So, why not tip your hand? What is it you would like to “extract” from the states?

That gets us back to your previous post. Schmoke predicted the war on drugs fiasco, and thus predicted the failure of NCLB-type accountability. As was explained by the founder of data-driven community policing, and was further illustrated by The Wire, accountability by data is like chemo-therapy. A little can be helpful but keep it up and you poison yourself.

Most people with real-world expertise on crime knew in the 1980s that the Drug War would turn around the percentages, making people of color the majority of prison inmates, even though they did not use drugs at a higher rate. We knew that we would fill the prisons with non-violent inmates, causing even more damage to families, hurting the poor and thus damaging education, thus making the downward spiral worst.

And whether you were a cop or a social worker, a prosecutor or a defense attorney, a scholar or a small time criminal, you knew the reason why. IN ORDER TO MAKE THE NUMBERS COME OUT RIGHT, we’d lock up small fry and pervert our criminal justice system getting them to snitch on the big fish.

I would think that Schmoke would be the perfect person to mediate because he understands the reality of urban poverty, and the human comedy and the way that people will turn themselves into pretzles to make the numbers look good. I heard Jason Kamras on C-Span at Aspen when he acknowledged that the value-added models sought by Rhee are not ready. Why did they waste a year pursuing some pipe dream? Get this wrong, and Rhee will do more unintended harm on poor children in D.C. than Reagan’s Drug War did. Yes, our problems are huge. Simplistic quick fixes, however, always have the potential to make things worse. I bet that Duncan and Obama understand that.