A specter is haunting Eugene Sanders and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. It’s the specter of Barbara Byrd-Bennett.

 And if the current Cleveland School’s CEO is going to move the district away from the chaos and mismanagement that he inherited, he must exorcize Byrd-Bennett’s destructive handiwork from the district

    In 2006, after Byrd-Bennett stepped down as CEO of the Cleveland schools, I had an encounter with a graduate of these schools that illustrates ongoing issues with the Byrd-Bennett legacy. å

At Cleveland State University, the student was struggling with basic academic literacy. Despite numerous educational interventions, it finally became clear to her that she would have to delay her goal of higher education because she could not overcome her educational shortcomings and meet the demands of an academic program at the same time.

    Instructively, the student lamented to me that she had spent most of her school-based life under Byrd-Bennett’s regime and had accepted without question the district- and media-driven propaganda that she was receiving an education that would allow her to successfully complete the demands of higher education

    As her hopes of pursuing a college degree evaporated, it became clear to me (and her) that she was a victim of a regime that demanded that persons with real stakes in the school district subordinate their concerns for the sake of unity. She shared with me that she assumed that because of a lack of debate that took place among the appointed school board, everything was okay.

Byrd-Bennett came to Cleveland with a simple program. Her vision consisted of high standards and a strong curriculum; a commitment to excellence among teachers and principals; a safe, supportive, resource-rich learning environment; a maximization of the district's financial resources; and a partnering with parents and the community to meet the academic and non-academic needs of students and their families.

    To aid this vision, Byrd-Bennett and her supporters asked that citizens of Cleveland specifically do three things: Give up civil and political rights (she only desired to work for an appointed board); compromise the notion of educational excellence (academic failure was seen as progress); and never publicly question how the schools were run (all debate about her regime was muted).

Byrd-Bennett’s posture pleased many people. Those who have always had a problem with democracy immediately gave her program admiration because it disenfranchised so many from participation in school governance.

The old school board had become an untidy place, where members almost literally fought each over how best to educate children. Appointing school board members blunted the differences between the members, guaranteeing orderly meetings and no opposition to the school CEO’s agenda.

In the post-segregation era, the transition of cities from majority white to black has been a significant element in shaping the debate around voting rights and control of public institutions.

    Many have felt uneasy with blacks — through the ballot — having total control over their elected representation. That appeals to the racially charged tendencies that have viewed blacks from their enslavement in America to now as incapable of governing themselves. (Incredibly, Byrd-Bennett even supported this position when she went on the record as saying—prior to the vote on the school governance issue—that she did not wish to work for an elected school board!)     

    Those who have never believed in educating urban (mostly black) children immediately gave her program applause, since they feel that too many public resources are wasted on people whose limited intelligence constricts their opportunity for success. The central feature of this narrative has been in place since blacks were introduced in the New World: Compensatory education has failed, it contends, because blacks lack the genetic inheritance to ever achieve parity with whites in academy and the workplace.

Watching the board perform at a special hearing to approve the 2005 general fund for the Cleveland Municipal District, several community activists, onlookers and I were struck by how each of the newly minted board members seemed to feel that being on the board was an inalienable right rather than an earned responsibility based on how a member performs public service

For example, at that meeting, the appointed board passed a budget that reduced textbook spending in 2005 by $1.5 million to $0. The new budget allowed for no new textbooks, no replacement textbooks (for lost texts), and a reduction in magazine purchase and other supplemental materials. At the same time, however, the budget provided for an increase in district’s public relations spending from $1.29 million in the 2004 budget to $1.403 in the 2005 budget. (This last item may be the reason the district did much better in the media than in the classroom during a time when, it could be argued, Cleveland was the worst performing major school district in the country?

But how can the few school graduates who make it to college compete with other students without having had the benefit of recent textbooks or popular magazines? They can’t, as the struggling student’s story above illustrates.

In the nearly seven years under Byrd-Bennett’s regime, three things—all of them bad—occurred with Cleveland’s schools: The loss of the right to vote and participate in school matters; the loss of clearly definable educational standards; and the loss of public accountability of school officials

During her regime, the complexities of a school district were reduced to people feeling good about Byrd-Bennett and the triumph of educational bad faith over every sphere of reason when it came to discussions of the Cleveland’s schools.

But this devolution could be a real bonus for Eugene Sanders if he has the courage to take advantage of it. So far he hasn’t.

Speaking before The City Club of Cleveland in August of this year, Sanders refused to place the current academic and fiscal crisis of the district into its proper historical context. Like Byrd-Bennett, Sanders put forth what he called a “bold new direction.”  Embedded in football imagery and a slogan—“Vision is Victory”— he articulated four critical areas of his game plan: Academic Achievement, Safety and Security, Innovation, and Community Engagement.

The last three areas of his plan were fairly consistent with most rhetoric that emanates from school-based persons. Of course, everyone wants safer schools, innovation and community engagement. In fact, these concepts have become pretty abstract and counterproductive. They really don’t denote or stand for anything. An irony of each of these terms is that they suggest just how different the district is from most districts that do work. But don’t be fooled into believing that these are anything other than rhetorical categories. They help to sell something. They don’t define anything.

In the area of academic achievement, however, Sanders took a real hard sack. “The ‘Continuous Improvement’ ranking is important,” he said. “But it is not an end in itself. I consider that and other measurements to be sign posts along the way. They (sic) are touchdowns and field goals. But we are not just here to score points. We’re here to win the game. There’ll be years in which we get positive state and national designations, and there be years in which we won’t. But if you miss a field goal, you don’t pull your team off the field, load up the bus and drive home. You play a little defense, get the ball back and march down the field again.”

Earlier in the City Club address, Sanders had already conceded that the district’s ranking on the Ohio Report Card—which was released on August 25 —had been lowered to “Academic Watch.”  I’m not sure how much Sanders knows about football, but you win games by scoring the most points, not by punting.

    Over the past several years, I have written commentary and found myself locked in struggles with Byrd-Bennett, elected officials, and public functionaries as a means to make sense out of the world that we share.

    I have proceed differently than other commentators because I have organized how I think about politics—particularly African-American politics—from a theoretical construct that recognizes that since the end of state-sponsored segregation, new forms of political dominion now subordinate African-American emancipation.

     We have witnessed that control most clearly in Cleveland’s black urban regimes, especially Byrd-Bennett’s administration, which most accurately expressed this trajectory because it was able to most efficiently continue white and corporate subornation of African Americans in school matters.

    The backdrop for this political domination is that, despite having access to the electoral process, African Americans still act as if their political needs must be brokered through African-American race leadership — an orientation which may be one of the last vestiges of the awful Jim Crow era.  
    When Byrd-Bennett became leader of Cleveland’s schools, she did so in the spirit of reform and to redistribute education equally among all of Cleveland’s school children. When she was gonged off the stage nearly seven years later, Cleveland’s school children were still not getting decent educations, and there wasn’t even a puff of smoke in lieu of her disappearing act.

Now Eugene Sanders wears the crown and will be confronted with the challenge posed by psychiatrist and revolutionary scholar Franz Fanon: "Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it."

A lot of people are going to be watching, especially former and current students.