That’s how I characterized the recent brouhahas of the Christina School Board with their RTT fiascos in correspondence with Pandora.
Now we have the next act of the Christina School District All Drama, no KIDS extravaganza as Councilman Jea Street weighs in to call for the State to take over the District.
There is no doubt that the CSD has more than its fair share of problems, and there is no doubt that the CSD school board hasn’t been especially functional recently. But what doesn’t help anything is an effort from the political class that doesn’t do anything other than add to the dysfunctional drama. And make no mistake — this letter from Councilman Street and the Delaware Black Caucus is about the Drama, it doesn’t have anything to do with the KIDS.
Starting with building a case for a takeover that includes old issues that have been largely resolved, wrongly characterizing all of the Christina city schools as being under academic watch or review, and presenting the issues that the CSD Board has had with its Superintendent and the DOE Secretary as somehow dangerous to African American kids. As if these two executives were *only* overseeing the education of African American kids. Academic performance of schools or kids is glancingly mentioned towards the end of the letter, which is how you know that Street is here to add to the Drama and get his fair share of the publicity here.
Now, I happen to think that Street has the germ of a point here — and that is that some people’s children *are* the ones available for ideological in-fighting over. But if the Delaware Black Caucus was interested in making sure that the kids actually get a fair shake, they would have approached this thing with some education-focused solutions. Or even some solutions for helping the CSD Board get abit more functional or responsive. But piling on (and not even an especially smart or honest piling on) helps no one, except the people looking for more TV face time, a few more newspaper column inches, a way to *look* like they care about a problem without having to do (or be responsible for) any of the hard work to help fix it. You can tell from the cc list that this isn’t meant to be much more than a new bit of attention-getting.
Leadership means getting a bunch of people working together to accomplish some goal. It is a really simple idea, but a hard thing to do — because you have to work at understanding the problems, the influences on that problem, vetting the solutions, and getting the right people to get those solutions implemented. All too often, the Delaware Black Caucus is way too interested in taking actions that make them *look* like they are concerned with issues of Delaware’s African-American community. Time for them to now figure out how to demonstrate some leadership on these issues, and time for their constituents to ask these members to be accountable for some *results*. Because ideological fights that have no results in concrete change is just an empty effort that was never about the KIDS in the first place.