Time for action on Sac High
By Cosmo Garvin
cosmog@newsreview.com
More stories by this author...
  |
Elections have meaning. We don’t always like what they mean, but we should at least try to understand them.
That’s true whether we’re electing representatives to go to Washington, D.C., or to sit on the local school board.
Take, for example, the local elections for the Sacramento City Unified School District Board of Trustees.
All three of the candidates backed by the Sacramento City Teachers Association won their elections.
Does that mean, as The Sacramento Bee tells us, that the union has too much power? Or does it mean that voters are simply more simpatico with teachers than they are with anti-union candidates pushing “reform”?
Nothing so complicated. It seems more likely that voters just picked local candidates who they most trusted to address the concerns of their particular neighborhoods.
That was certainly true in Area 2, covering East Sac, Midtown and Elmhurst. “The biggest issue in the area is a lack of a public, comprehensive high school,” Jeff Cuneo, the guy who won that election, told Bites.
More than test scores or unions or all those “bad teachers” we keep hearing about—voters in Area 2 wanted a candidate who would do something to replace the neighborhood high school lost when Kevin Johnson’s St. Hope organization took over Sacramento High School and turned it into a charter school.
The Bee didn’t like that message, and published an editorial last week which called the Sac High issue “merely a distraction.”
But it seems Team Scoopy is deliberately misreading the meaning of the election, and worse,