Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Breaking News Dean Believes the Children Are Our Future
Posted by Matt Pulle on Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 3:40 PM
Comments (9)
Showing 1-9 of 9
Geez, give him a day why don't ya? Certainly it has merits but many things need to be considered before shifting the political structure of a 75,000 child system. I wish Dean had been a bit more communicative than he has, generally speaking but this is kind of a big commitment. I'd hope he'd take longer than a news cycle to commit either way. Your readers will just have to be patient.
like
dislike
Who would you suggest be on the already "doomed" task force to make it "undoomed"?
Not totally sure what you're getting at, but the political "committee" charged with reducing the dropout rate is the very one Mr. Fox is seeking to reform.
Doomed? I think the Mayor's Task Force will eventually come up with some decent ideas. What will happen then?
One wonders at which point David Fox came to realize he was unqualified to serve on the Board, and why he ran in the first place.
Geez, give him a day why don't ya?
Perhaps the mayor deserves a little breathing space, but let's be honest and acknowledge that this isn't a new idea. It has been kicking around city hall since last summer's election, and was a subject of conversation during the lengthy campaign that preceded it. What's new is that someone (David Fox) finally decided to speak about it out loud in a way that catalyzed press coverage. And no surprise: an elected official announces support for a reform that would eliminate his own position -- that is news. It seems fair to expect the mayor to formulate and articulate a position on this before long because (a) it's been in front of his people as a possibility for quite a while, and (b) there is clearly a lot of civic impatience on the issue of Metro public schools.
The mayor will "formulate and articulate a position on this" just as soon as his pollsters tell him where the majority of voters stand on the issue. How anybody ever thought that Dean was going to be a transformative leader is beyond me - neither his history nor his mayoral campaign so much as hinted that he was other than a political hack. You can count on it -- we are in for four years of a timid and poll-driven Dean administration whose primary focus will be making the 2011 re-election campaign as easy a coast as possible.
BB is right. Mr. Fox is doing the biding of those who helped him get elected. He wants to go home with the people who brought him to the dance. He also probably doesn't want to do the job anymore since it's not very exciting in reality and quite time consuming and cantankerous.
The question is not whether Mayor Dean has to check out a poll before he decides but what do the majority of voters want: an elected or appointed school board. He's not King but the popularly elected Mayor. There are very few elected positions that most people who want to participate in government can run for. And since "less" important elected positions have only one or two candidates vying for the post, there are very few votes cast in their races.
