RealClearEd Today 03/31/2014: 'Jobs and Skills and Zombies'
Good morning. It's Monday March 31st. At RealClearEducation this morning we have the day's top headlines in news, commentary, analysis, and reports from around the country. Among them, Paul Krugman calls the skills gap a "zombie idea" in a piece for The New York Times, Chalkbeat New York takes on the second round of Common Core testing, and Arne Duncan hung out with PBS NewsHour this weekend to talk policy and defend his department. As usual, we'll be updating throughout the day.
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On this day in 1923, Marcus Foster was born in Athens, Ga. The future educator's family moved to Philadelphia, where he finished high school. At different times, Foster worked as a cab driver, postal carrier, dishwasher, and waiter before emerging as a well regarded principal in Philadelphia and earning a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania.
A rising star in education, Foster arrived in Oakland to high hopes in 1970 to serve as school superintendent. Three years later, he was dead at 50.
Foster and deputy superintendent Robert Blackburn were walking to their car following a November 1973 school board meeting when "the guns went off and I felt slammed, hit, spun around," Blackburn recounted for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002. "Two figures were crouching, and I saw flashes from the muzzles of their guns. Then I was being hit from behind with a shotgun. I stumbled down the side of the car, into a narrow alley, stumbling and reeling. They stood over Marcus and put another round in his head. The coroner said he was killed outright. Seven or nine bullets." The bullets were coated in cyanide. Blackburn barely survived.
Foster was gunned down by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a previously little-known group that would soon gain attention in the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Some speculate the bizarre Hearst episode was actually an effort to deflect attention from Foster's murder, which was roundly condemned on the political left and right. The self-described radical group was ostensibly opposed to a school district plan to have high school students carry ID cards and killed Foster in reaction. But Foster himself wasn't onboard with the policy and was working to modify it at the time of his death.
In other words, pointless. Describing the Symbionese Liberation Army, Blackburn -- who would later lead the Oakland schools himself -- told the San Francisco Chronicle, "They were uniquely mediocre and stunningly off-base. The people in the SLA had no grounding in history. They swung from the world of being thumb-in-the-mouth cheerleaders to self-described revolutionaries with nothing but rhetoric to support them."
Thankfully political violence remains rare in education, but a surprising number of big city school superintendents have security or a police presence at their residences. It's hard to miss how the venom and anger of American politics has permeated the education discourse as well.
For his part, Foster saw something bigger. In a 1971 speech to school district employees, he spoke his aspirations for what's possible:
"Our success will come not because of Board directives, or the Superintendent's notions, or the staff's creativity, or the community's yearning. We will make it because we have the common need to draw on each other, and the audacity to believe that in concert, we are equal to the great tasks."
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