Stephen Colbert Ridicules The Dismantling Of Wake County's Successful Schools

Last night, Stephen Colbert deployed "The Word" to bring his show's unique and wonderful brand of language-brutality upon the recent decision of the Wake County, N.C. school board to dismantle a successful school system that had achieved schools of high economic diversity and astounding rates of parent satisfaction.

The baseline reason given for taking apart a success story was austerity. But Colbert highlighted a lot of the pure disingenuous nonsense involved -- in the mind of Tea Party acolyte and school board member John Tedesco, for instance, the successful program was nothing more than government sponsored "social engineering," and the poor were much better off in a situation that magnified their hopelessness.

TEDESCO: If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public will see the challenges, the need to make it successful...Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it.

To which Colbert archly responded: "See? Misguided government do-gooders foolishly diluted the problem by addressing it. We need to ignore it, so we'll pay attention to it!"

COLBERT: Just take public transportation. City buses are dirty, because we ignore the problem because it's not squalid enough. But I believe if we made certain groups of people ride in the back of the bus again, we'd remember how poor those conditions are and I'm sure we'd fix them. And then we can reverse socially-engineered progress in other areas like lunch counters and water fountains until things get so bad for the poor that we won't be able to ignore them. Because there would be massive social unrest. These injustices will become so apparent to everyone that we'll put aside our differences that we worked so hard to reinstate and join together in a new civil rights movement to undo the undoing of what we've already done.

According to WTVD-TV in Raleigh, Colbert's mockery has some residents grousing that is makes it "seem like we're kind of backwards." But Tedesco is said to be taking it in stride:

"I think when we laugh together, we can talk together. So I hope it does create more dialogue," he said.

Maybe, in this way, Tedesco is right: if we can shed a light on the fact that the community has a high concentration of super-stupidity localized in the form of John Tedesco, the problem will be so undiluted that no one will be able to continue ignoring it.

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Comments

[eilene1226]

10:03 PM on 02/07/2011

Now the state of North Carolina is considering further lunacy. They are proposing to eliminate the cap on charter schools. I don't have a problem with that, except they propose to have them not answer to local school board authorities anymore, or to the state elected division of schools. They propose to have a new authority set up with appointees from the legislature to oversee the charter schools. In essence, they are creating two separate public school systems. However, the charters will not have to provide lunch through the federal program, so free and reduced lunch students need not apply, and they won't have to pay for transportation, so anyone whose parents can't drop them off every day need not apply. And, they get public education funds. Since the charters can cherry pick their students, sounds pretty elitist to me. Also, they can keep some less than desirable students around for the 20 day budget count, then kick them out and send them back to the "regular" public schools, but the funding the charter schools gets from their count stays with them. Wow. Just come out and say it, NC. We are trying to dismantle public education.

[memery]

08:20 PM on 01/27/2011

Considering how the right-wing feels about education (remember when Reagan wanted to dismantle the Dept. of Education?), I'm surprised the Tea Partiers aren't trying to pass a NC state law mandating home schooling. It's in their interests to keep people ignorant because only the uninformed would believe the swill that they spew.

[Ghoulish]

10:54 AM on 01/21/2011

Seems to me that the people insinuating that these good schools will become "bad ones" once they are segregated is more racist than reversing desegregation. If the schools in Wake County are all good (as they are said to be right now) then they should remain good regardless of the race of the students attending, desegregation or not.

[dim]

02:47 PM on 01/27/2011

Yeah, when you a have a good thing going, let's mess with it.

[Edward Standley]

07:02 AM on 01/21/2011

I just resent that the Right Wingers assume that Progressives are as dim as they are. How can they think they're fooling anyone but their base?

[galaxian]

03:11 AM on 01/21/2011

Gotta hand it to Colbert. It's tough to satirize something so absurd.

[AnonymousDissenter]

01:06 AM on 01/21/2011

I was one of the first classes to graduate from the Magnet school in my deep-south hometown. I don't care what these Tea Partiers say -- it was a fantastic experience. I lived in a suburban neighborhood and fought like heck to go to the downtown school that had a rep for being violent and awful before the program. They go on about a drop-out rate, but I don't hear the stories of valedictorians like mine, who was a black young woman and I still remember how much I admired and wanted to be like her. I was very close with our quarterback who used to hang out in my art studio to talk philosophy and watch me paint who had a 4.0, also black. And there was my other friend who worked with me at my dad's restaurant; he lived in the poor section and I used to have to give him a ride to school when it rained because the wipers on his Impala didn't work, and he also had high marks -- higher than mine -- also black. What about them?

We had the Entreprenuership and Fine Arts Magnet programs at our school and if it weren't for the integration, things would have been very different for them and for me. That experience taught me to respect and admire how hard they worked given an equal opportunity. Tadesco is making a serious mistake.

[DoctorJohn]

08:16 PM on 01/20/2011

What an awful echo from the 1950s and 60s. The term "social engineering" was used a lot during that time by bigots, racists and segregationists to fight school integration and all other forms of eqaulity for southern black society. During that era, how dare black folk should want a chance to get a good education, or at least a level of education that low incomes whites received. Never was anything amounting to seperate but equal when it came to funding black schools in the south. The use of the term "social engineering" was especially puzzling since southern whites had engaged in one of the most disgusting forms of social engineering imaginable...slavery and Jim Crowism. If Jim Crow wasn't all about social engineering of the worst sort, then what was it?

[MamaBird62]

11:04 AM on 01/21/2011

well said

[mmsuki]

07:23 PM on 01/20/2011

Dumbing down good public schools only hurts every taxpayer, through decreased property values.

No one wants to move into an area with poor schools, unless you are a tbagger.

[Edward Standley]

07:08 AM on 01/21/2011

Always thought that busing teachers on a rotating basis might help shine a light on poorly performing schools. I think that School Board administrators develop a cynicism and familiarity when discussing problems with the same teachers day in and day out. If they hear the same arguments from a fresh crop of teachers "in rotation", maybe people will start to notice.

[Vyslichajici]

10:34 AM on 01/21/2011

how would that help the teachers to do their job better?

[SpaceCadet]

06:01 PM on 01/20/2011

It sounds like North Carolina has decided to compete with South Carolina for the title of State with the Dumbest Politicians in the Union. It's too bad the tea partiers there want their children to be ignorant, too.

[JBS]

08:20 PM on 01/20/2011

Not really. It's not North Carolina that has decided, it's a bunch of arrogant outsiders trying to take over the state.

North Carolina had a large influx of immigrants from the old rust belt. Most of those who came here came because they thought they'd have a better life. And for the most part they have and their contribution has been far greater than their numbers.

But we've also received our share of undesirables. Some came because they saw an opportunity to make a power grab.

The problem with the Wake County School Board is caused because a minority of tea-party carpet-baggers who were part of the immigrant influx has seized power. They ran on a stealth platform of lies and innuendo and took advantage of the way municipal elections are structured in North Carolina.

With luck we'll be able to begin driving the carpet-baggers out with this next election cycle, but they're backed by a powerful lot of secret money thanks to the United States Extreme Court.

[oldguru]

10:58 AM on 01/21/2011

It is going to take more than luck.
If the people with brains sit on their tails and do not run for those seats on the school boards, it leaves a vacuum that gets filled by these zealots who are determined to take us back to the 17th century.
If the midterm elections did not point out the danger of being disconnected from the rational politics of progress, I don't know what would.

[MarcEdward]

06:41 PM on 01/21/2011

Well put. We watch Wake Country from Chapel Hill and are so glad we don't live there. They would have a hard time pulling that sort of thing here.

[ArtTeach]

10:12 PM on 01/22/2011

North Carolina schools are in a race to the bottom. The state is talking hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to school budgets again this year. Look for NC to be 50th in school funding in 2011.

[Allthosewhowander]

05:36 PM on 01/20/2011

The longer I teach, the more I believe that society wants to keep people ignorant in the interest of capitalism. If we are ignorant, then we are complacent with our shallow materialistic must haves. We will believe that success is having a big screen tv, a car that dropped 40% of its value when we drove it off the lot, our crippling personal debt. Our eyes will be closed to the real issues. An educated society might start questioning the bureauracracy, and our gov't is terrified of having too many educated people out there that might hold them accountable.

[JBS]

08:23 PM on 01/20/2011

Society does not want that, the "capitalists" want that for themselves.

[marla singer]

04:17 AM on 01/21/2011

Most of society, unfortunately, wants what the "capitalists" tell them to want.

[Marnie1]

05:23 PM on 01/20/2011

Everything I think he can't top himself......

Hopefully the local NAACP or some parents can get a court order to stop this move and get a reading by a federal judge.

[SweetTart]

04:17 PM on 01/20/2011

By the time the voting public catches on to the fact that these board members are dismantling their educational system, the damage will have been done. It's such a shame that tea party voters are so ignorant that they actually vote in people who will make huge messes and then leave them for someone else to live with.

[Fattonecat]

04:12 PM on 01/20/2011

TEDESCO: If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public will see the challenges, the need to make it successful...Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it. .............. Another Teabagger genius !

[Republicrat1776]

03:59 PM on 01/20/2011

Ok, I watched Colbert yesterday and it was a completely different episode.....am I losing my mind here?

[Republicrat1776]

04:03 PM on 01/20/2011

nevermind, I see this was originally posted yesterday....

[Just a passerby]

02:49 PM on 01/20/2011

So how does this work? "If it's fixed, break it!"

[Marnie1]

05:26 PM on 01/20/2011

We are talking about people who go around in public with seep through tea bags hanging from their clothes.
Backwards doesn't begin to corer their retroness and dumbitude..