Acting Locally (continued)

I got Mom's shipment out the door (nine boxes), with tracking URLs emailed from the UPS Store (a handy service). Then, after coffee with Derek at Powell's on Hawthorne, I walked the Doug Strain tapes over to Bullseyedisc. I look foward to delivering him his copy.

Then Sunanda and I joined Don on Meliptus where some interesting phone calls came in (hey Russ, I'm glad you'll be making the upcoming SNEC confab in NYC, sounds like great fun).

This evening I took the Max over to the Dixon Building to see if the Koreducators charter school proposal would be approved. It was voted down 3 to 3, after a couple firebrands took the floor and raised a lot of straw man issues (including ad hominem remarks lambasting a plan to locate the new public school inside Marshall itself -- not really the plan at all (hence a straw man argument)).

Board member David Wynde did nothing to shush the cheering and applause in the wake of these unseemly polemics, but when I booed loudly, suddenly we weren't to indulge in "public spectacle" and he threatened ejection (so would the applauders be ejected too? -- I think not (get the tape, see what you think)).

All in all, it was disappointing to watch so much hard work derailed by fearfully protective impulses emanating from within our older model schools.

Whereas the board has a mandate to give grassroots organizers exactly this kind of opportunity to experiment with new approaches, career educators think it's somehow their special right to monopolize reform from within. Obviously our charter school initiative is being subverted and undermined by the selfishly entrenched.

So maybe it's time to explore other options?