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Any serious person, with skin in the game, has to be mightily ambivalent about the potential takeover of MPS by the City and State. Certainly, the Governor’s announcement that he would not seek re-election roils up the takeover water cooler conversations.

Certainly Mayor Barrett knew the Governor would not run and chose to pursue the takeover initiative anyway. According to that scenario, the Guv didn’t throw the Mayor under the bus with his announcement. But I digress.

I am of two minds. One visceral; the other more intellectual.

I can’t imagine anything more anti-democratic than throwing out an elected school board to let the state’s two top politicians takeover MPS. Or to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht mocking Soviet Commissars, who asked if they could just “dissolve the people and elect another one”. Given what I do for a living, my knee jerks because I think that democracy trumps competence every time.

On the other hand, a few hundred dupes who elected and re-elected the thoroughly corrupt and contemptible Charlene Hardin was a joke. That was a perversion of democracy. No, this was hardly New England-style town square democracy, at it’s small town best. MTEA, and the infantile left in town gave her just enough money to keep her in business in return for her reliable vote. Even she didn’t take herself seriously.

The visceral response is that of an MPS parent.

I want a cookie for every parent teacher conference I went to, every soccer-swimming-volleyball game-track meet-and even wrestling tournament I agonized through (only swimming was agonizing), and the years I basically wasted as a parent representative to site based management councils.

My problem-the one I am really worked up about-are people with opinions and self righteousness that never risked sending their kids to MPS-like I did! Teachers, MTEA leadership, some politicians, would never, ever, send their kids to school in MPS. But now they got a ‘tude about Barrett and Doyle.

Let’s face it. Barrett and Doyle with a czar-like person at the helm with no school board cannot be worse than what we have now. A democratic, but utterly failed school system is not acceptable. It would be nice to have both. But that’s not where we’re at.

My lefty friends say there is no evidence that school systems in Chicago or Washington DC have performed any better than their predecessors. But unlike the school board or educational bureaucratic, the mayor and governor are in charge of economic development and thus have a big stake in who and what comes out of the educational system that supports our State’s economy.

So! What’s more important to you? Your children’s education? Or your democratic impulse?

Answer that question, and you’ll know what side of this issue you stand on.

-Howard Snyder