(26) Tue 17 Dec 96 13:13 By: Don Martin Re: Our tax dollars at work Here is an item of int

(26)   Tue 17 Dec 96 13:13                             
By: Don Martin
Re: Our tax dollars at work

    Here is an item of interest from the New Republic of Dec
30, 1996, page 6: the TRB column on why taxpayer funding of
private education may not be in the best interests of a
democracy. Should you suppose that this is a problem only
local to DC, I would point out that U.S. taxpayers at large
support the antics of local government of Our Nation's
Capitol each and every year.

    Dangerous minds

    On August 13, 1996, the Board of Education in Washington
    voted unanimously to approve an application from Mary A.
    Anigbo to open the Marcus Garvey Public Charter School.
    A charter school is an oxymoron, a private school that
    is funded with public money--in the case of the Garvey
    school, District residents pay $4,000 to $6,000 per
    student. This year, its first in operation, the Garvey
    school has 62 students and will receive up to $372,000
    of the taxpayers' money.

    The board's decision to establish the Garvey school was
    remarkable in that the board seemed not to have the
    slightest idea what it was establishing. Anigbo, a
    self-described "clinician, psycho-education, consultant"
    proposed, vaguely, to create an Afrocentric school that
    would require students to wear military-style fatigues
    and would offer instruction in such matters as "Cultural
    Family Retardation" and "The Destruction of Black
    Civilization." The board noted that it did not know:
    what this description of the curriculum actually meant;
    what Anigbo's qualifications were; "what controls,
    financial supervision, curricular supervision, etc. are
    in place;" and whether "this publicly funded charter
    school is employing sound practices and using
    non-ideological, non-polemical and non-proselytizing
    curricular materials." The board granted its blessing
    anyway. Let a hundred flowers bloom.

    On December 3, the board members found out what kind of
    place they had established. On that day, a reporter for
    The Washington Times, Susan Ferrechio, went to the
    Garvey school for a story on its progress. While waiting
    for Anigbo, Ferrechio briefly interviewed a student. A
    school secretary demanded that Ferrechio show her the
    notepad. She refused. Mary Anigbo, accompanied by four
    young males, apparently students, attempted to wrest the
    notepad from the reporter's hands. Ferrechio resisted. A
    group that included the secretary and seven to eight
    students attacked Ferrechio, pushing and pulling at her.
    The assailants hit and kicked the repeatedly. The
    principal grabbed the notepad and, with the rest of the
    mob, began pushing Ferrechio out of the school. They
    yelled racial taunts at her, including warnings to get
    her "white ass out of this school." At the door, the mob
    picked Ferrechio up and pushed her out.

    Within two hours, Ferrechio returned to the school with
    two police officers, a black Times reporter named
    Barrington Salmon and a white Times photographer named
    Cliff Owen. Inside, Owen began taking pictures of the
    secretary. Principal Anigbo and other adults attacked
    the photographer. When the police attempted to
    intervene, the attackers (including Anigbo's nephew,
    Calvin L. Gatlin, a security guard at the school)
    scuffled with police. Again, Ferrechio and Owen were
    subjected to racial taunts.

    This account is based on the assertions of Ferrechio,
    Owen, Salmon and the police officers, as reported in The
    Washington Times and elsewhere. Anigbo has offered a
    disputing account. She claims that Ferrechio stole a
    notepad off a counter and refused to return it, that
    Ferrechio hit Anigbo in the chest and grabbed her arm,
    that Anigbo's students naturally tried to de- fend her,
    that Ferrechio shouted racial insults at the students,
    telling them that she was going to "get you black people
    out of that building," that Ferrechio threatened the
    students with a knife and a can of mace. But Anigbo's
    account was unbelievable on its face, and was made more
    so by revelations this week that (1) Anigbo was, in
    1986, charged with assault with a deadly weapon and
    carrying a deadly weapon after she attacked two female
    process servers with a knife (slashing one) and a small
    log; and (2) Anigbo's nephew, Garvey security guard
    Gatlin, was convicted in 1978 of armed robbery and
    assault with a deadly weapon (a gun), in 1984 of armed
    robbery, in 1989 of possession of cocaine and in 1995 of
    attempted unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.

    After this incident, several predictable things
    happened. The national media showed little interest in
    the story. The Washington Post has played the story
    mostly inside, made no real effort to ascertain the
    truth of what happened, and generally treated the
    disputing accounts of what happened as morally and
    logically equal. As of December 9, none of the three
    major network newscasts had run a piece, nor had The New
    York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tnbune or
    The Wall Street Journal.

    Also predictably, black political racialists have
    rallied behind Anigbo, blaming the whole thing on white
    people and raising the usual spectre of mob violence. In
    a rally on December 6, Anigbo was joined by the Reverend
    Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., one of the organizers of the
    Million Man March and Malik Zulu Shabazz, a young man
    who achieved notoriety at a Nation of Islam rally in
    1994 in which he roused the crowd with a Jew-hiting call
    and answer session: "Who is it that controls the media
    and Hollywood?" "Jews! Jews!" "Who is that has been
    spying on black leaders and spying on Martin Luther King
    and set up his death?" "Jews! jews!"

    What has not happened so far in the Garvey school affair
    is what most obviously should happen. There has not been
    much of a hue or cry against the whole idea of charter
    schools. This is odd, because the Garvey school affair
    demonstrates everything that has always been wrong with
    the idea. Charter schools, and similar ideas like the
    use of vouchers to pay for tuition in private schools,
    enjoy support from the right and the left for
    essentially the same reason. Conservatives like charter
    schools because they think the schools' autonomy will
    allow the teaching once again of conservative
    virtues--old-fashioned education, discipline, religious
    instruction. The race-and-gender left likes charter
    schools because autonomy will allow the teaching of its
    values: Afro- centric schools for blacks and feminist
    schools for girls and so on.

    And this bi-ideological popularity is, as the Garvey
    case shows, exactly why such things as charter schools
    and school voucher programs cannot in the end succeed. A
    pluralistic society cannot sustain a scheme in which the
    citizenry pays for a school but has no influence over
    how the school is run. (And there really is no
    difficult.) Public money is shared money, and it is to
    be used for the furtherance of shared values, in the
    interest of e pluribus unum Charter schools and their
    like are definitionally antithetical to this American
    promise. They take from the pluribus to destroy the
    unum. If you say that the taxpayers should support the
    Little Sisters of the Poor to run their private school
    as they see fit, without any real oversight by the
    elected representatives of the taxpayers, you must also
    say that we should pay for Mary A.T. Anigbo to run a
    place where black children learn that white people are
    their enemies, and act accordingly.

                           MICHAEL KELLY


... Through a Jaundiced Eye Darkly--Rheum With a View
               (don.martin@mbbs.com)

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