Editorial: City Council priorities out of whack

Which is more important?

For now, it seems that ensuring restaurant and bar patrons and employees can return home with fresh-smelling clothes. Never mind the fact that restaurant owners now are free to choose whether to ban smoking on their premises and patrons are free to choose where to eat and drink. Neither does anyone force bartenders or servers to work in the restaurant business.

Leadership is about setting priorities.

Secondhand smoke is bad for you. There is no question about that.

But should the City Council waste any time on an issue that can be solved by simply avoiding it?

Members should focus all their energies on the issues that really matter. Finding ways to expand public school choice, to give each school more autonomy about hiring, firing and pay issues and to fully fund charter schools — proven ways to make education work, no matter the socioeconomic circumstances ? strike us as a better use of time and resources. Every day, the press office of City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake e-mails missives about how she is “Moving Baltimore Forward With Diverse Staff,” how she hates childhood obesity about and how not banning smoking in public places means “essentially allowing the air we breathe to be contaminated with harmful chemicals.” Where is her commitment to structurally reforming education in the city? Did we elect her to blast e-mail platitudes and support the obvious?

Government is the only High School Assessment test subject out of four in which more than half of local high schoolers passed. In 2009, passing all four of the state?s High School Assessments will be mandatory to get a diploma. That strikes us as an urgent issue unless the school system plans to hold back nearly two thirds of its graduating class each year.

Let Rawlings-Blake and the 14 other members of the City Council commit themselves to solving the big stuff, not arguing over personal choice issues.