Okay, so former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin decides to take it upon herself as a private citizen to appeal to US Education Sec'y Arne Duncan (AKA "White Shaq") to help us with our APS problems.
I say that's a great idea, and here is mine to go with hers.
Dear Arne:
First of all, you are SO freaking tall. What is up with that? Could you bend over a little so I am not just looking up your gigantic tunnel-sized nostrils?
We have a problem. All the statistical gains our city school district claims to have made over the past few years are now turning up to be either fraudulent or doctored in some way. We stacked the chips to get a good NAEP score and then we got blindsided by a few educators who decided to cheat on the CRCTs.
OK, maybe not a few. OK, it was more like a hundred and nine.
But we can't get rid of our superintendent, because she's, like, really popular and won a bunch of awards and it would be embarrassing now to admit that none of the test-score gains or dropout-rate reductions she's claiming are actually valid. (Could we please just not talk any more about scores and data right now? It's kind of a sore spot).
All of us parents who are professionals in other fields know our school district is really screwed. We can't fix it unless we fire everybody who isn't a teacher or principal then fire the bottom ten percent of those, then ask everyone to reapply for their old jobs then turn away most of those who do. Then we have to go back and re-fire everyone who snuck back in via nepotism and "connections," then we have to re-re-fire anyone who got back in to a job where they only collect and sort PowerPoint data.
Because the thing about data collection is this: we were never really good at it. We fudged a lot of numbers and missed some big ones, like the ones that would have told us 58 of our schools had test-cheating issues. And we thought our dropout rate was dropping, but it was, like, exponentially rising.
Oops.
But because our school leaders made such a big whoop about data, it's kind of hard for them to now admit all those data-manipulation jobs were just siphoning away money from people who actually educate children.
Could you please fix all of this for us? After all, it's not fair to have to blame the boss when things go wrong. I mean, I know everyone blamed Obama for not handling the BP spill better, but that's different. Why? Because....well, it just is.
God, you are so unbelievably tall. Where do you buy your suits?
And I know they blamed Obama for all the other stuff that has gone wrong and that it's sort of the American Way to fire the manager when the ballplayers are on a big losing streak, but....well, I just think that is so unfair, because our super is such a nice lady and if you put her out of a job, what in the world is her $100k/year driver going to do to put food on the table? Have a HEART to match the size of your pituitary gland, would ya?
We want you to come down here and tell the local newspaper to stop being so mean. And stop publishing so many facts.
Oh, I forgot one other thing we'd like you to fix. Most of the kids in our system--well, their parents really suck. They're uninterested in helping educate their kids and think our schools are just daycare paid for by taxes paid by people who work and pay taxes (people not like them, in other words). Could you please fix all those parents?
We're counting on you!
Your pals,
The top 10% of APS parents (don't ask me how we got that percentage. Please).
