TheGibsonReport.today.com

The money that could be used for enhancing education for DC Public School students is going into salaries for top administrators… thanks to Mayor Fenty.  He’s pushing the City Council to pay the new chancellor and the new head of facilities more than $275,000 each - nearly $100,000 more than ever paid to any school administrator in the history of the school system.  What we’re talking about here is POLITICS!!!  Politics forced the mayor’s hand to fill the chancellor position with someone endorsed by the White House and other political insiders.  BUT… as one who has taught in the DC Public School System, let me tell you, what is needed is not better paid administrators as the mayor thinks or better teachers, as the chancellor’s believes… BUT a reduction of bureaucrats and administrators who get to age in place and persist in maintaining mediocrity downtown.  How else does one explain an urban school system in the 21st century using antiquated payroll, attendance, and other methods?  We all know that change is needed in the school system… but it is the approach to change that is suspect. The mayor’s great transformation is not grounded in research. Instead of demanding fact-finding or evidence, politicians at the city, state, and federal level have endorsed theories and the word of an enthusiastic mayo; there’s little evidence that the mayor and his chancellor appreciate how historically difficult change is because of entrenched insiders when they advocate that better teachers will turn the school system around.  WRONG!!! They blew a miracle by not bringing together both insiders and outsiders before the unprecedented take-over.   

I’m a student of the Larry Cuban school of thought and an innovative teacher award recipient, so I know the importance of change from the bottom up as well as the top down.

Without parental, community, teacher, and student involvement, there is a good chance the new chancellor is either going to become a firefighter - putting out fires - or the sister of the little boy who was always plugging up holes in the dam with his fingers.  Busy, yes! Successful? 

This may be a good time to define success or what progress is going to look like over the next few years.  This month the problem is getting the funds for band uniforms… what will the problem be next week or next month for the chancellor?  I can guarantee you that whatever it is, the chancellor is most likely to hear about it first from the media, rather than from her staff.  Unless, of course, she realizes the amount of re-education that is going to have to be done starting right now.  For $250,000 I and probably a few others can show her how…

The head of the very city that is taxed without “voting” representation in Congress… wants to take away the historically created voting rights of the D.C. School Board. But his reason for doing so is amazing. Mayor Adrian Fenty says nine people can’t make effective decisions for the D.C. Public School System. He doesn’t know the history or the fact that there was a time when one or a few didn’t do much better. Fenty’s comment is like saying the D.C. City Council or the House of Representatives can not be effective, either: too many people to be efficient. What is just as paradoxical is the fact that the D.C. Council, both houses of Congress, and President Bush have signed off on an obviously flawed idea and document. For example… The Washington Post revealed in May 2007, that one-third of the mayor’s take over plan wasn’t even original; it was, in fact, copied from a yet untested North Carolina school system plan. BUT… these politicians didn’t blink at the finding of such gross “plagarism” in such an important and putatively transformative document. Nor did they explain why they would vote to take away the voting rights of D.C. citizens for a school board while supporting voting rights for them in the U. S. Congress.

Doesn’t anyone remember the hard fought battles to get an elected mayor for the District of Columbia? Doesn’t anyone remember what it was like before school board members were elected in the District of Columbia?

Where is the rage that a newly elected mayor who hasn’t even demonstrated that he can run one of the most important cities in the world wants to strip DC residents of power?

Where is the rage that the very deputy in charge of the mayor’s take over plan is the very one who admitted he didn’t credit others for borrowing their North Carolina ideas?

Where is the rage when the mayor says he doesn’t need to ask D.C. citizens about his take over plans because he asked the D.C. City Council, instead? So he understands the importance of representation in a democracy. But even more to the point, where is the rage that Congress and the President of the United States are having input on a “state” or local matter?

A victory for the Fenty administration may well translate into a historical loss for the residents of the District of Columbia. Fenty lacks a track record for useful input about the public schools when he sat on the City Council. Just because Congress and President Bush say the Home Rule Charter can be changed to exclude an elected school board… does not mean that it should be done? The same people who are undermining the public school system with private school voucher programs are slowly deconstructing the very infrastructure that is vital to a democracy. Aren’t these the same ones who have declared the DC Public Schools to be in a desperate state? Where’s the rage? I know… it’s been coopted!

Since 1984 federal regulators at the FCC have told parents that the best control for avoiding violent TV is to “turn the TV off.” The FCC’s argument for more than two decades has been that broadcast regulation is based upon “the public’s interest” (marketplace model) rather than the original mandate and narrative of “the public interest” (trusteeship model). Without acknowledging that it is now proposing RE-REGULATION,” the FCC is now trying to get away with trying to get Congress to do what the FCC had the mandate to do… before it redefined the situation and deregulated TV in the 1980s.

The memory the FCC lost about regulating in the public interest for the common good can be found in my unpublished dissertation (1995) — Ideological Narratives and The American Airwaves: Reconstituting the Public Interest.

This work tells the story about how regulatory words came to lose their meaning. Now the shift in regulatory metaphors is coming back to haunt a deregulation-driven agency. But with the broadcast playing field finally leveled, I would argue, that the FCC willl put itself out-of-business without help from Congress. In other words, the FCC which has refused to regulate Cable TV (hence, rising rates), now wants to hide behind Congress with warmed-over and out-of-date TV violence proposals.

With a changed telecommunications landscape, however, Congress may well need a new and different kind of telecommunications regulator. Could it be that FCC now stands for “fainthearted changed choices?”

Surprise! You can’t define “excessively violent” TV programming. In fact, neither Congress nor the FCC has the time to play content police. Perhaps, that’s why we hear swear words being bleeped on one channel but heard loudly on another. Furthermore, just think of all the people who will have to be hired just to respond to the thousands of letters the FCC will get about what is “excessively violent” and what is not. Open the can…. and some funny looking regulatory worms are sure to follow. The FCC has yet to explain, for example, why it regulates some of the channels but not others on our TV sets.

There is a simple solution, however. RE-REGULATE TV again with a mandate that says television should be family programming before 10PM on any kind of TV. That will level the playing field for cable and what will soon be, former over-the-air broadcasters. It’s still a well-kept secret that, thanks to the FCC’s selling of the public airwaves in the 1980s and 1990s, the TV sets we have today are going to be obsolete in two years when over-the-air TV signals go digital. That means the public will be forced to pay more to convert or purchase new TV sets.

Talk about a regulatory nightmare! Rather than getting looped into re-defining the regulatory mandate of the FCC, legislators would do well to take an extremely long look at why the FCC is really urging limits on TV violence. To congratulate the FCC, as some legislators in the Senate have, for issuing an out-of-date TV violence report is to keep the game going… that the FCC matters.

It’s obviously a win-win situation for the FCC: legislators will be blamed no matter which way the regulatory wind on TV violence blows. The pivotal first step to avoid repeating the problems caused by TV deregulation is to examine FCC’s dismantling of key regulations that created the environment for “excessive violence” on TV, in the first place.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around the insane violence inflicted on dozens of innocent people on the Virginia Tech campus this week. Having experienced a gunman aiming a gun at a room full of people in Boston when I was a TV news anchor, I know what panic and fear feel and taste like. My heart goes out to families and friends coping with such an intimate tragedy. I also feel a bit of rage and frustration with academic settings that often allow madness to fester. It’s rather frightening to be intimidated by students who make veiled threats when they don’t like the grades they’ve earned. It’s equally unsettling to identify students with obvious mental health problems on a college campus and find institutional practices that prevent taking action. I once had a male student disrupt a class of 75 with his threatening behavior. Fearing for the safety of myself and others, I went through the chain of command letting administrators know about the student. I was told there was nothing that could be done. That of course wasn’t true. Citing the law, the professionals refused to do more; they fell back on 20th century practices rather than thinking outside of the box and creating new ways to handle old problems. At a time when depression and suicides continue to plague college campuses… more innovative approaches must be developed in university settings.

My situation with an obviously troubled student was resolved a month later when he was arrested for having drugs and stealing from others. Contrary to what an editorial in The Washington Post reported on 4-19-07, there are things that can be done on any campus when mental health questions are raised. The problem is that the letter of the law is being followed, but not its spirit.

So we need to treat Seung Hui Cho’s [sung hee JOH] damaging behavior as a wake-up call; we need to ask urgent questions AND we need to be kinder and gentler to each other. What, for example, caused so many teachers during his entire education to just pass him along? How did he get into Virginia Tech with such anti-social skills; how did he get to be a senior? Why isn’t there a clearing house on any campus for team assessments of individuals who pose possible threats to the quality of life of a university community?

The shooter has been repeatedly described as a “loner, anti-social, weird.” What a shame that young college students in his living situation were forced to endure the shooter’s alienating behavior. They were the only individuals to actually seek professional help for a disturbed student. That happened because Virginia Tech, like most universities, didn’t have an adequate mental health safety net. Finally, since the shooter’s Great Aunt in Korea has told the world that Cho was a “cold” child before he was even eight years old, it’s difficult to understand how professionals over a 16 year period didn’t make referrals for mental health care.

As a social psychologist, I have found enough information in the literature that indicates when individuals are “loosely coupled,” they tend to be loners, isolated, withdrawn, and typically angry. Certainly you don’t need a college degree or any kind of professional certification to know that a poor ability to relate to others is a key indicator that something is wrong.

When Cho’s roommates observed that he never went home over breaks, they became concerned enough to call the police. While these students should be applauded for trying to help, they should not have had to endure being around someone who demonstrated a total disregard for other human beings.

Seeing the shooter’s total disconnect with reality in his video, we are forced to wonder how many others like him are roaming our streets, campuses, workplaces, and even, our temples, mosques, and churches.

The Virginia Tech massacre is a serious wake-up call for every state that has cut its mental health budgets and closed its mental health institutions. Shame! We have enough money to fund a billion dollar war but not enough to help our citizens who are in pain? Shame! We have only to look to our prisons and jails to see where so many of the mentally ill and homeless individuals have landed. We need to face the fact that homelessness is a socially constructed phenonmenon. Can we not see, now, what a student killer has shown his family and the nation: the United States of America is in the midst of a serious mental health crisis?

Now is the time to insist that Colleges and Universities stop shutting out parents by insisting that students are their sole customers. Now is the time to stop overloading young college students with massive debt and stop pretending that their parents just want to “hover” when they ask questions about their children. These institutions have created a serious debt problem at the same time that they have made lots of money for loan agencies and debt collectors. The intitutional wagons were circled when Virginia Tech’s president supported his security system before the facts were even investigated. In the end it will be the parents and love ones of the students who will bring about change…

Should Walter Reed Army Medical Center be closed as soon as possible (Washington Post, 4-12-07) as a top level Pentagon review panel has concluded? Absolutely Not!!! Who are these guys? Have they every visited Walter Reed? Are they even aware of the relationships that have been formed over the years between families and the institution? The panel is wrong! I grew up in DC and I know the importance of Walter Reed to the community. My dad had a liver transplant at Walter Reed when he was a Chaplain in World War II. I remember him coming out on a balcony and waving at me and my brother. Over the years, I’ve had many friends who live on three sides of Walter Reed. The Medical Center has been good for the neighborhood and vice versa. The fact that casualties overwhelmed the facility and the staff can be changed with a rearrangement of priorities. Certainly if you want to support a policy to close, realign, and expand the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda… you would not want to make improvements in northwest Washington. But… the patients, the staff, and the neighborhood deserve better. Time for them and us to say, “hell, no… we won’t go!”