School Me Once Everybody loves a winner, and we all know why. Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing. Who, though, loves a loser? It depends. Look no further than pro football for a microcosm of the old victory-defeat dynamic. In Buffalo, the people love their Bills; always have, always will. The city's passion for the team is its most endearing quality. This amorous relationship has been on a rollercoaster for decades, with the biggest loop-de-loop coming in the early '90s, when the Bills lost four straight Super Bowls. The fans adored them then, and they adore them now, as well they should. Most everyone else considers them losers. But sometimes losers are popular, which makes no sense at all. For instance, the State of Arizona just lost again, in a rather important category. For the fourth year in a row, we lead the nation in the percentage of teens (age 16-19) who have dropped out of high school. The consolation is that we get to kiss our sister - we're actually tied with Louisiana for top (er, bottom) honors this year. This is not a good thing. Already, Arizonans have shown a mighty disdain for menial labor. You never see kids mowing their own lawns, much less those of their neighbors, which was commonplace in my childhood. You seldom see them bussing tables or busting soap suds at restaurants. You certainly won't find them out in the fields, hoeing rows or detassling corn. Those are, to paraphrase George W. Bush, the jobs that Americans won't do. We use illegal immigrants for that, see. So, with the low-wage jobs quickly evaporating, and union jobs shriveling up and blowing away, what are all these dropouts to do with their lives? In the newspaper, along with the few paragraphs explaining how quick Arizona teens are to give up on the public education system, there are a few profiles of success stories. Some do turn their lives around. The rest of them just disappear from the societal radar. They pay fewer (if any) taxes and pump less cash into the economy. The only time they surface, apparently, is on Election Day, when they show up in droves to vote Republican. That can be the only possible explanation for the cycle of stupidity that grips Arizona, recently listed as the third-dumbest state (overall) in the country. Never mind the pro-business Democrat in the governor's office; Arizona has always been one of the most conservative spots in America. This has manifested itself in mind-numbing ways. We were the last place on Earth (just about) to outlaw cockfighting. Hell, it took us forever just to fluoridate our water. We were the last ones to give civil servants a paid day off in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. We're the state with the chain gangs, horseback posses and Tent City. When Charles Keating was busy acting like a white-collar John Dillinger (his crimes having since paled in comparison to those of WorldCom and Enron), he did it all right here. We won't clean up our polluted air or teach English to Hispanics (that they might assimilate and be productive citizens), even when under court orders to do so. We couldn't even solve the murder of Bob Crane. Yet people keep moving here from everywhere else, presumably from smarter states, at least to some degree. And the GOP maintains a healthy advantage over Democrats in voter registration statistics. So stupid we stay, part and parcel of entrenched conservative policies. In a way, Arizona is the canary in the coal mine for the nation. Our economy, the envy of the Baby Bush era, is healthier than the norm, but we're riding on a real estate stampede that may be headed for a cliff, as it was in the late 1980s. What, then, can the beleaguered children of Arizona learn from their education leaders when it comes to confronting troublesome news like this? Not a thing; they actually seem to be tutoring the adults at this time. Republican Tom Horne, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction, reacted to the report by putting his hands over his face and pretending it wasn't there. "I think that organization has their numbers wrong," he said, referring to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. They based the findings in their "Kids Count" report on census data, as opposed to Tom Horne's data. True, we have improved: In 1998 the dropout rate was 18 percent; today it is 12 percent. From behind the Superintendent's rosy shades the dropout rate looks more like six percent, which might explain the lack of alarm on his part. Of course, his laconic denial could stem from the fact that Horne is simply a fool, statistically speaking - on paper, it's almost a probability in Arizona. At the very least, you can rest assured that he figures the rest of us are not bright enough to figure any of this out. After all, he was elected... Paul Heller 7/27/05 << back to the archives
	All site contents © 2005, Paul F. Heller