AC Wharton addressed tonight's gathering of Drinking Liberally at RP Billiards, and spent well over an hour with us, being very candid and talking at length about his plans for the city.
I wanted substance, I got substance. He talked for half that time about education, and he was very clear that he is will to do what it takes to make education a focus. I had never spent that much time with him in a setting, and he is mesmerizing.
He knocked it out of the park, and showed why he is leading.
2 comments:
I am not in the city, as you know, so I have no local stream of information about what may or may not be taking place within the City School system. That caveat being offered, my sense has been for most of the last twenty or so years that the Memphis public schools have become rank with inefficiency, bloated with repetitive and entrenched bureaucracy and do a terrible job at providing even a rudimentary education to their students. It's not all their fault, of course, since parents and neighborhoods bear a large portion of the responsibility for nurturing their children to educated citizenship and a sense of common human decency. It takes a village, after all...
At the same time, do AC, any mayoral candidate or the Cracker not recognize that alternative solutions than gut-fighting over over federal dollars are worthy of consideration? Until the Congress killed it, the DC voucher program was actually helping the poorest of the poor in a school system so bad that it makes Memphis look like England's Oxford. Is there an alternative to the relentless unionization that rewards stasis, degrees in education and buries even the best teachers--my brother for example--under an Everest of paperwork? Do AC, his major opponent or the Cracker have an answer to these issues? Thanks for your time--
The Mayor of Memphis has little...very little influence over what goes on over at Memphis city Schools at all.
So it really does not matter much what any Mayoral candidates has to say about the subject really.
However...the Mayor can do alot about the many outside things that come into the schools and interfere with the educational process. Public health,Juvenile recidivism,poverty,drug addiction and lead contaminated soil in the surrounding neighborhoods...just to name a few
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