Skepticism
October 4, 2011
One of the greatest catalysts of the environmental movement in Michigan was the rise of the middle class working family as our state industrialized in the early 1900s. Forty-hour-a-week workers with good pay and benefits sought out clean rivers, streams, lakes and parks for recreation and relaxation during their weekends and vacations. Many industries that created the jobs soon realized they had to provide their employees a clean environment as well.
Now as we struggle through a prolonged period of economic malaise in America, economists and politicians focus on what is needed to stimulate growth in the U.S. and world economies. They appear to worship at the altar of economic expansion, few seeming to question if our planet can sustain the growth rates they pursue. What price to our environment does a robust economy extract?
Of course, it is easier for a person with a job, insured benefits and a retirement program to question the obsession with economic growth; but a job without clean air to breathe and water to drink will not be satisfying for long. So a healthy dose of skepticism about economic growth is needed.
As I read the scathing indictment of corruption in college sports in the October issue of The Atlantic Magazine, I kept thinking that a healthier dose of skepticism about ever-increasing hype might have avoided the crass commercialism and exploitation of what once was but may no longer be justifiably connected to institutions of higher learning.
And of course, a healthy dose of skepticism must be maintained by those in charge of school sports as we trend during difficult economic times in directions more commercial than our founding principles may have envisioned.
Bad Choice
September 11, 2015
From our vantage point, we saw years ago that “choice” was disrupting schools more than it was improving them, and hindering more than enhancing the academic accomplishments of students.
What we saw years ago was that choice was more often exercised for adults’ convenience – to schools closer to child care or parents’ jobs – than for students’ academic improvement. Studies now tend to prove that observation is correct.
We also saw years ago that choice was mostly a chain reaction of prickly people. Students or their parents unhappy with their local school for one reason or another would move to a nearby school where, simultaneously, unhappy people would be moving from there to another nearby school. Studies now show that about half of choice students return to where they began; whether or not they ever accept that the fault was their own and not the fault of the first school is more difficult to discern.
In July, Michigan State University reported some of the most recent research about, and some of the faintest praise for, school of choice; but because previous studies have demonstrated that students’ learning diminishes as their mobility increases, there should have been much more scrutiny of Michigan’s school of choice policy when it was introduced 20 years ago, and as it has spread to 80 percent of Michigan school districts since 1994.
As a means of improving schools, choice has failed by making poor schools worse. As a means of integrating schools, choice and charter schools have actually re-segregated schools. And as a means of destroying neighborhoods, choice has been the perfect weapon.
You want to rebuild Michigan? Then start with neighborhoods, at the center of which will be a grocery store and a school, both within walking distance for their patrons who are invested in them.
School of choice has created problems for administrators of school sports. But what’s far worse is the damage it has done and continues to do to our students, schools and society.