A court-ordered debate about better ways to allocate money for schools, they argued, was the perfect moment to open up the whole sprawling organism and simultaneously fix an array of other problems because, as with a patient undergoing heart surgery, every weakness was tied to another: Crowded classrooms to tight budgets; budgets to staff salaries; salaries to union negotiations; negotiations to school board elections; and on and on.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the major operation never happened. When the dust settled at the conclusion of the McCleary funding talks, lawmakers had stitched up our wheezing school system with a few financial improvements, but no substantive changes.
Claudia Rowe’s
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