Shortsighted Reform
April 16, 2013
Our posting of March 29 (“Hit Again”), about the mistakes being made in the guise of reforming education, struck a nerve with readers. And since then, writers with wider audiences have offered similar commentaries, including DeWayne Wickham writing for Gannett as his words appeared on LSJ.com on April 3, 2013:
“The fight against public school closings has become the new civil rights battle in this country – and rightfully so. Faced with a billion dollar budget deficit, Chicago’s public school system is the most recent urban district to announce a massive closure of schools. The city intends to shutter 61 elementary buildings, nearly all of them in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
“That’s a penny-wise-and-pound-foolish decision that condemns the neighborhoods surrounding these soon-to-be-boarded-up schools to further decline. ‘We have resources that are spread much too thin,’ Todd Babbitz, the chief transformation officer (no kidding that’s his title) of Chicago’s troubled school system, told the Chicago Tribune. Over the next decade, school officials predict that these closings will save the school system $560 million. But first the city will have to spend $233 million to move students into classrooms elsewhere.
“Even if the school closings actually produce savings, the damage they will produce to the neighborhoods left without public schools will be catastrophic. While poverty and crime have decimated the population of many inner city neighborhoods, shutting down schools in those troubled areas will depopulate them even faster. The result will be a growing expanse of urban wastelands that could well deepen the budget deficits of the cities that are closing public schools.
“Politicians and school officials must be challenged to justify their school closing decision beyond the deal making of Chicago’s City Council. The U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights division is investigating complaints that claim the decisions of several urban school districts amount to a civil rights violation. If the school closings don’t violate the letter of the law, they sure seem to trample upon its spirit. For example, officials in Chicago and elsewhere should turn these school buildings into hubs for nonprofit organizations and other public services. Why not use the empty space to house police substatations, public health clinics, recreation centers and a mayor’s station?
“School systems in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Detroit and Newark have announced plans to close public schools, and in every case blacks and Hispanics will bear the biggest burden of these cost-cutting measures. These decisions signal an indifference to the damage such policy decisions will have on the neighborhoods.
“‘If we don’t make these changes, we haven’t lived up to our responsibility as adults to the children of the city of Chicago,’ Mayor Rahm Emanuel said. That’s a pretty shortsighted analysis of a problem that will render large swaths of Chicago’s black and Hispanic neighborhoods uninhabitable education wastelands.”
Heads and Heat
August 16, 2012
We are engaged in very serious discussions. They’re not only complicated, with unintended negative consequences possible from what are thought to be positive actions; they’re also a matter of life and death.
The topic is football – the high school sport under most scrutiny today and suffering from the most criticism it’s seen since the 1970s when catastrophic neck injuries spiked, liability awards soared, many insurers balked, and most helmet manufacturers abandoned the business altogether.
During recent years we have learned about the devastating long-term effects of repeated blows to the head; and we’re trying to reduce such hits. We’ve learned that 70 percent of concussions in football result from helmet-to-helmet contact, and we’re trying to have coaches teach blocking and tackling differently and have officials penalize “high hits” consistently and rigorously.
During the past several years we’ve learned that serious heat illness and heat-related deaths are 100 percent preventable, yet nationwide there were 35 heat-related deaths in high school football alone from 1995 to 2010; and we’re promoting practices that acclimatize athletes more gradually than “old school” traditionalists might advocate.
As we simultaneously address issues of heads and heat in football, some coaches may think we’re being overbearing, while many in medical fields say we’re out of date, citing higher standards of the American Academy of Pediatrics, National Athletic Trainers Association and National Federation of State High School Associations, as well as many of our counterpart organizations across the country.
As we consider in-season changes to improve athlete acclimatization and reduce blows to the head, we should be open to making out-of-season changes that work toward rather than in opposition to those objectives. There can be no sacred cows. The topic is too serious.
Ultimately, if we err in the outcome of this year’s discussions about heads and heat in football, it must be on the side of safety, on minimizing risks for student participants. They deserve it and, once again, the sport of football needs it.