The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Yippee for Mayor-elect Nutter for squeezing a couple of million dollars out of the patronage haven parking authority for the city’s public schools.
What better way to get out of the mess of abysmal student performance. That’s the knee-jerk response, throw more money at a failed system. The feel-good solution for inept, career politicians. Mr. Nutter’s first order of business should have been to find a solution to stop the cultural genocide that is rampant throughout the city in the black neighborhoods.
Mike Franklin
Marlton, N.J.
Dear Mike,
Beyond the obvious response to your question, which is “What the hell do you care, you don’t live here or pay taxes here”, there are a few points that you, a person who doesn’t live in our city, fail to comprehend.
For example, you don’t seem to realize that the money Mr. Nutter has managed to secure from what you correctly identify as a patronage operation is money that has been improperly withheld from the city and misspent. Nutter is not “throw[ing] more money at a failed system”, he is insisting on a partner honoring a debt. The Patronage Parking Authority promised us that money. They spent it on themselves. What part of that is so difficult to understand?
Interestingly, although New Jersey’s school’s are well-funded and highly successful, you don’t seem to understand that a well-funded school system is intimately linked to higher student performance. You don’t seem to grasp that the low average performance of Philadelphia schools is linked DIRECTLY to poor funding, and that the Parking Authority’s promise of funding was meant to ameliorate that.
You also don’t seem to understand that a well-funded school system is a ticket out for many children, including those victim to what you call the “cultural genocide that is rampant throughout the city in the black neighborhoods”. You don’t seem to understand that high-quality public education (and high quality social supports and programs but we don’t do that in America anymore), are in fact key to stemming this “genocide.”
You decry throwing money “at a failed system”. What do you propose in place of the public school system? There is plenty of time and place to criticize Mr. Nutter, but by “squeezing a couple of million dollars out of the patronage haven parking authority for the city’s public schools”, he is well on his way to funding, if not necessarily finding “a solution to stop the cultural genocide that is rampant throughout the city in the black neighborhoods.”
You would think that as a policeman working in our city (scroll at link to letter three), you would understand that. After all, isn’t the Philadelphia Police Department short a few hundred cops thanks to budget cuts? You guys haven’t done such a hot job this year yourselves: perhaps funding promised to the Department should be withheld as well, rather than “throw more money at a failed system.”
Would you agree with that, Mike?
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January 4th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Maybe the cops just don’t like nutter:
http://www.kyw1060.com/pages/1428899.php?
FOP Critical of Nutter Appointed Official
by KYW’s Mike Dunn
The local Fraternal Order of Police is blasting mayor-elect Michael Nutter for his selection of a longtime public defender… to be his point person on matters related to the police department.
The local FOP is furious that Nutter has chosen Everett Gillison for the new post of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety. Gillison spent 30 years with the public defenders association.