... Or, as Mark Twain once observed, "God made the idiot for practice, and then He made the school board."
We now reach that beautiful and poignant moment in the telling of the story — that being the application of Great Hearts, an Arizona charter school group, to run a school in Nashville — that journalists covet so dearly: the crystalline moment when chaos spreads exponentially across the land, rational expectations fall to irrational outcomes, and nobody can tell what the F is going on.
Dear nation, we are now at that moment.
Predictions would be unwise. The cast of characters — unusually headstrong, all of them — are likely to produce a plot line that runs, well, about like Chris Johnson.
To recap, and these are only the basics — Great Hearts applies to open charter schools in Nashville. The school board denies its application, mostly because the school that Great Hearts decides to open first, in a fine enough part of town, will not ensure diversity. The state overrules that decision. This goes back and forth. Ultimately, the school boards stick to its guns — application denied. The state then withholds money from the school board to the tune of several million dollars.
The people seethe, rejoice, consider options, etc.
(Before I proceed, a disclosure: I was once the chairman of the board of Lead Academy, a local charter school. I got a dog in the fight.)
In the interests of deconstructing what has gone on, and to provide a textual analysis, here is the starring cast:
