A call to help our schools and kids

Leonard Pitts, the Miami Herald’s Pulitzer-winning columnist, is in town today. He spoke to a breakfast sponsored by the nonprofit group Mecklenburg Citizens for Public Education, or MeckEd (http://www.mecked.org/ ). This afternoon he’ll visit the staff at The Observer.

In 2007 Pitts wrote a series, “What Works,” in which he highlighted more than a dozen successful efforts around the country to help children and schools. One was from Gaston, N.C. (a town near Roanoke Rapids on northeastern North Carolina, not nearby Gaston County) and featured a KIPP Academy.

“How do you change something many of us long ago learned to take for granted?” he asked the crowd. And, “If we know what works, why not just do it?”

He quoted an ancient Greek saying: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”

In other words, get involved where you can, doing what you can.

He’s not the first to note this, but it’s still true: A strong public education system is important for the local economy, for keeping businesses healthy and for the fiscally prudent goal of keeping local people engaged in productive lives and out of jail. It’s not just a feel-good thing, Pitts said, but a common-sense mathematical calculation.

Yet if you read the comments section of this blog or many online sites, anytime the public schools emerge as a topic, and they’re filled with hostility toward Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in particular and public schools in general. Which is, at bottom, incredibly counter-productive for the whole community. Nothing is perfect, but invective doesn’t help anyone improve anything and indeed, tends to have the opposite effect.

Has my kid had some bad teachers at CMS? You bet. Been in class with a few deeply troubled kids? Yep. Do CMS administrators make occasionally silly decisions? Of course. Why should they be different from managers everywhere? (I say that as a former department head, where made my share of dumb decisions.) None of those problems is specific to CMS or even to public schools.

Yet there’s a vein of what seems to approach hatred running through parts of Charlotte, toward its public schools that too often drowns out an equally strong vein of support.

MeckEd hopes to start a community discussion on public education. Here’s a link to their new discussion board, being run with help from the Crossroads Charlotte initiative.

And don’t forget DonorsChoose.org, where you can put your money to good use helping classroom teachers who really need the help.