A Knight in Dragonland

Until yesterday, I was worried about Jim Mangan. Articles from the Pekin Daily Times printed since the NON-BINDING consolidation referendum (here and here and here) made it seem like Mr. Mangan had gone soft – quoting him in support of a study and saying that he had an “open mind” about consolidation. He has previously disparaged the necessity of a study, and his views regarding consolidation have been anything but open-minded. “Stridently partisan” would be a better description.

Well, his letter to the editor in yesterday’s Pekin Daily Times cured me of any thought that he might have gone “bleeding heart” since the referendum. He was back to his antagonistic, condescending, nasty old self. The letter was written as a thank you to Pekin voters for their support of the consolidation referendum.

Over the past five months, voters received unvarnished facts of the many shortcomings of our two-district system. Voters also heard different reports from local education experts and their followers, trying to put a happy face on years of insufficient student quality and wasteful taxing.

No, Mr. Mangan. For the past five months we’ve heard your nasty personal slander of District 108 administrators and teachers and exaggerated negative spin of the district’s test scores.

Now it is up to the school board members of districts 108 and 303 to get the job done. Will these representatives of the voters and their public paid administrators honestly follow the clear will of the people, or continue to conspire to find technical excuses and loop holes to protect the status-quo?

Conspire? The only organized conspiracy I see is your organization – the Citizens for Pekin School Consolidation, a group dedicated to shoving the consolidation issue down the throats of the people of Pekin. They pursue this goal by disparaging the hard-working and dedicated educators of District 108 and deceiving the public with vague, unproven promises of reduced taxation & educational benefit.

Will school officials and their fan club insult voters by pretending they didn’t understand what they were voting for?

Don White, District 108 Superintendent, has questioned whether voters really understood the referendum. I have my own doubts in that regard, but fine – yes, the referendum passed. However, the referendum was NON-BINDING – a fact that was clearly indicated on the ballot. Perhaps, Mr. Mangan, YOU should trust the voters to recognize that this was a non-binding resolution and NOT a carte blanche to move forward with consolidation.

The only way to assure that [there is an honest study of the consolidation issue] is by having two members of the Citizens for Consolidation group – myself and Dean Bacon – on the study team that the voters know and trust, and who have a working understanding of the material to be studied.

That’s like putting the fox in charge of the hen house! Trustworthy? That’s a laugh! Your letters to the Daily Times and your pro-consolidation fliers ignored the fact that test scores for District 108 schools hold up well against schools with similar demographics and against the state average. District 108 schools continue to meet adequate yearly progress as required by the No Child Left Behind Act. In fact, several 108 schools have won awards for excellence from the state. Did you mention any of those facts in your propaganda, Mr. Mangan?

We’ve also seen someone from your camp leak a confidential resignation letter to Mike Noyes so that he could use it to advance your petty political ends. Evasions, spin, outright lies and dirty tricks – that’s what we’ve seen from the Citizens for Pekin School Consolidation.

The policies promoted by Mangan, Bacon & Noyes (Pekin’s Unholy Trinity) endanger the already thinly stretched funding for the education of our children. Their slander of educators devastates morale and diminishes our ability to recruit and retain good teachers and administrators. If you were a teacher or school administrator, would you want to work in the hostile environment provided by the Citizens for Pekin School Consolidation?

Let’s carefully study the issue of consolidation and be sure that this is a good thing for our public school students before we move ahead. If such a study shows that consolidation will save taxpayer dollars while not jeopardizing education funding, then fine – go for it. If it saves money but reduces funding, then it’s not worth it. Our kids are already forced to do fundraisers on a nearly weekly basis. Our teachers already give too much out of their own pockets to educate our children.

We can’t just focus on the almighty dollar. We have to remember that the education of our children is the most important issue at stake here. Let’s not delude ourselves that consolidation will improve test scores. Tazewell County in general and the Pekin school districts in particular are undergoing demographic challenges that will not be solved by “organizing the curriculum” and ending social promotion (if that even occurs). We have more students with fewer resources at home. We have more students with special education needs that the tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act fail to separate from the rest of the pack. Consolidation does NOTHING to address these issues.

Social promotion is a failed educational policy, but the simple retention policies advocated by Mangan and his cohorts are an even larger failure. As Michelle Teheux suggested in her recent column, the real solution lies in providing supplemental instruction to students that are struggling. We need expanded early childhood education, expanded after-school programs and expanded tutoring services. This solution is neither simple nor cheap, but it offers more realistic chances of improving student performance than Mangan’s “magic wand.”