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.