I have told you that the public vs private education battle is going to land close to home soon and you can mark your calendars for next month as one of the early skirmishes. The Herzog Foundation, with fancy new headquarters in northern Smithville, is hosting Corey DeAngelis on July 21. DeAngelis is probably the most well-known school choice advocate in the country, and he is presenting a program entitled: Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools are Failing Today’s Students.
Attendees must register but there is not a cost. The skirmish part of this is that I have seen tweets from public school advocates who are encouraging their supporters to lock up all the spots for attendance and basically stonewall the event.
The forces behind the positions are formidable. Anybody with just a little common sense can see that public schools have fallen off any sort of axis of excellence, but the real battle is if that can be corrected by the system itself, or it needs an overhaul or shock that school choice brings with it. I tend to think the latter, but it’s a free country, think what you want.
Stanley Herzog left the foundation a bunch of cash to make his Christian education point, but teachers’ unions and school districts have more cash than all the Herzogs, so it’s still not a lopsided contest in terms of money. I’ll be interested in the tenor of this event.
This thing is on a Friday night and while I believe school choice would be good for education, I also know that Friday nights are for informal meetings with beer and people that don’t wear suits, so I won’t make the event. Somebody let me know how it flows.
Honestly, whoever said, “Hey, let’s have a school choice advocate speak to us on a Friday night in July?” You got to really believe in something to say that.
As someone that has complained for a few decades about administrative costs of schools that includes a dizzying array of non-classroom building upgrades throughout the state (think admin offices), I do think it is kind of funny that the foundation that is set up to dismantle wayward education spending spent a sizeable chunk of change on a super fancy building. Seems counterintuitive, but I probably just don’t understand Christian education or something.
God does seem to like nice buildings; at least my limited experience as an occasional Joel Osteen viewer indicates that God really likes big, fancy buildings and pastors that have nice cars and planes and such. I guess image is important to the product.
Joel and God bought the Astrodome, and they can pack 16,000 people in there, they say. Ok, I guess it’s not the Astrodome, it’s the Compaq Center, but you couldn’t really remember, either. Anyway, it’s a big building and God likes big buildings, Joel says so.
I’ll be honest, once Kelly Leake and the Bad News Bears played in the Astrodome it was downhill from there. How could you top that? Kelly’s dad, Coach Leake started the “let them play” chant and the world was forever changed as the Bears defeated the Houston Toros and it became the greatest game ever played in the Astrodome, even better than when that woman beat Bobby Riggs in tennis.
Anyway, the Astrodome was condemned in 2009, but for me that building was dead after the Bears victory in 77.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or cheering on the Bad News Bears)