indianapolis as the spot where a three year old, Tajanay Bailey, was murdered by her mother and her live in boyfriend. Upon examination by the coroner, they concluded that the child had been brutalized in the week prior to her death in a manner they characterized as "torture'. The child had been removed from this woman's care by protective services and had been with a foster parent, who had repeatedly warned that the child should not be returned. Apparently, the mother did all of the steps required and despite the fact that the apartment she was living in was a filth hole and one of the most crime ridden places in Indy, despite clear signs of abuse of the child, she was returned for a trial reunification period of 30 days. It only took a couple of weeks for the mother and boyfriend to kill her.

Too many subsidized housing projects such as Dunbar and Phoenix have become these warehouses of the miserable poor, where atrocities like the Dunbar rape or this senseless murder of a child are made more possible than they should be by an environment of hopelessness and squalor. These are failed places and the remedy for them is that they must be dismantled and rebuilt and the people who live in them must be helped to create a better life for themselves if they want it. Some will, others will not, and that group should be culled from the rest and summarily sent on their way. Like Dunbar, Phoenix continues because it is located in a community that is willing to tolerate it. I hope that the day is fast approaching when neither Dunbar nor Pheonix will be tolerated any longer.

Do something in 10 minutes that could increase resources that will help transform misery incubators like Dunbar & the Phoenix Apartments

Black Child Left Behind

People wonder why so many black children are failing in school and what the heck is wrong with the educational system. Well, a lot of things and this Supreme Court decision in June of this year reflects one of them which is that "diversity" has become an end in itself in our schools. It doesn't appear that anyone is really being critical about the issue and recognizing that the integration approach created when Brown vs. Board of Education was really about getting black kids into the better white schools they were denied entry to. This was the real point of the battle. Black kids were forced to attend poorly supplied and resourced schools and denied access to the well resourced and supplied schools of whites. I'm quite certain that Thurgood Marshall didn't think we needed to attend white schools because diversity was so wonderful. He fought to reverse the forced denial of education to our kids and get them in to better schools. That was the point then and it should be the point now.

But its not. Now, we fight tooth and nail for integration as an end in itself. TV debates in the wake of the decision were all cast as a fight about whether or not achieving diversity was a compelling interest. But we are missing the forest for the trees. We should be fighting to get our kids educated well, not whether or not they can attend a white school and achieving the latter does not assure the former. Its not a necessary fight in the modern age, because we can attend most any school if we can afford it or if we live in its attendance zone if its a public school.

But we are wasting time with diversity while our kids are falling further and further behind, refusing to face facts, one of them being that centralized public school systems lack the management and educational fire power to address the educational needs of urban populations stressed by a variety of socioeconomic conditions. Like the auto companies, they are saddled with legacy labor costs they cannot shed and union structures that are part of the problem, not the solution. These centralized bureaucratic systems are not nimble enough to deal with whats happening to our kids in and out of school. Furthermore, they are expensive and inefficient. We are spending two or three times what we should because these systems allocate their resources for education poorly and our money is not doing the work it should.

I'm not just long on critique. I've got a big gun answer - charter schools. Why are they the answer? Because they drive accountability for performance down to the school level, they are driven by market forces such that the good ones will thrive and the bad ones will fail, they are open to a variety of configurations and approaches and they do it all for about a third of what public schools do it for.

Lots of places in the US have charter schools, but there are only a few that get it right. The one that has the best system in place in my view is Indianapolis. Bart Peterson, the mayor of Indianapolis is the only mayor in the country currently with the power to charter schools. In nearly all big cities, Mayors are confronted with failing public school systems, but since they don't hire the superintendent and they are not on the school board, they have little ability to actually affect how school systems run. However, they have to deal with the consequences of a failing system such as aversion to homeownership investment and poor workforce preparation. Bart Peterson's response? He obtained the power to charter schools and has essentially built a school system for which he has the power to require accountability. Charter applicants must pass through a rigorous examination to obtain a charter and perform to standards in order to retain it.

Why are charters better? In my view, all of the accountability for performance is right at the school level. You don't have to mediate accountability for performance through superintendents and school boards. Charters must exercise care to serve the needs of their students and their families or lose their enrollment to another. Secondly, the charter approach permits tremendous variation in educational approach and philosophy. It is far more flexible in responding to the needs of students.

Sadly though, the charter approach is often hotly protested in the cities where its needed the most. We fight tooth and nail to preserve a public school system that consistently under performs for our kids, that promises to improve and rarely if ever does. We fight to preserve centralized bureaucratic school systems as though they have a right to exist, as though they are the only way to do education. I have conversations with people about education and they argue strenuously for more propping up of centralized bureaucratic education systems, but they are never very clear about why it can't be or should not be done any other way. Case in point Detroit. In 2003, Michigan millionaire and philanthropist Robert Thompson offered the city $200 million to build 15 Detroit charter high schools. His offer started a full scale war by the unions on the Mayor and the Governor and when the dust had cleared, Thompson had been run out of town along with his $200 million. Lest you think I'm just harshing on Detroit, I lived there for 8 years and I was around for that particular fiasco.

Education is an imperative for the African American community, but we are going to continue to lag in this area if we do not divorce ourselves from dependence on centralized bureaucratic public education systems in our urban centers. They don't work, have not worked for decades now. The charter approach, as exemplified by the Indianapolis model (which won a Harvard Innovation in Government award) should be speedily adopted by mayors of urban centers across the country. The black activists for education who fight to preserve these poor performing systems need to start championing what works, rather than what doesn't.