The pattern developing in the District isn’t just one of declining ethics and apparent lawlessness among elected officials. There also has been an incremental erosion of standards that particularly threatens low-income communities, undermining the “One City” campaign that was supposed to reduce disparities across the city. Consider DCPS decision to lower the requirements of its teacher-evaluation system. The Examiner’s Lisa Gartner recently reported Chancellor Kaya Henderson said teachers who previously were rated “highly effective,” and this year scored above average on their first two assessments, won’t be subjected to the remaining three appraisals.
At the same time, Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown has said he wants to increase bonuses for “highly effective” teachers who agree to serve in “struggling schools.” Henderson’s altered assessment process and Brown’s plan could mean that DCPS students in general, and low-income communities in particular, may not actually get the level of teaching expertise promised by the new evaluations and recruited with bonus bucks.
How can we be lowering our standards already? Has the “soft bigotry of low expectations” returned to the District?
The council repealed the law allowing police to arrest individuals driving cars with plates that had expired 30 days. That action was instigated by Gray, who was motivated by a letter from Sen. James Webb, D-Va., who had heard complaints from his constituents.
Kristopher Baumann, head of the Fraternal Order of Police, said being able to arrest motorists driving unregistered cars was a “huge crime-fighting tool.” Speaking on News Channel 8’s Bruce DePuyt’s show, Gray acknowledged as much. He said in the past those arrests frequently captured drug dealers and other criminals. “It was an important law enforcement tactic,” he added.
So why drop this tool? Have all the drug dealers decamped?
Baumann said Gray’s trying to rehabilitate his political career. There’s some truth there: Hoping to satisfy Hispanic voters, he issued an executive order prohibiting public safety officials from checking individuals’ immigration status. He also barred “District agencies from making incarcerated youth and adults under its supervision available for federal immigration interviews without a court order.” (The Hill reported of the 396,906 illegal immigrants deported in 2011, 216,698 had been previously convicted of felonies or misdemeanors.)
Leo Alexander, a 2010 mayoral candidate whose campaign partly focused on immigration, said Gray is “blowing the opportunity to make sure undereducated populations have jobs.”
Allowing illegals to stay promotes the exploitation of both those immigrants in no position to protect themselves and push for higher wages and local citizens who would be employed if the playing field were level.
“We’ll do those [service industry] jobs but not for illegal immigrant wages,” he said.
At-large Councilman Phil Mendelson, chairman of the public safety committee, defended Gray’s order. He called checking immigration status a “distraction. I want Chief [Cathy] Lanier and Chief Lanier wants to be reducing violent crime in Trinidad and dealing with gangs.”
But many gangs are based in immigrant communities.
Who cares? It’s the symbolism that counts.
Meanwhile, in low-income communities, drug dealers drive around in unregistered cars, illegal immigrants fill the too-few jobs and low-income children head out to schools where the teachers don’t have to meet hard-won standards.
That’s “One City” in action.
Jonetta Rose Barras’s column appears on Monday and Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].
