No Longer Singing For Their Suppers

I just got a text that a crooked charter school I once worked at is closing, because they are a half million dollars in debt.

What did we do before the magic of instant messaging allowed us to suddenly conjure up news that would make us chuckle?

I don’t mean to sound insensitive to the students who must suddenly find new schools or the mostly uncertified teachers, or teacher like adults, since I remember not everyone who was contracted as an educator actually qualified for the term, who must find new employment. I am a sensitive guy. I take medicine because I’m so sensitive.

But for most of the Chicago charter school’s semi-illicit history, the school was always threatening to “close mid-year” and ask its students to “suddenly find new schools”. In that sense, the Southside of Chicago school was kind of like that 70s sitcom about Southside of Chicago life in the projects, Good Times. When an episode came up where it looked like Florida, J.J., Thelma, and barely closeted little Michael might actually get out of the projects, and then somehow they didn’t, you eventually learned not to be hurt or surprised. That shit happened every other week and was a basic premise of the show.

Or, nearer to the truth, the charter school was like Traci Lords, the former underage porn star, turned softcore porn star, turned born-again Christian who doesn’t actually show her tits in movies any more but just teases you that she might. If word hit the Internet that Traci Lords was sucking dick on film for money again, would it really be surprising?

As teachers and education workers posing as teachers, we spent a lot of time telling students, parents, and damned near anybody with money that would listen, that unless the school’s Children’s Choir got booked at this place or sang with this questionable public figure or suddenly got a cash injection from this half-known group of businessmen, then the school was going to fold.
And now the school has folded.

Big surprise.

What was surprising is that the school got away with pimping kids with public funds for so long. There really was this Save The Children Infomercial feel to most of what the school held as important. The kids didn’t run around half-clothed with their bellies hanging out and flies buzzing around them, but it was an elementary/middle school and more than a few students did show up dirty and smelly. But the kids wore semi-clean uniforms, and even had special blazers that they wore when the school sent them out in public to sing for money. And while I know I am a sarcastic child of a dog, the school literally did send the students out to sing for money. The pass the hat moment was a bit more subtle, I’m guessing, and none of the school’s outdoor concerts were near Chicago Elevated train stations. But how many generations removed from the homeland did the Black and Latino students on exhibition have to be for the prospective “donors” to get the message that their gifts of kindness would keep Shante, Sharday, Duquan, and Esteban—his name was Stevie when he wasn’t appearing in public-- from a life on the streets?

Of course, the gift of kindness—a euphemism that I’ll officially be appropriating for everything from charitable giving to ejaculation—was going to cost more than 70 cents a day. The business of private education through the misuse of public funds costs money. As the banking and automotive industries have pulled our collective coats to, mismanagement is expensive.

The charter school’s principal wasn’t really a principal. I don’t mean to imply that he didn’t have any formal training in primary or secondary education. He didn’t, but that’s not the point. His title was Director, and the difference was an extra $50k in salary, since charter school Directors are given “the gift of kindness” to be able set their own wages. And that is a very expensive cum shot.

All school headmasters have some nickname that those that stand below them use when they are not around. I always called the Director G-Money. Not for any physical resemblance he enjoyed with New Jack City and House of Payne-full Acting star Allen Payne, but mostly because it matched the initials of his last name. All though, as the director of a singing and entertaining choir school, the Director did spend much of his working hours on his knees asking for money, and he definitely was not his brother’s keeper, so the name worked nicely on several levels.

But G-Money was a keeper of women, and, as the urban radio station griots tell us, romance without finance is a nuisance. So of course the Director’s kept woman was on the singing school’s payroll and was also appropriately overpaid. What a good man wants for himself, he also wants for his woman.

Now age and medication keep me from being able to remember the school secretary’s name. Not the secretary who answered the phones and worked in the main office. I remember her name, but her name, personality, and salary all fell within the category of the unremarkable, and earn no cataloging within this space.

It was the other woman--isn’t it always--who somehow earned more yet did less. I can remember the face and the frown and the ferocious, Las Vegas show tiger attitude. I remember that she was about Hobbit-high and looked like TLC’s Chili with about fifteen years and thirty or so lbs. thrown in. As any person of African descent can inform the reading public, a brown-skinned woman with her own Native American looking “good hair” is going to have a sense of entitlement large enough to have one, maybe two zip codes.

So maybe I’m just hating, and it made sense that she earned $75K a year to schedule infrequent begging events and to tend to the students “special blazers”. For $75K, I’d think these kids would have been strutting out in the kind of bright sequence and leather outfits that Maurice White, Phillip Bailey, and Earth Wind and Fire toured in during the funkified 70s. State certified teachers had to damn near hire David Falk or Arlis Michaels for representation to get paid well below what Chicago Public School teachers were earning. Even the education workers pretending to be teachers were paid less than scale for their performances and hourly sessions.

But, there was no Earth Wind and Fire Phoenix Horns, and, to my knowledge, no horn blowing was done in the school choir room. There are those who say that “good hair” is a talent and so is looking like Chunky Chili. And it’s not like Halle Berry, Beyonce Knowles, or convicted City of Detroit Chief of Staff Christine Beatty have experienced what they’ve enjoyed strictly because of how they act, sing, or chief the staff. Director G-Money felt that having his staff chief-ed was vital to the school and was worth $75K a year of Illinois educational dollars. Talent costs, so it maybe it made financial sense that the school Musical Director also made $75K, even though his title suggests he wasn’t leading children in a school singing group but was instead leading the band on The Arsenio Hall Show or The Magic Hour. I don’t believe his job description involved chief-ing the staff or receiving gifts of kindness from the school Director, but he was a classically-trained male singer, and these things all took place far above my pay grade and job description.

I was just there to teach English to sixth graders and help them catch up to grade level. I don’t know about birthing no babies. Or chief-ing no staffs. Or using public school dollars to solicit no gifts of kindness. Or running a city-funded charter school $500,000 into debt. I raised the test scores of all but three of the 50 students I taught, but I’m starting to think I was just there as window dressing.

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

An Injection of Cash for Detroit's Big Three?

I have friends who work in the food-chain of the Detroit Automotive Industry. More than a few of them are nervous, but feel their jobs, wages, and mortgages will be secure.

There are a lot of families in the auto industry that have not been that lucky over the last twenty years.

Detroit Steel has spent the last twenty years figuring every way they could to close US plants, break contracts bargained with the unions in good faith, get people to work harder at the same jobs for less money, and export jobs outside the US to non-union labor. Yes there are auto workers who make good money. There are also a lot of auto-workers who spend half the year laid off on “slow downs” because of management incompetence.

The Big Three don’t want a bail out or a loan. They want government welfare to subsidize their twenty years of lazy, short-sighted, quick-fix, inept, visionless leadership. Reagan and his henchmen spent the eighties wagging their collective fingers and demonizing families and single mothers who wanted to use government aid to help “pay their bills”. Bill Clinton even beat the drum for welfare reform, because it was politically expedient. Now that the Big Three are failing at an industry that they created, because of a failed business model that they chose to let fester, now welfare is not only okay, but necessary? All the fiscal conservatives that watched auto plant closings devastate families and turn cities and neighborhoods into bankrupt wastelands, and said it was just the holy “Invisible Hand of the free market”, none of them minded when it was working families getting slapped around by the Invisible Hand. Now that the unseen hand has become a fist, and is catching Detroit Steel in the jaw, now all of sudden “Big Government” is okay. Now Reagan’s ideas of Supply-side Economics that failed in the eighties, that Bush in his neo-conservative crew tried to bring back, now those ideas of Trickle-Down Economics suddenly don’t hold water? If social and economic Darwinism was okay when working families were the ones struggling, then natural selection is just as good right now. Cars will be made in the US. I’d love it if they were made in my home state of Michigan. But if the Big Three become the Big One, I’m okay with that.

You don’t give good money to a drug addict. It serves no purpose and doesn’t change behavior. The people that have mismanaged the auto industry have needle marks all over their arms and between their toes. They don’t want to quit cold turkey, and I don’t want to pay for their habit. They let cities and communities die on the vine, with no remorse. I think democratizing some of that pain will help the future industry execs that are left standing create a more responsible and sustainable business model. Call it tough love or just lying in the bed that one has made. Even if it is a bed of nails that was meant for somebody else.

Letting those chickes come home to roost might even give our business leaders a long overdue lesson in the consequences of economic exploitation.