'Help me, Rhonda'

Our apologies to the Beach Boys for abrogating their 1965 hit title, but we couldn't think of a more apt response to Hamilton County School Board member Rhonda Thurman with respect to the startling remark she made to this newspaper's reporter, Joan Garrett, in explaining her fervor for ousting former superintendent, Dr. Jim Scales, and for shifting the school system's educational focus away from underachieving students in inner-city schools and back to the more privileged students of suburban schools.

Here's what she said in a front page in this newspaper Sunday as she revealed her resentment toward the attention on inner-city schools that she apparently believes have been coddled, and on which resources have been wasted in terms of academic results.

"Poor people learn. Slaves learned to read. I don't know why poor people can't learn to read and write. I have a lot of poor people in my family, but they are still expected to learn."

"Help me, Rhonda." Really. Is this really how Thurman understands the core challenges of public education in a world where the legacy of institutional slavery, to which she so flippantly referred, and Jim Crow racism long and unevenly divided educational resources between mainly white schools and mainly black schools? Does she really want to go back to that bad old world of malignant neglect and de facto segregation?

Indeed, if Thurman's remark reflects her world view of inner city schools and disadvantaged children, there's more than condescending, uncaring racism capsuled here. There's also an astounding lack of compassion, public responsibility and insight into the legacy not just of slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era and the terrible personal, familial, educational and economic toll these took. There's also determined neglect or inexplicable ignorance of the destruction of nuclear black families that followed it in the old model of welfare, and the hurdles to a learning culture that it engendered.

That was the system which largely limited public housing to unmarried women with children, thus spawning a history of ghettos, undereducated young mothers, absent fathers, low goal-setting, the cruel discipline of the street, and social barriers to learning, all in addition to segregation and separate and unequal schools.

The intergenerational consequences survive to this day. In a world where parents are expected to be dedicated first teachers, and to become the most invaluable models of early and lifelong learning and educational success, the obstacles to learning where that familial chain has been broken have been devastating.

They are deeply embedded and enormously hard to reverse. They especially affect children who have not been read to, or taught to read, by the time they enter kindergarten. And they long exacerbated the plight of children in inner-city schools that traditionally received scant attention and were written off by low expectations and too many demoralized teachers.

To address this dysfunctional system, special federal Title 1 funds were set aside for schools with high numbers of children eligible for free or reduced-price meals. In Chattanooga, the Benwood, Lyndhurst and Community foundations, in coordination with the national Carnegie Foundation, have poured tens of millions of dollars over the last decade to help break the cycle of low achievement in inner city schools since the 1997 merger of the former city and county school systems.

New federal "Race to the Top" funds will require continued emphasis on student achievement at all levels, and in all schools, not just the suburban schools, which have traditionally enjoyed higher achievement scores, at least in part because of a stronger learning environment at home.

It is astonishing that Thurman, along with some other school board members and some of the school system's local funders on the County Commission, still harbor a resentful, racist view on the attention given to elevating inner-city schools. Regardless, state and local education funds are divided evenly among all county schools on a per-student basis. The attention given to improving inner-city schools has not infringed on that per-student funding split.

The focus on inner-city schools has been vital, however. It has spawned significant successes. And for simple fairness and for the larger, long-term societal health of our community, it must be maintained. This community has gone to far to turn back to a racist, malignant neglect of minority students.

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