While reading Liam's musings this morning??armies of grown-ups who had gone gaga for a certain presidential candidate's mellifluous vapidities about change and hope? is worth serious consideration?I was listening to Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy being interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition and was suddenly caught up in my own reveries.
I was working in Washington in 1994 when convicted cocaine politician Marion Barry re-won the mayoralty. In a memorable post-election press conference Barry told the Washington Post, which had editorialized against him and, in Barry's view, represented the city's whites, with dramatic bravado, to ?get over it.?
It was one of those laugh/cry moments. You had to admire Barry's chutzpah. But I also recall feeling terrible sympathy for African Americans, so used to living within America's penal system that they felt no shame in electing an ex-con to the city's highest office.? (It was during this period that I read with some degree of shock, of a study of DC's mostly black adult prison population: average reading level was 3rd grade.)
So, I feel a bit entitled (a term I learned in DC) to offer my sympathies to the city's still beleaguered public school students. (Even the President of the United States agrees. More on this, with advice for Mike, later.) ?I also feel a bit sad?sad that Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee were too preoccupied with education excellence to watch their political backs and sad that DC voters are still too caught in the net of failure to appreciate Fenty and Rhee's work on their behalf.
I certainly sympathize with the sentiments of those who find the hubris of some of our preppy reformers grating, but we need beware not to be goaded into the kind of easy patronizing that politicians like Marian Barry are so adept at exploiting. I was thinking of this as I listened to Milloy on NPR. His is a sweet voice, and no doubt his own black populism plays well to a still largely impoverished black populace, which is, as he argues, being further marginalized by the?DC's continued?(white?) gentrification.? But it still sounds like the race card to me.?And Milloy seems pretty aware of it, as he wrote in this September 8th column:
Many white folk had been in a funk since 1994, when Marion Barry won reelection for a fourth term as mayor, following his release from prison on a drug possession charge, and told them to ?get over it.?
Luckily for the students of DC much has changed since 1994.? There are some very smart African Americans ?one of whom lives in the White House?who are taking education reform seriously.? And some, including Fenty and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, brave enough not to weight their school systems with too much political patronage. As the African American Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson says, Michelle Rhee's appointment was the ?ultimate display of respect for African-American residents in Washington.?
Excellence?should be?its own reward. But excellence needs more victories.
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
