The elephant in the room

There are at least three very good reasons for refusing to even consider busing your kids out of this neighborhood. Two are obvious: first, that you worked hard to make SPARK (or Lin) what they are today, and don't want to start over. Second, you bought a house here for the schools here, not to be on a bus route to Hope-Hill Elementary.

The third reason is one I haven't heard anybody else articulate, and that's because it's a really prickly subject: the role of black urban culture in bad test scores and bad behavior in second-tier APS schools.

It is the elephant in the room, so let's stop ignoring it.

APS truly, madly, deeply wants to solve some of its test-score problems by infusing second-tier schools with a creamy white solution of high-performing students. And right now they actually think they're going to pull it off. APS's $65 million deficit, they reason, is the perfect political cover for some large-scale social engineering camouflaged as cost-cutting.

And if there's one thing I learned while threatening to sue (and then suing) APS, it's that it's almost impossible to stop the people in the Trinity building from doing something stupid when they put their minds to it.

The bureaucrats who stonewalled us and got the district sued have a particular blend of arrogance and sense-of-entitlement that is oh so very North Korea, only blacker. So you're in for a big disappointment if you expect redistricting to be handled professionally and sanely.

Errol Davis is a righteous dude, but our Board of Ed is a formidable opponent to anyone wishing to do good in this school district. Our BOE reps are really just Costco-sized versions of APS bureaucrats--Now! Even MORE arrogance! And with EXTRA BONUS senses of entitlement! (Because, after all, they rationalize, they were elected by their (now deeply regretful) constituents).

The District is going to use numbers it creates (or finesses) to persuade you that there is NO OTHER CHOICE than to bus your kids away from schools that YOU have made into good schools----

----and INTO schools that can NEVER be made into good schools because there is a critical mass of parents and children in those neighborhoods who cannot and will not allow excellence to occur.

The neighborhoods APS wants to send your kids to have been infected by a self-loathing urban "culture" which considers assimilation and achievement via hard work to be "lame."

This culture accepts as a norm the one-parent household; accepts as a norm the casual use of vicious and sexually-charged language (the vernacular of its "musicians" and "entertainers") by children, and simultaneously blames its hardships on, and expects to feed from, the hands of others. What passes for a "value system" in these neighborhoods is something you wouldn't want to get on your shoe, which is why you live here and not there.

Houses can be renovated, streets can be spruced up. But neither APS nor anyone else can fix the adults in many Atlanta neighborhoods; people whose children come to school not to learn but to disrupt learning.

APS makes a serious effort to help the children--as serious as its limited capabilities will allow-- but it is a clumsy, hapless whale swimming against the tide.

But--notice the whale segue!--here comes the legacy of the disgraced and departed Bev Hall.

Yes, just in time for the holidays, say hello to the Ghost of Scandals Past!

Hall discovered that if she manipulated test cohorts, she could achieve illusory gains on the supposedly "fair" NAEP tests that she could then trumpet as her the legitimate fruit of her own hard work.

Hall's proteges at APS now realize they have the same opportunity. "Why, if we move a bunch of kids from SPARK to Hope-Hill," they reason, "we will have amazing jumps in test scores, and the children will be much easier to police.

"We can make ourselves look like geniuses simply by manipulating who takes tests, and where. It has worked before, and will work again!"

You've got to admit it--they're right. If SPARK children were bused to Hope-Hill, the school's test scores would rise, and the percentage of little-thugs-from-thug-parents would be diluted, perhaps even to a level where teaching and learning could occur.

So, you--the parents at SPARK--now have an opportunity to do what APS could never in a million years do, and that is dilute the percentage of low-achieving and bad-behaving kids in APS's second-tier schools. Isn't that why you had children in the first place? So your offpsring could sacrifice their futures in order to buoy the children of low-achieving, deeply resentful parents and buoy the fortunes of low-achieving, deeply resentful APS bureaucrats?

What? No? You didn't have that in mind? Where's your civic-mindedness? How could you be so callous? What about the concept that you must do what Brenda Muhammed says is "in the best interest of ALL the children of Atlanta?"

One's heart breaks for the children of no-account parents. Good people everywhere want to help those kids, even as we deplore the disastrous decision-making that leads to poverty-stricken one-parent households with absent, deadbeat dads.

But you didn't cause the cancer that is inner-city black culture and you are not responsible for fixing it. You want to help? Help with time and money. Not by handing your kids over to amateur--and amateurish--social engineers masquerading as school officials.

Your children are not some currency you've been given to gamble with. You have a job to do, and that is to provide them the best possible start. Period. So get going on that, and don't let yourself flinch when the arrows and epithets start flying.