NAME GAME GREENLIGHTED

While twiddling its thumbs over the huge loss of five percent of the student body in the space of one year, the Grand Rapids Public School board of education approved the hackneyed renaming two elementary schools after union-organizer Cesar Chavez and civil rights leader Martin Luther King.  Come Fall 2006 Sibley School will get the Chavez moniker and Henry School will be MLK.  If board members were sincere in this name game, they could have found local icons to honor.  They do exist and speak well of the city’s progressiveness regarding race.  But that’s not the reason for the renaming.

Using the names of Chavez and King, two men who have had nothing to do with River City, the school board is playing to the P.C. mindset that bows to the racial grievance industry in town.  By throwing these bones, somehow the board members must’ve thought it would make up for the GRPS’s spectacular failure to deliver a decent education to inner city residents of Grand Rapids.  This pointless exercise in the politics of the craven will do NOTHING to help the students stuck in the city’s underperforming public schools.  And, as this year’s plunge in enrollment shows, it will do even less to attract new students to the GRPS.

Only when we can get past race-mongering to discuss honestly the failure of our public schools, especially urban systems like the GRPS, will we find the will to make genuine reforms.  Stunts like the GRPS’s trivialization of race with its name game does nothing good and sets us back.

Comments

[Non-Creative Class]

Thank You! I'm glad to hear this from someone other than me. Every few months they keep tacking MLK or Chavez's name onto somthing in this town. Hey GRPS, what about Lyman Parks? He was only the first black mayor of GR. You would think they can give this guy his due. Or if their clueless about the former mayor, why not just name a school in honor of Ben Franklin? Wait, nevermind. I'm sure they dont even teach about him in schools these days anyway.

keep up the good work guys!

[The Executive Director]

Thanks for the support, Non-Creative. Once we remove the blinders of race and just deal with people as who they really are, the foolishness of pandering like that of the GRPS is glaringly obvious.

That's probably why early on in a more sensible era the GRPS adopted the policy of naming a school, by and large, after the street it's on or neighborhood it's in. It avoided all the politics of the name game.

Regards,
Bill Tingley
Executive Director