"Mayor Rahm closed half a dozen schools in Jackie Robinson West’s part of the city, and tried to close the school, Marcus Garvey, where the founder of JRW—Joe Haley—worked. Then Chicago Public Schools cut funding for high school freshman sports, laid off a thousand teachers. CPS put forty kids in physical education classes and doesn’t even put a librarian in most of the school libraries in [the South Side district of] Auburn Gresham."
From "Gentrification Is the Real Scandal Surrounding Jackie Robinson West," in The Nation.
February 15, 2015
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64 comments:
"This would read like scabrous satire from the pen of a writer whose DNA was part Runyon and part Baldwin if not for the fact that there are very real children being victimized by this decision in the city of Chicago."
Values are not "satire".
Values are the standard of principles we live by.
Cheating is dishonest.
"Honesty is the best policy".
Winning isn't everything.
Children must be taught this.
It alarms me how many people step forward in the midst of a cheating scandal to stand up for the cheaters.
Are schools supposed to stay forever open, even when enrollment declines?
The way to wring something positive out of this mess is for the Phils to take any three of those kids in exchange for Ryan Howard.
Wow. In my inner city school of refugees, immigrants and local kids the gym coaches would have killed to have had only 40 in a Phs Ed class. Ours ran upwards to 60+ a class. Shoot, I had regular classes of 50+ for my Civics and Geography classes for several months at a time before the powers that be figured out how to schedule classes well into late October. When I retired last years I hadn't seen a real librarian in a number of years. And as for neighborhood boundaries? In the inner city they are a nebulous thing - more tribal than any officious line marks by entities like Little League Baseball.
School teacher firings? I blame Scott Walker
Jeez - I typed that before my first cup of coffee and you can tell. Note to self - Coffee before typing comments at Althouse.
Sure, blame it on the Jew.
The baseball part of this is the poorest excuse for a scandal I've seen in a year with really poor sports scandals. Substituting one set of artificial district boundaries for another is way down the list of things that qualifies as "cheating" in little league. (All of these teams are basically all-star teams anyway. The Bad News Bears aren't out there.)
Gentrification is the problem. Yeah right. Perhaps if adults followed the RULES!? this wouldn't have happened.
Frankly, national tournaments for 10-12 year-olds are child abuse.
School teacher firings? LMAO. They can't find teachers willing to do inner city duty in my city - and the ones they do find never last very long. Certainly not long enough to learn the job which takes about 3 years. My favorite story is the hardened Mst Sgt Iraq veteran who signed on to teach Math and quit before lunch on the first day of school. They are bribing teachers here in the good suburban schools with an extra 10 - 20K in salary to relocate to the inner city. Zero takers for that transfer from the Beaches schools.
If it's Chicago, there are probably enough scandals to go around. However this was Little League with a specific set of rules, and the rules were intentionally violated. That is called cheating.
"Well, we all know the Chicago Way is never wrong. But in this case, it was a little weak on bein' right."
Admiral Numnutz, "In Rahm's Way (2015)
"Frankly, national tournaments for 10-12 year-olds are child abuse."
Yup
Hands down, The Nation is staffed by the looniest libruls who are led by the owner and editor Crazy Eyes I Forget Her Name.
Cherchez le blanc!
"I reached out to Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey who said to me, "
Yes, that will get you the truth.
Sometimes rules don't quite fit the facts and then the rules need to be reconsidered. The fact is that suburban schools recruit inner city kids who are good athletes, offer them scholarships to a good high school and a chance to train with a good coach which means a chance at an athletic scholarship for college. See Hoop Dreams. So that an inner city area has lost its best players to the suburbs and perhaps is entitled to say that its boundaries need to be adjusted to reflect this reality. Maybe Little League needs to organize a commission to study this reality.
But I haven't heard that the adults concerned tried to get a boundary adjustment to reflect this reality. The boundary rules are trying to keep teams from using ringers and that principle has to be upheld.
Perhaps a study commission might conclude that Jackie Robinson should share the title - but this could only happen once - because the rules hadn't kept up with the reality of the effect of suburban recruiting. And the drawing of boundaries in the inner city should be done under a special rule - the rule followed by the Jackie Robinson recruiters who obviously understood how to surmount the problem.
Bottom line is that the School Administrators salaries cheated the students out of the budgeted funds needed to keep education going as it should.
Where ever can Chicago find a Reform politician who wants to redress that problem.
Send for Scott Walker. He is the Jack Reacher of Conservative Governors disguised as a mild mannered mid-westerner.
Emanuel, yes; but behind him I suspect is the Emperor (i.e., master of spacetime Scott Walker).
@Wildswan - you see some of the nuance. Most people see the black and white of the situation but very little of the grey. In my area the rich private schools on the river give "scholarships" to the very best athletes from the inner city and then with all the ringers they run roughshod over the public schools in athletics. And no one can gainsay those parents to want their children out of violent public schools. I lived in a very urban (but quite nice) area whose attendant public school was a very violent place. I sent her to 12 years of Catholic schools. It wasn't even a question.
In Chicago WHO is responsible for school funding and for identifying and ultimately closing down schools?
The Mayor?
The Chicago Board of Education?
Both?
If the Board does not agree, does the Mayor have executive power to override?
Note that the board members are racially/ethnically mixed.
It is avant-garde now to stand up for the bad behavior of some black folk.
"Gentrification"? Haven't they been sending the denizens of the ghettos out around the country with Section 8 vouchers for years now? Spreading the wealth, so to speak.
They probably sent some of their best talent to Des Moines.
Wildswan, wrote -
"The fact is that suburban schools recruit inner city kids who are good athletes, offer them scholarships to a good high school..."
OK. You lost me there. High School scholarships? I thought these are 10-12 year olds. What high schools could offer a scholarship other than private schools? Since they have no boundaries to begin with, what boundary adjustment can solve your supposed problem?
Finally, what is the boundary requirement in LLB? Residence or school? I've seen commenters cite both.
surfed @8:29am/
LOL. In New Orleans circa 1977 we had a mid-40s idealistic divorcee from Wisc living next door to us who had gotten her teaching certificate specifically to "give back" by teaching to inner-city youth. She was certainly no shrinking violet as she had owned a landscaping co and had bossed around brawny types for years and had muscles of her own.. They sent her to Live Oak Middle school where she had a 19 yr-old in her 7th grade class. On her first day she was giving her class an outline of what was expected of them when the 19-yr old raised his hand. "Yes?" she said. "Are you through!!!???" came the reply.....She didn't make it past mid-term, lol
The myth that private schools win football games by recruiting their players with scholarship offers is an urban myth held onto by jealous losers!
I don't have enough information to go either way. Not the rulebook, not the story. I am inclined to go with the team, but don't have the facts I need.
"MayBee said...
It alarms me how many people step forward in the midst of a cheating scandal to stand up for the cheaters."
Have you been following the Brian Williams sory? Remember Bill Clinton? Hell Hillary! The left has no rules. No morals. Just "the cause."
Why have the lefties all turned on Obama's guy?
that seems to be our culture now. Find someone to blame, never be accountable for your own actions and decisions. There are always mitigating circumstances that absolve you of your responsibility.
I blame this attitude on the fucking lawyers.
Virgil, that reminds me of being sent to a low income school to sub for a fifth grade class. The bell had just rung and I was looking down at the attendance roster when I heard an adult male voice at the back of the class. I jumped it so surprised me. This "fifth grader's" deep voice and mustach put my husbands to shame.
re: Chicago Mayoral powers, City Council has involvement, from Wiki: By charter, Chicago has a "weak-mayor" system, in which most of the power is vested in the city council. In practice, however, the mayor of Chicago has long been one of the most powerful municipal chief executives in the nation.
Chicago City Council also is a racially diverse group
Unless I missed something, the net message of the article was "it's unfair to strip the team of the title because life hasn't been fair to the kids". Nowhere to they deny that the team violated the rules about where kids live, instead it appears that because the team had lots of hardships, the city hates inner city schools, pro baseball's blacks are from the suburbs, and Little League is a largely suburban sport, they should be given a pass.
Thus we teach people that following the rules is optional if you can show you're in some way oppressed. Though on the other hand, I think it would be interesting to do a general audit of Little League. Given the competitive nature of the sport or even kids wanting to play with their friends, there are likely to be quite a few teams with players outside their "official" area (or kids using a friend or relative's address).
Integration of economic classes is a problem until it's not. Reverse gentrification, or integration of lower into upper economic classes, is not a problem because the same people who criticize gentrification will willingly vote to subsidize the disparity, especially at the national level which reduces individual liability, then exploit the resultant problems associated with disparate achievement.
Skipper said: "Why have the lefties all turned on Obama's guy?"
They've turned on Mr. Emanuel because he's supporting the school closings, etc. the teacher's union opposes. They have similarly turned on Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York.
We are continuing into the age of litmus test politics. Conservatives work to get rid of RINOs (Republican in name only) who don't support every conservative issue. Now that the Democrats lost both houses of Congress the same is happening on the left. Lists of members of Congress who didn't vote the party line are being circulated with campaigns to teach them the error of their vote.
The Nation bemoans the rise of blacks into the middle class.
So much of youth baseball nowadays involves travel baseball, which requires parents with financial resources, time, and commitment. Black or white or Asian or Latino So the best players are suburban.
@All - In my last year before retirement I had a senior citizen (16 years old in 7th grade) call me over:
Student: "Mr. Autree what be this curly line and a dot?"
Me: "That LeCharles is called a question mark."
Societies fault or the individuals fault?
Who knew that there are still red lines that can't be crossed?
Put the shoe on the other foot. Suppose some suburban team recruited a collection of all stars and then went on to beat an inner city team 42-3 in the qualifying round. Wouldn't the inner city team be entitled to ask WTF and investigate further. If their investigation caused the suburban team to lose its title, I would not put the cause down to anti-white bias on the part of the inner city parents. I would consider it an example of the long arc of the law bending toward justice or some such thing.......Anyway, if these kids are on a team of elite athletes I don't consider them under privileged. If you possess the body of an elite athlete, you're quite wealthy.
""Mayor Rahm closed half a dozen schools in Jackie Robinson West’s part of the city, and tried to close the school, Marcus Garvey, where the founder of JRW—Joe Haley—worked. Then Chicago Public Schools cut funding for high school freshman sports, laid off a thousand teachers. CPS put forty kids in physical education classes and doesn’t even put a librarian in most of the school libraries in [the South Side district of] Auburn Gresham."
It's just like the argument about Deblasio trying to stamp down on loosies. By closing these schools, see, Rahm created a black market for illegal ball players.
Its not really the fault of the people playing illegally. no its because of something else.
Thomas W wrote:
They've turned on Mr. Emanuel because he's supporting the school closings, etc. the teacher's union opposes. They have similarly turned on Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York.
THe other instersting question is why are all these liberals deciding to close schools? Someone got smacked with a dose of reality.
jr565: "It's just like the argument about Deblasio trying to stamp down on loosies. By closing these schools, see, Rahm created a black market for illegal ball players."
An idea so crazy, it just makes sense!
It ain't cheating if blacks do it. They HAVE TO CHEAT just to overcome racism!
The first time i heard the term "ringer" was while watching the LLWS on TV in the early eighties. My dad and I were watching the Taiwanese team crush the Americans and my dad, who spent years working In Asia said flat out that the Taiwanese kids were high school age, if not older. He didn't think they were locals either, but were a de facto national team. Don't tell me the JRW parents didn't look at this and then look at the American LL expounding earnestly about boundaries and the sanctity of the game and thought, "screw this,"
Little League boundaries are determined by the local Little League group so it would seem that the Jackie Robinson adults merely had to get their local group to agree on a change of boundaries. So I wonder why they didn't do that. No way to know but I am of the opinion that it will turn out that the Jackie Robinson group was bounded on all sides by other Little League groups who refused to change their boundaries. And (this is all iffy I realise) and if this is so then the Little League obercommand should recognize the situation and deal with it.
"
CWJ said:
"High School scholarships? I thought these are 10-12 year olds. What high schools could offer a scholarship other than private schools? Since they have no boundaries to begin with, what boundary adjustment can solve your supposed problem?"
I took a few short cuts in my comment and so what I said was not at all clear
You are correct that high school scholarships would not alter the Little League as such. But Little Leaguers who are talented are sought by regional teams even at very early ages and there they would get the training to be recruited for good high schools and there for colleges and there for the major leagues or at least they could get an education. But there are rules about how many hours a kid can play so the regional players aren't always available for their own Little League team.
Generally I know that thousands of students get out of the inner city schools either by legitimate transfers or by lying about residency.
My argument was (and is) that these trends had altered the playing field for those left behind. And that I thought that the Little League should study the problem. I think that Little League boundaries perhaps were drawn years ago before all these new realities and a Little League group may not be able to adjust their boundaries to the new realities on their own. They may need help from the higher levels.
Perhaps the Jackie Robinson group did try to change boundaries. If they did the lamestream media has been too busy with big issues like Kim Kardashians butt and Brian William's lies to tell us.
Look, you want to show that Blacks can perform at a high level once given a chance, so you give them that chance even though they don't meet the regular standards. It's called affirmative action. We do it all the time. If we didn't do it for the Little League, bigots would continue to say that Blacks aren't capable of performing well in athletics, see? What are a few broken rules compared to achieving that goal?
And affirmative action in Little League ball is a lot less dangerous than affirmative action in medical school admissions.
wildswan,
"I took a few short cuts in my comment and so what I said was not at all clear."
No kidding!
Look. I suggest you just stop digging, OK?
"Generally I know that thousands of students get out of the inner city schools either by legitimate transfers or by lying about residency."
Then the problem is about lying, not boundaries.
I still don't see your perceived problem being solved by boundary adjustment.
Lying aside, you've still not even begun to address the boundary-less nature of private school recruitment. And you seem to think that you have some sort of moral argument that will convince suburban schools and parents to calmly recognize the wisdom of peeling away swaths of their territory for the greater good of the inner city.
Look you've got a point you want to make. I get that. Just make it, OK? Don't try to wrap it in some Little League Cloak.
wildswan,
You assume that there is something wrong with JRW's boundaries but what would that be? What do you suppose that the objective of those boundaries are? Geographic contiguity? Equal competiveness? Population equality? What?
We're talking about the boundaries of a team that prior to this had won it all. Are you really arguing that the boundaries need to be jiggered to confirm that? Why not rejigger the boundaries of tens to hundreds of other teams who didn't get close to winning it all? What about hundreds of rural districts that have a harder time faking their residency.
God bless The Nation. From my earliest days of my Internet political surfing, it has been a frequently visited stalwart of my favorite's Punditry folder (as have you, Althouse). The Nation has been a boon companion through many an airport layover, kid's track meet or wrestling tournament, slow day at work, or couch-ridden bout of the flu. Lefties don't get much more entertaining or crushingly stupid than they do at The Nation.
The point I'm making is that I can believe that the boundaries laid down by the Little League in the Jackie Robinson area forty years ago don't correspond to current realities. This cheating by these adults might be pointing to an underlying problem, which is not racism. It's a kind of hollowing-out of the city so that museums, factories - everything you think of as belonging to the city - is out in the suburbs. And a lot of inner city athletes are out there too, one way or another. In that situation old boundaries need to be readjusted. But an inner city league is surrounded on all sides and defined by the past. It's in the same situation as the schools which are being closed and consolidated, (i.e., expanding their area) except that it can't expand without help from upper levels of the Little League.
Schools and school sports are going through a time of tumult and this story seems to be one more episode in the drama.
That is what passed through my mind. I do not have dark plans to expand the whole city of Chicago into suburban Milwaukee and run an express from the Loop to Miller Park. Nor do I support Common Core or Federal intrusion into everywhere.
60 comments, and no one has so far made any remark on the all-Black nature of JRW. I assume that the team is legally capable of excluding all non-Black applicants, and its name and nature suggest that it at least wants to. But they are going to have to define "Black" eventually, and I wonder how they'll do it. Is it going to be Wannsee-Protocol-specific, or just "the one-drop rule"?
This is why everyone who can avoid affirmative action should: Because at some point you do end up not just using racial classifications, but having to clarify who counts and who doesn't. And you end up arguing whether 1/32 Cherokee is enough, or should it stop at 1/16? Or go on to 1/64? Is Vanessa Williams Black enough? Is Mariah Carey? Is Barack Obama? Why is Obama "Black," when Bill DiBlasio's son (exactly as Black) is "biracial"?
One Godalmighty can o'worms. I say give it a rest, already.
There's another factor that makes baseball a suburban sport, namely space. You need a big lot even for a Little League game. Big lots are very difficult to come by in an inner city that has any life left in it. Basketball is understandably more popular among inner-city youth, because more practical.
Such a lot of nonsense. Little League age is up to twelve. It has nothing at all to do with HS or teachers or gym class. Little League boundaries are not school district boundaries. Other area districts complained because they were poaching star players from them. And, all teams that compete in districts are All Star teams drawn from all the teams in the district - IN the district. Just making excuses for cheating. What does that teach the kids? We'll cheat, and if we get caught, we'll shriek racism so loudly they'll be scared into looking away?
@ Pesota 2:04 - They check birth certificates now, since Danny Almonte and the Bronx team. They are very strict about it. The kids would have to have fake birth certificates.
@ Michelle Dulak Thompson - There aren't very many white kids South Side Chicago, so I don't think it was an issue. Unless the U of Chicago faculty has some athletic children - hmm I would say not likely.
On her first day she was giving her class an outline of what was expected of them when the 19-yr old raised his hand. "Yes?" she said. "Are you through!!!???" came the reply.....She didn't make it past mid-term, lol
I once heard (maybe on this blog) that many low achievers in school think that education is something that is done to them, not something they do themselves. And I have come to believe that there is a whole set of reinforcing downward-spiraling behaviors and attitudes in the lower socio-economic parts of our society.
There is a fraction of young people from poor backgrounds who somehow learn that serving others with something that they will pay for is the way to a good life. I think we should try our best as a society to teach that character counts and let more people improve their lives. I can't think of one example of liberals teaching that lesson.
They should have taken the NASCAR approach. Let the victory stand and then penalize teams and owners in the background. It's just too upsetting for fans to take away a victory witnessed. Probably somebody "overlooked" this thinking the team would get nowhere. Surprise. Most likely there are people in the Little League organization that need to bo too.
Here's what I say to the Jackie Robinson players.
"You have not been awarded the championship, but you did win the tournament. Be proud of that. The rest is all about the adults, not about you."
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