How I Redistricted Myself

This is a true story.

In the summer just after my 16th birthday, my mom and me (and my five younger siblings) found ourselves, through a series of bad decisions on her part, in a housing project in east San Jose, Ca.

(My mom was getting child support from three ex-husbands, plus welfare, plus charity from her church, but she was never any good at managing money, so when she managed to gather her children together (we spent most of our childhood with grandparents and relatives), we were always dirt poor).

From the second-story window of the dilapidated bedroom I shared with my brothers, I could see the high school I'd be attending in the fall, William C. Overfelt High.

I wanted to see what I was getting into, so I scouted things out during summer school. I had been living with my grandmother for the previous couple of years, and attending an excellent public school, so I knew at once that Overfelt was not going to work out for me. The kids were hostile toward me (literally the only white kid there), hostile toward school and hostile toward their teachers. (This phenomenon--a rejection of all things educational by poverty-stricken inner-city families--is, in other words, not new).

I wanted none of it. To the southeast, about 3 miles away, was Silver Creek High, which (I learned through playing sandlot baseball and pickup basketball) had a much more diverse student population and a better academic reputation. But it was 3 miles away, I had no car, and I had no paperwork to show I was eligible to attend. If I tried to register at Silver Creek, certainly they would send me straight back to Overfelt, right?

I decided to give it a try--there was no way I was going to Overfelt. Without telling my mother (she would not learn about this until much later), I set off on foot for the first day of my junior year in high school, got a couple blocks from home, took a sharp right turn and walked to Silver Creek.

On the way there, I took note of a picturesque street (Nickel Ave) in a much, MUCH better neighborhood. I walked down the street and took a long look at a couple of the street numbers (I was looking for a gap). I then walked the remaining distance to Silver Creek, and into the Registrar's office.

I told the Registrar that my mother couldn't register me because she was working, and I gave her a home address on Nickel Ave.--an address I had invented for a house that didn't exist. (I knew this was a risky strategy, but I bet that a municipal school system would take an entire year to figure out my fraud, and I was right).

It worked. I spent the whole year in Silver Creek, and was a standout student, a good volleyball player and had major roles in both of the school's plays.

I had redistricted myself to a better school because, even at 16, I knew the difference between a school where I could succeed, and which was worth my efforts, and a school where I would be ridiculed for trying hard.

Throughout the school year, I lied to everyone about where I lived. When parents of friends (or friend with cars) drove me somewhere, I always had them drop me off at the corner of Nickel Ave. and S. King Road, telling them that I would be fine walking home from there. (In fact, I would have to walk a mile and a half from that point to get to our drab apartment).

I never once told anyone--even my closest friends--where I really lived, because I was terrified that if I did, I'd be found out and sent to the bad school near my home.

So when I say I think parents who cheat the system to get their kids into Inman or Grady should be given amnesty, you can see where I'm coming from. I did what they're doing, and for the same reasons.

If, 30-some years ago, the San Jose Municipal School District could not fix Overfelt High School because the households sending their children to Overfelt were uninterested in embracing education as a value, how likely is APS to be able to fix its wretched south side schools today?

Or tomorrow?

Those of you who are taking great risks and breaking laws to free your children from APS schools where too little learning takes place, you are my friends, and I am your friend.

The Grady-Inman Railroad

The Underground Railroad is alive and well at Inman and Grady. And I think we should legalize it and reward the lawbreaking parents and law-breaking school administrators who built it.

Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that the existence of this massive underground railroad is a scathing indictment of APS's crappy southside schools.

To get your kid into Inman or Grady when you're out-of-zone takes a combination of paperwork fraud and (more likely) insider assistance that is only something a truly desperate, truly determined parent would try to pull off.

Then, once they're in, they have to always worry about being found out, even as they struggle to provide transportation to a school far from home.

That kind of initiative--that level of willingness to do what has to be done for your child because APS can't and won't--should be rewarded, not penalized.

So let's have amnesty for every single child and every single family now at Grady and Inman against the rules.

I like to believe that if I were alive in 1850s Iowa, I would want to work on the Underground Railroad.

If you helped slaves escape, you were considered an Abductor. What would you call someone who helped children escape a terrible future? Whatever the word is, you would have to be proud to be called that word, right?

POSTSCRIPT: After writing this post, I decided it was time to tell the story of how I set up my own, one-person underground railroad in San Jose when I was 16 years old. You'll find that true story just above.

Plantations, Circa 2012

We watched the movie "The Help" on Christmas afternoon, and boy, did those white people suck. If we are ever able to resurrect the dead, they'll have some serious explaining to do.

On the other hand, let 'em rot.

I was trying to wriggle out of my uncomfortableness by rationalizing that Iowa, where I'm from, was a Free State, and was part of the Underground Railroad. But Iowans were no saints. They ravaged the Indians who preceded them onto that fertile rectangle of land and then joined all the other so-called "Free States" in looking the other way while slavery ruled the South. Only when a law was passed allowing bounty hunters to cross state lines in pursuit of escaped slaves did the Free States decide slavery was worth fighting over.

I don't believe we acquire our fathers' debts, or that we are somehow liable for our forbears' acts of immorality. Because looking the other way as a crime occurs when you have the capacity to try to stop it is on the same octave of evil as owning slaves. Like about a C-sharp.

The other thing I realized is that there are many forms of slavery. When the Civil War finally ended Slavery 1.0, the Slavery 2.0 of the Jim Crow era popped up to take its place.

And now we have slavery 3.0, which is the inner-city government schools. Here are the similarities, if you are unlucky enough to be born into a poverty-stricken inner-city black family:

1. You are compelled to go.

2. Your family has no real options other than forcing you to go; they have no way to buy your freedom.

3. The plantation owner (the school system) gives you just enough sustenance to live, but not enough to prosper, and, when pressured by outsiders, maliciously cheats you out of whatever future you might have had.

4. An underground railroad springs up to deliver the children of a few desperate, clever parents to better schools.

Would white and black parents alike go to extraordinary expense and inconvenience to sneak their kids into Inman and Grady (Grady is not exactly Andover, unless you live in East/South/West Atlanta, in which case it is) if the schools there were not plantations?

The Country Music Song We're Livin' In

So your nothing-but-trouble relative, who spent the last decade runnin' a numbers game, finally brings ruin upon the whole family.

He bet the farm on a golddigger named Beverly, but she turned out to be the sly CEO of Lyin' and Cheatin, Inc...

You've always had trouble with this no-account relative.

For decades.

Always he's promised to do better--to BE better. But each time he's only sunk himself--and you--deeper into the manure pile.

This time, though, it's serious. He's left the family deep in hock and a truly painful reckoning is a-comin.'

But he comes to you and says, "look, I know I done wronged you so many times before, but you can really trust me this time. I'm on the mend. I've left my cheatin' ways behind. I'm clean, and I'm askin' you to renew your faith in me."

And you say:

"Hey, no problem! We know you done us wrong, but we are committed to our government-run schools and stay true to you we will!"

Wait. What?

Exactly. I can't believe ANYBODY is willing to just bend over and take more punishment like that, but ladies and gentlemen, you've SEEN some of the posts on our SPARK redistricting forum.

The air of resignation.

The "we have to deal with them, so we'd better make the best of it."

The utter lack of backbone.

Anyway, getting back to the narrative:

The next thing that happens--while the words "you can really trust me this time" are still echoing in your ears, is that you are ambushed in the woods by some gun-for-hire demographers. You'd softened up just for a moment, you see, and you got yourself sucker-punched.

Because that's how it works when you keep forgiving those who would prey on your kindness.

But when you go back to confront your relative, you're told to not make a big fuss because, "hey, they only wanted to talk atcha a little bit--don't pay it no nevermind."

(Powerful twanging of guitars; cut to a shot of a screen door bein' slammed shut; the other family members have finally HAD ENOUGH).

That's right. In MY country music video, this family ain't takin' no more junk.

The people in MY song--are you one of them?--have guts, a strong sense of right and wrong (they'll protect their sister neighborhoods as well as their own) and a limit for how much BS they're willing to take.

In MY music video, we say how things are gonna be. We don't take orders, and we don't roll over and play dead.

We confront. We extract promises, and hold feet to fire. We wind up putting an end to every last bit of lyin,' thievin' and obfuscatin.'

We make it clear who's the tail and who's the dog.

And then, just for good measure, we cut to a shot of an ACTUAL dog, and the pickup truck he's half hangin' out of.

Hey, if I'm gonna get this video on CMT, I'm going to have to follow the conventions of the genre.

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.

The Case for a Bailout

It took awhile, and you have to unwrap multiple tissue-paper layers of courteous language to find it, but parents throughout out neighborhood are finally saying this to APS:

Forget about ANY plans involving busing our kids out of their current school zone. Not ever gonna happen. Slow down, start over, and by the way, we'll be bringing our own demographers to this next round of talks. (Okay, parents haven't said that yet--but they will).

Let's fast-forward through the next part of the dialogue, the part that is about to happen:

APS: We have to find $65M in savings somewhere, and we have to relieve overcrowding, and the fair way--the obvious way--is to move kids from crowded schools to schools where there's space.

PARENTS: We understand the problem, but you must take busing off the table. We won't do it.

APS: The schools are safe, the transportation can be managed, and the performance of the schools will improve once your kids are there.

PARENTS: We are not going to bus our kids away from the schools we've worked hard to build into schools that we don't think can ever be made to meet our standards for academic achievement and especially student comportment.

APS: If you don't agree to busing, our only recourse will be to cut staff, damaging schools.

PARENTS: Cut the bloat in central office, not teachers and staff at schools.

APS: This "bloat" you imagine we have--we don't really have it. We can't cut enough central office staff to erase the deficit. We will have to cut teachers, janitors, nurses and school staff. You'll have more kids in dirty classrooms with no nurses, no specials, no extras. Or you can have clean classrooms, extras and specials--but you'll be riding the bus.

PARENTS: We will not tolerate any further degradation of the school experience. No cuts in teachers or crucial staff; no elimination of specials, honors classes, AP, or anything like that.

APS: We can't raise property taxes, because families unaffected by all of this would never go along with that. They would just call you a bunch of spoiled, privileged white folk who won't compromise.

PARENTS: Agreed. No property tax hike.

APS: We're sorry, but you've given us no workable option.

(A frosty silence ensues).

Well, here's a workable option:

Pursue a bailout.

If GM can get one; if some banks are "too big to fail," then certainly in the world of intown Atlanta, APS is too big to fail.

So: who's going to bail us out, and why should we feel justified in asking?

Let's tackle that second question first.

There's a deficit because of Bev Hall's mismanagement (with the BOE complicit; it failed to watchdog Hall, with disastrous results; how did a projected $65 million budget deficit not pop onto anybody's radar screen until Hall had already snatched her last bonus check and fled to Kauai? How did the BOE not know about this MUCH sooner?)--

--AND because APS is paying a fortune to teachers it fired and must put through the due-process mechanism. (If you add up the AJC's numbers, the HR cost of the cheating scandal will exceed $10 million).

There are other reasons, such as APS having to overpay for wireless and other technology (the "e-Rate" scandal) and the horrible inefficiency of the special ed program, a swamp Errol Davis is just now beginning to drain....and of course the cost of providing too many non-educators with cushy jobs at the Trinity building.

But who here wants to argue with me that the taxpayers of APS were defrauded by the Beverly Hall regime on a massive scale. Anyone?

If it had just been sloppiness and bad record-keeping, we'd have no moral right to ask for outside help. But we were literally cheated.

That doesn't mean anyone has to help us, but it sure means we don't have to feel bad about asking.

What would happen if we went to the state lawmakers representing this area and insisted they at least draft legislation that would cover the part of the deficit resulting from the cheating scandal--all the HR and legal costs, basically. We could certainly see that a bill was introduced.

What if we then went to every foundation, every donor, every federal muckety-muck, and said, please help us this once, and we'll pledge never to let ourselves get caught in the perfect storm of a person like Hall and a BOE like...well, like our current BOE.

There is no guarantee anyone would help us, but I think we can make a convincing case that a one-time bailout is appropriate.

You know who won't help us with this effort? APS. They want to use this opportunity to social-engineer quality in some of their 2nd-tier schools by moving around good students and involved parents. It must be irresistably tempting to them to think that they can upgrade a school like Hope-Hill, for example, without having to do any hard work, but just by fiat.

Then they can observe the resulting success, success they had no real hand in creating and which may in fact be illusory (because while current Hope-Hill kids would benefit, how much would it hurt the high-achieving kids who were formerly at SPARK or Lin? How do you measure that?) and then trumpet their own expertise. In other words, THEY CAN PRECISELY FOLLOW THE BEVERLY HALL TEMPLATE.

Why did many Americans support bailouts of firms like GM? Because we understood that those companies (and indeed the whole economy) had been victimized by a relatively small number of unethical, vicious, greedy people.

How is this situation not EXACTLY like that one?

APS is soon going to say to us, unless you have some other idea about how to find 65 million dollars, we are going to have to get those buses warmed up.

At that point, it might behoove us to have something more to say than "no."

So, how about: "Then I guess we'd better all get busy looking for some money."

C is for Con Job

What Cecily Harsch-Kinnane and other progressive do-gooders want to sell you is the idea that diversity, by itself, is always a virtue, and that you cannot possibly get too much of it.

What you are actually buying is an agreement to allow children from bad neighborhoods to come into your neighborhood and use the public school you paid for (and have tirelessly supported) until it is overcrowded and/or underachieving.

Artificially introducing diversity in Atlanta is like living in an orange grove and taking vitamin C supplements. You get enough already; you don't need to buy more from the pill salesman. I have 20 interactions in Atlanta a day with people not like me. There's a hugely diverse population here, and it is most decidely NOT self-segregating. You see people of color at Kroger. At the ball game. At Atlantic Station. Every place you go. I get about 3,000 percent of the minimum daily requirement of diversity every day. I don't need any supplements.

If our neighborhood schools had 2X the capacity they have, would I be in favor of allowing more students from unfortunate household situations largely brought about by the selfishness of adults and terribly destructive govenrment entitlement programs --

--(I'm sorry, I meant to say, would I allow more "diverse" students)--

--to enroll here, and thereby flee their own underachieving neighborhood schools?

Absolutely.

But that is not the question in front of us.

The task we have right now is summoning the will to say no to holier-than-thou progressives who want to use guilt and race to bait us into taking a bad deal on redistricting. And if you don't see that deal coalescing in front of you right now (all the official statements to the contrary notwithstanding) then you'd better start paying attention. A bad deal is coming, and diversity is the Trojan horse they're going to use to wheel it into Midtown.

Now, nobody wants to turn their back on the many Atlanta children unfortunate enough to be born to parents who can't or won't get involved in their kids' schools.

Is this our problem? Technically, no. We can't fix those parents. But should we take on part of the job of fighting for those kids in an organized way, anyway? Is it a moral imperative? I think it is.

Can we help those kids while simultaneously excluding them from enrollment in our overcrowded neighborhood schools? Sure we can. Is it hypocritical to do so? No, it is highly moral to do so.

So how do we do that?

We should volunteer to adopt a school in another part of Atlanta and help improve its facilities and raise money for it.

We should also put heavy pressure on underachieving parents and underachieving politicians to do more for their own neighborhoods. There are ways to do that. Is it meddling? Yes, let's call it meddling. I'm pro-meddling. We should fight for those kids --kids who are mostly the victims of their own no-account parents. We should fight for them because their own parents won't.

I'm all for doing that. But I am not going to be forced to drive our daughter to a school in Buckhead or up to NAHS someday because somebody sold my kid out on the basis of their feel-good idea of "diversity."

No way, no how.

Honey Badger Don't Care

I love the "What I've Learned" feature in Esquire. You get the benefit of the accumulated wisdom of some very smart people like Regis Philbin and some people who have figured a few things out via some hard knocks (like Tim Allen).

Or the "Ask Jimmy the Bartender" feature in Mens Health--same thing. Great advice!

Recently, David Brooks of the New York Times did a series of columns on life lessons from folks who have lived a good long while. Excellent reading!

The point is, it's always less painful to learn something from somebody else's mistakes if you can.

So here, for your benefit, is what we have learned from our mistakes with APS:

1. Put on your headphones and listen to your iPod.

When you go to a meeting with APS people, you're going to be told over and over again what a great job they are doing and how they are using data-driven best practices and how they are on the upswing and how things are continuously improving. Put on your headphones and ignore this crap, because it's just a spiel Bevvy Hall told everyone to tell to parents.

Hall believed in the old football adage that the best defense is a great offense. So by always going on the offensive--always telling parents things were great and getting better all the time! --Bev was able to prevent APS from undergoing any real scrutiny for nearly all of her tenure. Until, of course, she left office utterly disgraced...

2. Don't worry about asking nicely, because it doesn't matter.

There are a great many people I know who really believe that if you ask a municipal employee to do their job better in a really nice tone and with your practiced empathy on full display you'll be able to persuade them not to hate your privileged ass and actually do the job they were hired to do in a halfway-competent manner.

I probably believed that at one point. But I now know it's a sucker bet, and it never works.

3. If you really want something done, there's only one way to do it, and that's to get a lawyer.

APS is condescending-to-openly-hostile to parents--you're the paper and APS is the scissors. But lawyers are the rock. So bring the rock with you. Trust me on that.

My prediction is that this whole redistricting thing will end up a bonanza for lawyers, and the communities with the best lawyers will win. I hope I'm wrong. But just in case, I want to find the Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger of lawyers.

What the F?

My first thought when I heard there would have to be a major redistricting plan to accommodate the mini-baby-boom in Midtown was this:

Oh, fuck.

We’re going to have to let our BOE make a big decision, and as sure as the sun comes up in the East, they’re going to screw it up.

Our BOE: individually, they're about the least talented group you’ll come across, but cumulatively—that’s where they really work their magic. Because cumulatively, they can’t agree on how to turn on a light switch. Cumulatively, they make the Supercommittee (you know, the one that never had a chance of reaching a deal on the U.S. budget) look like a model of cooperation and compromise.

We didn’t need (or pay much attention to the thought of electing) a smart, talented BOE last election day because we had Bevvy Hall, and she looked to the world (and to Atlantans) like the real deal. By that same token, the BOE members we have today probably thought getting a slot on the BOE would be an easy gig; nothing much to do but stand back and bask in the shared glory of Bevvy’s accomplishments.

But then, of course, it all turned to shit, and our BOE panicked, blew the investigation into the cheating scandal, disintegrated into Board of Ed Fight Club, got into a lawsuit, nearly got tossed out of office by Gov. Deal, and now...here we are. A BOE you wouldn’t trust to grade a second-period spelling test (I’m not sure all of them can spell) and we have to let them make the biggest decision in Midtown in the last 15 years.

Again: oh, fuck.

But as you play out the various scenarios that are likely to occur (and all the scenarios I can imagine have the BOE making a series of stupid decisions, resulting in more catastrophic damage to our system and neighborhood), it is comforting to remember this one thing:

You can get a divorce.

You can secede from this union. (You have to be careful saying that around here, because if you’re not, pretty soon you’re ringed by tattooed young men in pickup trucks shouting some sort of rebel yell, but yes, you can secede).

You can tell APS to go eff itself. (See illustration. Now, work into a sentence).

You can start a charter school or start a movement to force-convert existing schools into charter schools.

Now, if you do that, APS is going to FREAK OUT.

They are going to pull out all the stops to block you.

They realize that if you win, it’s the beginning of a process that ends with them dead or irrelevant in a few years.

And like any bureaucracy, they’ll fight with all their might to avoid that.

But who is going to say to us (and our lawyers): no, you cannot have a great school in your own neighborhood. You must continue to use subpar schools wherever APS tells you to go, because the greater collective good is better served if you and your children suffer and are shortchanged.

I can’t believe that would really happen. Not in post-racial Obamamerica. But even if it does happen, we can appeal.

Remember the scene in Fried Green Tomatoes where the Kathy Bates character doesn't mind smashing up her own car because "I'm older, and I have better insurance."

Well, we're more affluent and we can afford better lawyers. We'll win in the end.

.