C.C. Blaney: Magnet Status to Lure White Students to CCSD

It's a shame. If the Charleston County School District really wanted diverse elementary schools (read, "integrated"), it would reinstitute tracking!

I know, I know. Tracking has been the third rail of educational philosophy for the last couple of decades. Instead, CCSD is laboriously trying to deal with the problem of white flight by creating magnet schools. Students will end up tracked by school instead of by class.

C.C. Blaney is the case in point. In the early 1990s the school had nearly 400 students enrolled. By the spring of 2014, it had fewer than 200 students and was rated Below Average, with 94 percent of its students on free or reduced lunch. This year the building sat vacant as its students were divided between two other schools; ex-Superintendent McGinley was only too happy to remove it from her stats on failing schools.

Blaney will end up with the same "diversity" problem as Academic Magnet under the present circumstances. CCSD must up its game with the many defacto segregated black schools in the district. Until it does so, no true magnet school will be as diverse as Charleston County citizens would hope.

Will Diversity Ever Come to Burke High School?

Amid all the concerns in the Charleston County School District, ex-Superintendent McGinley decided to move "diversity" closer to the top of the list. Hence, the hiring of a "diversity expert." Evidently, diversity is the new buzz-word for quasi-quota systems (nod to the Oscar furor). 

Diversity spokesmen are now making the case that the admissions process of the Academic Magnet High School prevents diversity. The presumption is that in order to function in a multi-cultural society, students at AMHS must attend classes with a larger percentage of black students.

What about the students at Burke High/Middle? Shouldn't someone be concerned that, in order to function in a multi-cultural society, its students must attend classes with a larger percentage of white students? McGinley threw several half-hearted bandaids at the problem of 99% black enrollment at the school, but she (and the school board) was never really serious. 

Many in the community wish to continue Burke's tradition as a black high school. What would Martin Luther King, Jr., say about that goal?

Sensitivity Training Overdue in Charleston County School District

Former board member Larry Kobrovsky certainly nailed the problem in the Charleston County School District with his letter to the editor published in Thursday's edition. 

Brian Hicks is a gifted writer and often provides valuable commentary on issues of interest. He also has an obsession with Elizabeth Kandrac. 

Mr. Hicks is entitled to his opinion on Ms. Kandrac, but it's quite a stretch to blame Kandrac for the recent turn of events surrounding the fate of Dr. Nancy McGinley.

Ms. Kandrac has not been on the board for over two years and did not participate in any way, shape or form in the public debate over the treatment of the coach or football team.
Now that Mr. Hicks has brought Kandrac's name into this, I would like to suggest a much more compelling connection.

A federal jury found and a federal judge upheld the verdict that a public school in Charleston County was a racially hostile place to work.

The testimony in federal court was that Ms. Kandrac was subjected to vile and vulgar racial slurs and obscenities on a daily basis. Two 14-year-old students also testified that they went to school every day terrified solely on the basis of their race.

The defense of the district was that the offensive behavior was the culture of the students and that there was nothing they could do about it.

To this day the district has not spent one minute talking to or apologizing to the students who had to attend school while suffering racial slurs on a daily basis.

Nor has a single adult employee of the district been forced to undergo a minute of "sensitivity training" for allowing this to happen. 

Rather than blame Elizabeth Kandrac for the school board's recent action regarding Dr. McGinley, maybe Mr. Hicks could reflect on how the administration failed to show any compassion or concern for the two young men who testified that they went to school every day bullied and harassed solely because of the color of their skin. 

Larry Kobrovsky
Meeting Street
Charleston

Should Charleston County Ban Watermelon from Its Schools?

Surprise, surprise! The members of the Academic Magnet football team, as I pointed out previously, had no idea that their boisterous celebrations could be considered racist. That was the official finding of the school district. Could it be that these teenagers had been growing up in a non-racist atmosphere where no one pointed out stereotypes to them?

Gee, thank goodness the Charleston County School District exists to enforce learning of racist stereotypes. None of these players will ever look at a watermelon again without thinking of racist stereotypes.

Is that progress or regression?

Hicks Plays the Race Card for McGinley's Departure

According to our daily newspaper and its spokesman, Brian Hicks, former CCSD Superintendent Nancy McGinley was perfect! How could that awful (elected) school board "let" her go?

It's a syllogism:

Premise 1: Nancy McGinley is the perfect superintendent.

Premise 2: The CCSD school board was very unhappy with Nancy McGinley as superintendent.

Conclusion: The school board must be racist.

Well, that makes sense.

CCSD's McGinley Teaches Watermelon Stereotype to AMHS Teens

Most of them were born between 1996 and 1998, long after the association of watermelons with African-Americans was banned from public discourse, so it should come as no surprise that the Academic Magnet football team, including its black player, would not have associated smashing a watermelon while making the usual football grunts and raves with being racist.

Trouble is, the Charleston County School District's superintendent was determined to teach them a lesson anyway.

And she did.

So now what the boys saw as a harmless marker of their victories has become a racist incident causing the loss of their football coach. The coach was held responsible even though not present.

Political correctness run amuck.

The super had better watch out. She can mess around with academics all she wants, but when she starts messing with football that spells trouble.

Reading at Fourth-Grade Level? CCSD Welcomes You to High School

If you set the goal low enough, almost everyone can achieve it.

However, the Charleston County School District struggles to meet its own criterion that all incoming ninth graders will read at the fourth grade level. Despite focusing on literacy for the past few years, nearly 13 percent of the district's students read at or below the fourth-grade level. That would be bad enough if those students were spread evenly among CCSD's high schools. An additional problem is that they are clustered, often up to 40 percent of an entering class, in CCSD's lowest-performing schools. a

Below is an example of a fourth-grade reading worksheet. Remember that this is the goal for these students.

http://www.k5learning.com/sites/all/files/reading-comprehension-worksheet-grade-4-Washington.pdf

We don't know what percentage reads below the fourth-grade level. Here is third-grade level. Can you imagine this student reading a high school textbook?

http://www.k5learning.com/sites/all/files/reading-comprehension-worksheet-grade-3-rover.pdf

It's way past time to get serious about reading. If students reading on this low a level pass their freshman classes, what does that suggest about the difficulty of what they are learning? What percentage of these students will actually graduate?

Time to fish or cut bait. Either put all students reading at fourth-grade level or below in the same classes in the same school and keep them there until each reads at least on the sixth-grade level or distribute them evenly over the district's high schools so that students reading at grade level or above need not face a class with a majority of poor readers.

Grooms Gets an A for AP History Analysis

When the College Board first instituted the Advanced Placement American History curriculum, a five-page guide was enough direction for its small cadre of teachers.

Flash forward thirty years or so to the spread of AP classes to the masses and the problems the CB faces with teachers not fully prepared to teach them, perhaps not even capable of making a "3" on the test itself. Of course, through AP conferences and training many not-so-well educated teachers have become adept at challenging their students. However, recently the College Board decided that the younger teachers now taking over needed more guidance.

Hence, the genesis of the 142-page guide ,or "framework," provided to today's history teachers. The necessity for such a guide reflects the dumbing down of American high schools over the last thirty years. The America-bashing of the guide merely reflects the liberalism of today's educational establishment. The furor has occurred because they put it in writing. The College Board is surprised at the controversy because it doesn't know anyone who doesn't think the way it does.

Larry Grooms's op-ed in Tuesday's paper, a reasoned analysis of the fuss over the framework, bears reprinting:

There was a time when American exceptionalism was as much a part of a student's education as Jamestown, Manifest Destiny, and the Wright brothers. In his 1989 farewell speech, Ronald Reagan described America as a "shining city upon a hill... a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds ... a city that hummed with commerce and creativity."

The American experience is not this tidy. Our history includes plenty of mistakes, but we've overcome plenty, too. As Bill Clinton observed, there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.

This highly American ideology - the can-do spirit, the casting aside of differences when history demands - does not resonate with the historians who recently rewrote the College Board's Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum. The College Board is a nonprofit that helps students prepare for college through programs such as the SAT and the Advanced Placement Program.

Claiming that the existing five-page guide prevents students from studying "the main events of U.S. history," the board's scholars poured out their collective genius, releasing a new 142-page curriculum they call a "framework." Their self-proclaimed landmark project presents a consistently negative view of America. It also reveals a left-wing, radically flawed reinterpretation of history.

The framework does not include questions about the Mayflower Compact, Thomas Jefferson, the Gettysburg Address or the Truman Doctrine. Neither are students asked about Dwight Eisenhower, Jonas Salk or Martin Luther King, Jr. The valor of our soldiers who ended Nazi oppression in World War II and the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust are omitted. Instead of focusing on resilient personalities and extraordinary achievements - the history most of us learned - the framework centers on controversy. Identity group grievances, conflict, exploitation, oppression, unresolved social movements - these are presented as our nation's foundation.

We do a great disservice when we gloss over these injustices. But while America's means haven't always been laudable, our ends most often are. As Churchill observed: "The United States invariably does the right thing - after exhausting every other alternative."

It is this uniquely American approach that the framework ignores. Students should be taught facts - triumphs and tragedies. Instead, the framework consistently focuses on all that was ever wrong with this, the most generous and progressive people in the history of mankind.

Now that commonsense folks are calling them out, the test's writers are falling all over themselves to defend their work. They say that teachers are free to discuss George Washington, the role of capitalism, the Holocaust and other topics that may be required by a particular state's standards. South Carolina's education officials also assure us that our state's standards will safeguard students from negative biases.

Both assurances ignore page 2 of the framework: "Beginning with the May 2015 AP U.S. History Exam, no AP U.S. History Exam questions will require students to know historical content that falls outside this concept outline." Teachers face the difficult, if not impossible, task of finding time to teach both the state standards and the framework. Why teach topics that are not on the test?

The College Board knows this. Its stated goal is to "train a generation of students" to become "apprentice historians." The hope is that these apprentices in turn inculcate another generation. This is the same strategy used to promote controversial Common Core state standards. It is no coincidence that David Coleman, chief architect of Common Core, is also president of the College Board.

In the same remarkably prescient speech, Reagan warned of such schemes, cautioning that "we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. ... If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."
Reagan concluded with a challenge to students: "... if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do."

These historians are not teaching what it means to be an American. They are teaching victimization and social politics.

It is time we call them out on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

Larry Grooms, a Republican, represents Berkeley and Charleston counties in the S.C. Senate.

Opportunity for "Critical Thinking" Missed by Hard-Line Educrat Darwinists

Perhaps retired Bishop Allison's measured letter can contribute to the debate over evolution versus intelligent design. Note the irony of the anecdote at the end.

                                                         
Sep 30 2014 12:01 am
                                                            Not so random
Frank Wooten's Sept. 27 column on "Natural selection: Keep faith in science" is based on popular misunderstandings regarding issues of 100 years ago. The issue confronting us today is whether random chance can account for the created order or whether there is scientific evidence for intelligent design in nature.

Biologist Michael Behe has more recently shown that cilium, a microscopic hair-like organism that keeps foreign objects out of our lungs, is so irreducibly complex that it takes an act of credulity to believe it just happened by chance given the limited time of the planet's existence.

Of course, this does not prevent such credulity on the part of scientists already committed to a natural self-explanatory world.

But Wooten seems unaware of Behe, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, William Dembski, all (and many more) credentialed scientists that, on the basis of science, perceive intelligent design in creation and not mere random chance.

Last year's "Mere Anglicanism" conference featured famous scientists who believe nature discloses more than random chance. (CDs of these addresses are available through the office of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina on Coming Street.)

Especially interesting and even delightful are the addresses by Dr. John C. Lennox, professor of mathematics at Cambridge University. Dr. Stephen Meyer related a telling anecdote:

A Chinese paleontologist was lecturing at the University of Washington on the astonishing findings in China from the pre-Cambrian era, turning Darwin's bottom-up assumptions to top-down developments.

One American asked if he were not uncomfortable speaking skeptically of Darwinism coming "as you do from an authoritarian country."

The Chinese scholar smiled and replied, "In China we can question Darwin, but not the government. In America you can question the government but not Darwin."

C. FitzSimons Allison
Retired Bishop, the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina
Indigo Avenue
Georgetown

Brian Hicks Imposes Stereotypes Where None Exist over "Not a Penny" Tax

When did we guess that Brian Hicks was merely a liberal flack? Probably when his first column appeared in the P&C--was that only seven years ago? Seems like an eternity.

Case in point: The Charleston County Republican Party questions the need for a six-year extension of the "not a penny" tax to fill the coffers of the Charleston County School District for its contractor friends. It dares to suggest that the "not a penny" tax is overkill when new schools are necessary only in the places where population is burgeoning and overfilling present schools.

Of course, Hicks' being the conspiracy theorist he is (must be a friend of co-conspiracy theorist Dot Scott) thinks the anti-tax sentiment reveals that Republicans want new schools only for whites.

Um, duh.

Mostly whites are moving where the student population is bulging at the seams. Must be a Republican plot perpetrated in New Jersey and Ohio.

Hicks also claims to believe that the Metro Chamber of Commerce is conservative! He neglects to mention in his anti-Republican rant that Chris Fraser, whom he quotes for the School Board, is the guiding force of the Chamber of Commerce on the School Board and an officer of the Chamber, a bit like ignoring that Hillary Clinton is the wife of an ex-President.

To top off his ignorant rant, Hicks suggests that tourists will pay 40 percent of money raised with the extension. Apparently, he's been drinking CCSD's Kool-Aid. Heaven forfend that property owners should foot the bill!

Hicks wants to lay this oh-so-regressive sales tax on the backs of the poor instead.

What a guy!

Remember: it's not a penny. How often do you purchase items for a dime?

Gilbreth on APHistory Standards and American Exceptionalism

Edward M Gilbreth in his pieces for the local paper generally stays out of politics. However, one recent column is an exception. He narrows his concerns to some responses to Sherry Few's (and others) objections to AP History guidelines published by the College Board.

According to a recent Newsweek article, a former New Jersey history teacher, Larry S. Krieger, with 40-year classroom experience, sounded the loudest alarm of revisionist history. He has since joined forces with opponents of the Common Core curriculum. Critics claim it's no coincidence that College Board President David Coleman previously had a hand in writing Common Core's math and English benchmarks and that they have similarities.

It hasn't taken long for this furor to get red-hot with politicians, including the National Republican Committee (RNC), taking the lead. Private or not, the College Board takes public dollars and there's a move in Congress to halt federal funds until the curriculum is revised. 

College Board officials, who also run the SAT exam, say it's all a big misunderstanding.
Its website contends the number of historical references actually has increased and that thousands of teachers motivated the changes by expressing "strong concerns that the course required a breathless race through American history" that sacrificed opportunities "for students to engage in writing and research." 

Conversely, the Newsweek article says Krieger is convinced that the failure to mention most of America's greatest historical figures by name means that they won't be on the test and therefore won't be taught. He also contends the new curriculum has "a consistently negative view of American history that highlights oppressors and exploiters." 

Krieger told Newsweek he is particularly upset by the absence of discussion of the valor or heroism of American soldiers in World War II. Instead, he cited this from the framework: "Wartime experiences such as the internment of Japanese Americans, challenges to civil liberties, debates over race and segregation, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb raised questions about American values."

Critics have targeted New York University Professor Thomas Bender as influential in the changes. A National Review article by Stanley Kurtz claims that the redesign process actually took root in 2006 at a conference attended by Bender. He describes Bender as "the leading spokesman for the movement to internationalize the U.S. History curriculum at every educational level" and as a "thoroughgoing critic of American exceptionalism." 

There's that term "American exceptionalism" again. Some love it; some hate it. Some believe America is truly exceptional in overall exceptionally good ways - far better than any other country in history. Others see just the opposite - that we're an exceptionally bad country and have achieved our status through exceptionally bad means - and that we now need to hang our heads in shame, retreat from the world stage and apologize in unison. Accordingly, our rise to exceptional status must somehow be morally invalid, and that our good works mean nothing because they originated from bad. Make sense?

Well, not to this daughter of a marine veteran of Iwo Jima. "Questions about American values" will always occur in a society with free speech; however, free speech in the AP History classroom is generally controlled by the teacher. How about some research on the hardships faced by ordinary citizens in a war agains pure evil?

Mick Zais: Atwater for SC State Superintendent of Education

To no one's particular surprise, Mick Zais, the outgoing superintendent of education in South Carolina, has thrown his support behind Republican candidate Sally Atwater, who virtually tied with RINO Molly Spearman in the Republican primary.

Spearman, a "former" Democrat who switched parties in 1995, has contributed to opponents of school choice within the last decade, although she now claims to be in favor of  "public school choice."

Can you imagine the cronyism that will ensue if Spearman, the director of the State Association of School Administrators, tops Atwater in the primary runoff? Why, even liberal Democrat CCSD Superintendent Nancy McGinley might cross over and vote Republican in the fall!

CCSD Social Studies Loses All Credibility

"Must S.C. students debate Darwinism?" screams the above-the-fold headline. From the reporter's point of view, the idea smacks of idiocy. From College of Charleston professor Rob Dillon, a measure just passed in the SC Education Oversight Ccommittee "is part of an effort to sneak creationism into public schools." Dillon probably checks under his bed each night to see if Bob Jones is hiding there.

Haven't they heard all the fuss about teaching "critical thinking"? What are educrats such as Dillon afraid of?

Maybe ignorance. One of the four votes against teaching "the controversy" was cast by Barbara Hairfield, "a Social Studies Curriculum Learning Specialist" (whatever that amounts to) in the Charleston County School District. Hairfield worries that "academic standards could possibly be interpreted as promoting a religion."

Hairfield is quoted as saying, "What does that say to our students who are Hindu or Jewish or Buddhist?" Some of us are hoping she was misquoted.

Yes, Hindus and Buddhists do not accept creationism because in their world views, the world is and always has been. But Jews?

Apparently Hairfield has never heard of the Torah. Where does she think the creation story comes from? This is CCSD's expert on social studies.

EdFirstSC Finally Comes to Its Senses over CCSD's BRIDGE

Blame Bill Gates and the Obama administration.

Even though EdFirstSC finally sees the train headed for the wreck, its spokesman tries to blame SC Education Superintendent Mick Zais for the genesis of value-added teacher compensation. Zais visited the Charleston County School District to discuss Superintendent Nancy McGinley's plan to change the way teachers are compensated. EdFirstSC's members must lean heavily towards teachers who are Democrats. Yes, Republicans want teachers to be accountable, but the machinations behind BRIDGE must be laid squarely on the shoulders of the edublob and the Obama administration, especially U.S. Education Department head, Arne Duncan. They're all liberal Democrats.

Blame McGinley for applying for Race to the Top funds and accepting them. Federal money always comes with strings attached, and she knew full well what they would be. As a result of winning the grant, the district must follow Common Core standards AND implement a teacher evaluation system based on the fatally-flawed value-added model pushed by the Gates Foundation and Arne Duncan. In preparation McGinley sent Audrey Lane to the Broad Institute just to learn all about the new teacher-evaluation system and then rewarded her with a nice fat retroactive raise. And the edublob, in the form of Mathematica, got a nice $2 million (of Other People's Money) contract to figure out how to make the system fair, a goal that even those mathematicians must know is impossible.

This new system will never be fair to teachers or students. Look at the abundance of research on just this topic that Duncan, and McGinley, choose to ignore. Going after these funds and implementing the value-added compensation system in CCSD is McGinley's personal effort at her own "race to the top."

If you think testing is overrated and too important now, wait till teachers' jobs hang on these unfair results.

Common Core Proponents Rejoice over Spending Surge

The latest edition of Education Week, cheerleader for the Common Core, touts the surge in spending that has already begun.

According to the reporter,

The market for testing products and services is booming and could continue to surge over the next few years, according to industry analysts and company officials, who say that growth is being fueled by the shift toward common-core tests across states and the use of new classroom assessments designed to provide timely and precise feedback for teachers and students.

Guaranteed to go the way of the open classroom, new math, etc., after millions have been spent, and coming to a district near you!

Educational Shibboleths and Lack of Memorization Hurt Students

Repeat after Briana Timmerman: "Critical thinking skills good; memorization bad."

If that shibboleth reminds you of the mindless repetition of Animal Farm slogans, it should. It falls in the same category of nonsense.

That's the gist of her statement as Director of the SC Education Department's Office of Instructional Practices and Evaluations made this week to the state Board of Education. Several members objected to the "materialistic bias" of new state standards under consideration, but apparently no one objected to the following: "the new standards require students to develop higher order thinking skills and focus on problem-solving rather than memorization." It appears that even conservative members don't understand the effects of such a goal. After all, who can argue with "critical thinking"?

Timmerman herself is a victim of lack of factual knowledge, as her answer to one board member's question indicated. She did not know what "irreducible complexity" is as applied to biological systems. Her response was that ignorance doesn't matter because students will be asked to "evaluate the evidence."

That is just the point about the necessity for memorization. If the only "evidence" a student having no factual knowledge can use consists of what is in the textbook, the student (and society) is at the mercy of textbook writers. How will students "think outside the box" when they have no "furniture of the mind" (as I call it) to challenge accepted "truths"?  Maybe you would assume that Abraham Lincoln could have picked up the telephone and had a long-distance conversation with Grant during one of his battles. Maybe you might think that Grant was a Confederate general. I've known students who did.

Today's students are not expected to memorize too much information; the opposite is true. Ask any high school teacher trying to deal with their factual ignorance!

Here's a quote from Psychology Today that makes the point better than I can:

To return to the point of progressives that school is too hard, I have examined state science standards in great detail because I write middle-school science curriculum. The standards do not demand too much memorization. They don't demand enough, especially the kind of memorization where students have to know how to use knowledge in their thinking. 

I think that the low-level of memorization required of students today is a main reason why so many students have under-developed thinking skills. Too many of them mouth platitudes and parrot what others have said. They can't think on their own because they don't know enough to generate original and rigorous thought. Yet, too many educators dismiss the importance of memorization, assuming falsely that kids can think with an empty head. Educators tried that a few years back with "new math," which failed miserably. Now, it appears the same ill-begotten beliefs are re-surfacing in the context of state standards and accountability testing.

                                              --Author and Professor William R. Klemm, Texas A & M

Briana Timmerman needs to do a little critical thinking of her own!

Coming to a School Near You: Two Free Meals Per Day for Those Who Can Pay

Back in 2010 with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Since then the aspect of requiring healthy school lunches has gotten all of the media's attention. Little noticed until it kicks in fully in 2014 is the "Community Eligibility Option," already operating in several cities including Boston and Atlanta. Predictably, Superintendent McGinley plans to head for the government trough as soon as she is able.

No longer will those parents seeking free or reduced breakfast and lunch need to fill out a request. No child will experience the "stigma" of being on free or reduced meals. If the community qualifies according to the law's guidelines, everybody, both rich and poor, will have free meals.

Isn't that nice? All you need do is send your child to a school in a community that meets the 40 % "poor" guidelines. Probably McGinley will designate the entire county eligible (well, it is a community). Then students who live in I'On can get free meals.

Boston claims it is saving money by not asking for applications since it no longer needs to employ couriers to pick them up and armored vehicles to pick up lunch money. I'm not making this up.

After all, it's just Other People's Money. No doubt you have often said to yourself, "Why should the rich and middle-class pay for their lunches when the poor don't!"

CCSD's Self-Created Lawsuit

It started with a Tweet, a truly insensitive and juvenile one to be sure. The Tweeter was white; its target, black. For Tweeting the n-word to her classmate, School of the Arts senior Ashley Patrick served a five-day suspension.

Seems straightforward so far, doesn't it? But then district administration got involved. Patrick was sentenced to finish her senior year at Twilight, a computer-based district program for serious offenders. Put Patrick with those out on bail and/or violently disrupting the classroom.  

Maybe her continued presence in her classes would be disruptive, maybe not. Apparently the majority black constituent board didn't think so. Its considered decision was to institute strict probation limiting extracurricular activities.

District administration (notice we don't have a name yet) rejected the advice of the constituent board, appealing it to the CCSD Board of Trustees. Needless to say, the matter was discussed behind closed doors. The Board upheld the constituent board's decision, unwisely interpreting that Patrick would also not "walk the stage" at graduation or go to the prom. This interpretation later was dropped, but Patrick must serve 20 hours of community service and write an essay,

Really, the penalties for the Tweet are not the problem. No, the problem is conflict of interest on the part of district administration. The target of the Tweet just happened to be the daughter of Associate Superintendent Lisa Herring, who oversees CCSD's behavior and discipline programs. Did Associate Superintendent Lou Marten reclassify Patrick's offense to a more serious level because of Herring's position? Did Herring recuse herself because her daughter was involved?

Could CCSD have avoided another costly lawsuit? The plot thickens as Patrick's attorney is the husband of former CCSD Board member Toya Hampton-Green and a protege of Mayor.Riley.

You can't make this stuff up.

CCSD Uses Elephant Gun on Tweet

CCSD Tourism Runs Amuck in North Charleston

“Go tell that man we ain’t a bunch of trees.”
“Ma’am?”
“I said to tell that man to get away from here with that camera.”

Anyone who has read Toni Cade Bambara's "Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird" might chuckle over the Charleston County School District's attempt to show new teachers North Charleston "communities where their students live." In fact, administrators at the Taj Mahal might benefit by reading the story themselves.    

However, the tour is not funny. How would you like it if a bus rolled through your neighborhood in order to show how "the other half" lives?  Condescending, to say the least.    

How I wish Mr. Cain had showed up to request that these intruders leave.