On Monday June 11th. the Columbus Board of Education sans two selected Deputy Superintendent Gene Harris to lead this beleaguered school district as its next superintendent. Well now what does that suggest for the system? Harris former student of, teacher in and administrator for the system certainly has enough familiarity with the system to know where all of the skeletons are buried. After serving for nearly a year as the number two person, she will now have the opportunity to step up to the plate and take a swing at rescuing a system that seems to many to be beyond repair. The Columbus Public Schools system has a major image problem, not to mention the substantive challenges that plague it. A staggering drop-out rate, truancy rate, unreliable figures on college placement and a low graduation rate are but among a few of the minor issues that face Harris as she ascends to the leadership role.

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled down over your eyes to blind you from the truth, the truth that you are a slave. As long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.” The Matrix Well, folks, the Matrix exists! Not the computer generated “virtual reality” fed into the vat-grown humans of the movie, nor is it the creation of sentient machines at war with humanity, but it does exist, and its purpose is the same: to blind us to our slavery.

The Cincinnati establishment is trying to look respectable following the mass protest, in the streets, of the murder of an unarmed 19-year-old man by a police officer.

The fatal shooting occurred early April 7 when a Cincinnati policeman, Steven Roach, chased Timothy Thomas into an alley and shot him in the chest at close range. The cop pursued Thomas because he fit the description of an individual sought by the police for 14 warrants, all of them misdemeanors or traffic violations.

Friends said Thomas had left the apartment he shared with his fiancée, Monique Wilcox, and his 3-month-old son, Tywon, to buy cigarettes. Thomas had recently earned his general equivalency diploma and secured a job as a laborer. He was planning to marry his fiancée in June.

By the morning of Monday, April 9, protesters were gathering in the streets, demanding justice. Thomas was the fourth black man killed by Cincinnati police since November, and the fifteenth such victim since 1995. A police news conference about the death of Thomas suggested a whitewash.

You might not see things yet on the surface, but underground, it’s already on fire. - Indonesian writer Y.B. Mangunwijaya

The surface reports of the recent Quebec City trade talks belie their real import. The mainstream media reported on the heads of state, the official pronouncements, free trade as if it were. The U.S. president declared the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is about “liberty and democracy.” We saw images of the police fighting protesters, the tear gas, and the fence “protecting” those gathered to negotiate an agreement.

Nowhere in the mainstream media did we read substantive stuff of the drama. No one mentioned the power being wrested from sovereign states, giving corporations the right to sue governments when health or safety or environmental policies limit their capacity to make profits. Nowhere was there debate about the proposed expansion of corporate power to challenge governments’ “monopoly” on public services. Nowhere was there a call to accountability for the fact that under NAFTA the U.S. has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, while Mexican workers’ wages have fallen even lower than pre-NAFTA earnings.

Dear Editor:

In the Winter 2001 issue of the Free Press, P. Thomas Harker wrote on “The Scoop on Proficiency Tests.” In short, he disapproved of the present statewide testing system. One of several reasons Harker gave, “Schools cannot mass produce uniform children . . .”

This taxpayer is a proficiency test supporter, of a sort. Accordingly, I’ll offer a different viewpoint.

Most people will agree that, strategically speaking, having a successful public school system is very simple. First, citizens collectively define what the students should learn. And, then teachers teach this curriculum to their students. The purpose of testing is to see if, in fact, the kids have learned the stuff they are supposed to. If not, the students restudy what they missed on the test. Then they get retested. Etc., etc.