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The State of Dean's Speech is....Crapalicious

Well, the reviews are in—Mayor Karl Dean's State of the Metro Address has been panned by both the City Paper and the Scene, the two papers that actually follow local politics. The address was bland, unchallenging and had several head-scratching moments, which we mock and ridicule after the jump.

Dean Ducks Tax Issue in Speech

Mayor Karl Dean, operating in a tight budget year, was reduced this morning to trying to make a big deal out of a few minor initiatives in his first State of Metro speech.

Nashville has been chosen to participate in a National League of Cities program, which apparently will bring more "small learning communities" to schools. The juvenile court system is going to start running an attendance center for kids who play hooky. And the mayor will add funding to the capital budget for a DNA crime lab for police.

Otherwise, Dean congratulated Maplewood High, arguably Tennessee's worst school academically, for losing the state championship football game. (The Panthers "outplayed all but one other class 4A football team in the state last year," Dean gushed.) And he recognized a couple of cops for fixing a family's flat tire last Thanksgiving. We're not making this up.

There was nothing in the speech about the central issue confronting Dean's administration: how hard it will be for Metro to raise enough revenue to provide the same level of services in the future because of the 2006 charter amendment that requires public approval of property tax rate increases. In fact, Dean pretended it'll only take "smart fiscal management" to overcome these little pesky money problems we're facing now.

"Although times are tight," the mayor said, "we know that will not always be the case." That's reassuring.

After the jump, the text of Dean's speech.

Politics, Public and Private

A sidebar piece in Sunday’s Tennessean package on public schools raised a contentious issue that rears its head every so often: Does it matter whether elected officials and civic leaders who make so much noise about improving public schools send their own kids to public schools? The Tennessean story reminded us that both the mayor and the chair of the Metro Council’s education committee are privateers when it comes to educating their own children. Some say this is no big deal—your kids’ education is your own business. Others find it unsettling (that’s putting it gently) that those who would control the system’s fate think the schools are good enough for other people’s kids but not their own.

Does a different standard apply to those who serve on the school board? That question popped up last week on a Pith comment thread about District 9 school board candidate Alan Coverstone, whom I described as an involved public school parent (which is true). An anonymous commenter then offered up the factoid that one of Coverstone's kids will go private next year. Invited to comment, Coverstone, a teacher and administrator at Montgomery Bell Academy, tells Pith:

My older son is very excited about the prospect of attending USN next year, and I hope that every 5th grader in Nashville will be as excited about school next fall. I am and will remain an active public school parent at Hull-Jackson, and I am running to make sure that every family who struggles with what is best for their children will have options that their children can be excited about. I am committed and passionate about public education. I believe that we can bring all communities together to expand the choices parents have in public schools. My experiences in private and public education, as well as my personal experiences with the most personal of school choice decisions, qualify me to bring people together for the common good of all children and families in Nashville.

My own view is that everyone—elected officials included—has the right to educate their kids as they wish. But if you’re going to seek public office with direct responsibility for the school system—the largest piece of the county’s budget—you incur an obligation to say publicly and specifically what it is about the system that makes it unacceptable for your own kids. You might not be morally obligated to send your kid to public school, but you do have a moral obligation to say concretely why not. To say it's “what we think is best for our children; it's not a political decision," as Karl Dean tells The Tennessean, doesn’t cut it. The system is made worse when the city’s elites, people with money and influence to invest in the system's future, abandon it. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Dept. of Dubious Metaphors

Alan Coverstone, a candidate for Metro school board in District 9, is a promising contender for the seat being vacated by retiring board chair Marsha Warden. Coverstone is a thoughtful progressive whose campaign is off to an energetic start with lots of fundraising appeals and email blasts. The one sent today, however, did seem to incorporate an unfortunate turn of phrase in the subject line.

Vandy Partay

While trolling the depths of YouTube last week (bet you wished you worked at the Scene), we found this old-school shout-out to Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management (a.k.a. b-school), created by FuquaVision, a group of MBA grunts from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

Among the highlights:

" ’Cause no one's harder than a Vandy gangtsa / Pop a cap in your assets ’cause our daddy owns the bank-a"

"Got 10 pink polos hangin' in my closet / Record the Masters twice just in case I wanna pause it."

It's pretty damn funny. But to Fuqua, we have this to say: "Hello, pot? This is kettle. You're black." (Or, in this case, "white" might be more to the point.)

Boys on the Bus

There's a lot of doubt among the post-middle-aged male demographic as to whether a 14-year-old Rutherford County girl was raped by a male student on her bus ride home from school. (Take this story and this ridiculous blog, for example.)

Murfreesboro police said the 18-year-old suspect raped the girl and characterized surveillance tape of the incident as “shocking.” The police spokesman described it this way: “His hands were all over her body, and you can clearly see from the video that she's trying to fight him off and squirm away, yelling 'no' over and over again.”

But the all-male Rutherford County school board (pictured above) isn't quite as shocked. These dudes watched the same video, and their fearless leader had this to say about it: “I could not see what the young man was doing with his hands below the level of the seat back. But nothing I could see indicated a sexual assault was taking place.”

So, let me see if I have this right. You couldn't see what was happening behind the seat, but just to err on the side of caution, you're going to completely discount this young woman's claims, the police department's evaluation of the video, and default to the boy who was arrested in the incident?

After reviewing the video, the school board chairman did call the incident “undeniably horrific,” but he added that it “was not the type of rape that most people seem to assume it was.” So, was it a lesser form of rape? Is there a less traumatic way to be raped on your trek home from school that we're not aware of?

(Note to commenters, before you artfully advise me “not to get my panties in a twist,” a common retort directed to Pithers of the female variety, I realize that the jury's still out on this case. But in the meantime, I simply don't see the sense in trivializing what may have happened to this young girl—or in laymen vehemently discounting her story. Or, in the larger sense, making it all the more harrowing and intimidating for young girls to come forward with reports of sexual assault.)

SEE ALSO: Aunt. B.

Do Magnet School Parents Have Street Cred?

Friday is probably a better time to post silly YouTube videos than ponder broad, philosophical issues of civic devotion, but, dear Pith reader, I have no such fun and games for you today. So instead let me ask you a question: Can parents boast about their family's commitment to public education if they send their children to one of the district's many high-performing magnet schools?

I ask that because of a letter to the Scene this week in which a public school parent lectures Mayor Karl Dean for dispatching his kids to private school: “My family believes in public education, and we attempt to walk the walk by sending our kids to Nashville public schools.”

But the letter writer also says that his kid attends a middle school magnet “so that our child will be guaranteed a spot in the nation's 32nd best public high school, MLK magnet.”

Well, what would happen if our letter writer couldn't send his child to one of the nation's top high schools? Would he still believe in public education? Perhaps a little less. It's a tad easier to boast about your commitment to public education when you have a student in a magnet school that doesn't have the same challenges as many local schools. Imagine being self-righteous about how you only buy American cars when you're driving around in a Dodge Viper.

Then there's also the issue that expanding magnet schools weakens local schools by luring away the smartest and most devoted parents and kids. That's really the same argument public school parents use against private school ones, right?

A Fifth Name for MNPS

A Tennessean story this morning mentions the names of four people who have signaled their interest in becoming interim director of Metro public schools: Maplewood principal Julie Williams, MNPS administrator Lance Lott, former Paris (Tenn.) Special School District director Paul Doyle, and celebrity homophobe Carolyn Baldwin Tucker. Some public school advocates in town are pushing the intriguing candidacy of a fifth person not mentioned in the Tennessean story: Mildred Saffell-Smith.

Saffell-Smith is a former public school educator who graduated from what was then known as Pearl High School and spent more than 30 years with MNPS. She taught English at Glencliff until the mid-1970s, through the early years of integration, and then became an administrator: assistant principal at Dupont Hadley Junior High, West End Middle, and Hume Fogg, and eventually principal at MLK from 1996-2002. At Pedro Garcia’s request, she returned to MLK as interim principal during the 2005-2006 school year. Saffell-Smith has a Ph.D. in education from Peabody at Vanderbilt, along with bachelors and masters degrees from TSU. She has taught at MTSU and TSU and is currently on the faculty in educational studies at Cumberland University.

I met Saffell-Smith at an open house for her hosted by some public school parents last night. She strikes me as an energetic, passionate advocate for public education who sees the most critical role of the system’s central administration as helping principals and teachers do the difficult job they are asked as professionals to do. Saffell-Smith supports the idea that smaller learning units and communities present attractive options for overcoming some of the stubborn problems in the system. Although she recognizes the value of measuring achievement for knowing where we are in relation to where we need to be, she wants to unleash principals and teachers to work toward common goals in diverse ways that suit their students and circumstances. In this sense, Saffell-Smith plainly rejects the one-size-fits-all approach that became the hallmark of Pedro Garcia’s tenure as director.

Saffell-Smith has the virtues of being a knowledgeable and experienced participant in the system as well as a thoughtful and critical observer of it from outside. A parent who had kids in school during Saffell-Smith’s time as principal describes her leadership as “extraordinary.” I have no idea if she’s the best candidate on the table to lead MNPS as interim director, but she is clearly someone worth listening to.

How to Improve Metro Schools: Part 329

Jeremy Kane, director of LEAD Academy, who is featured in this week's Scene, has drafted a memo outlining a radically different way of approaching education. In it, Kane proposes we undertake a far-out, risky enterprise in which we look at what works at other school districts and see if we could apply any of those lessons here. Sure, that approach may not seem so revolutionary, but in the arena of public education the debate is typically between incrementalism and doing nothing. Kane's memo argues for more meaningful reform designed to foster smaller, more autonomous schools. We're not convinced all of the measures outlined here are feasible, but Kane's proposal is as good a starting point as any for a debate about our district. After the jump, a rough draft of Kane's memo. Though he hasn't finished citing all his sources, we pleaded with him to let us publish it now.

Sunnyside Up

Gov. Phil Bredesen sounded a few upbeat notes on education in his State of the State speech last night by invoking Education Week’s recent state-by-state report card on public schools:

Believe me, these kinds of grades and rankings should always be taken with a grain of salt, and they don’t always capture what is most important. But I’ll confess to you that it was nice to look it over this year. We’re still in the 40s on school finance, 41st to be exact. But this year for the first time they ranked states on overall scores – the measure that tries to take everything into account—achievement, standards, transitions, teachers, finance—the bottom line. In that ranking, this January, we’re not in the 40s. We’re not in the 30s. We’re not in the 20s even. Tennessee is ranked this year No. 16 in the nation.

In areas we have focused on, we do even better. In the category of “Standards, Assessments and Accountability,” we’re ranked number 10 in the nation. After the actions that our State School Board took last week to further raise standards, I expect this to climb even higher in the years ahead. And my personal favorite ranking: In one of the six categories they look at, “Education Alignment Policies”—this is where pre-K lives—we know we still have lots to do here, but in 2008 our Education Week rank nationally is one.