That old bit of arrogant advice for those in power came to mind this week reading two stories in the news. Both reveal weaknesses in how local government communicates with citizens. The City of Richardson and the Richardson school district (RISD) are both getting beaten up online. Neither is doing much, if anything, to clear up misinformation or refute allegations of misconduct.
After the jump, my own criticism of how local government fails to head off criticism before the fact.
The Richardson ISD (RISD) recently announced a program of furnishing every student in certain grades at certain schools with school-owned netbook computers. The Dallas Morning News covered the news with a story on its main web site and another story on its Richardson blog. Your challenge, readers, is to guess what angle to this story was of most interest to the newspaper's readers. If you guessed tin-foil hat conspiracies and charges of government waste and fraud, you get a gold star.
After the jump, examples of why education's biggest obstacle to learning isn't the student, but his parents.
For the last several years, the City of Richardson has been defending itself from two lawsuits regarding, not eminent domain or taxes or even trash pickup, but how the city council conducts its meetings. One lawsuit charges the city with holding closed executive sessions prohibited by city charter. The city council implicitly acknowledged this (if not legally admitting to anything) by holding a charter amendment election in 2007, which passed, making the offenses alleged in the lawsuit moot today. The other lawsuit charges the city with unlawfully lobbying for passage of the charter amendment.
The lawuits have been making their way through the courts, slowly, as most such lawsuits do. In December, city attorney Pete Smith briefed the council, in open session about the status of the cases.
After the jump, an update.
As an aging Baby Boomer, I'm acutely aware of both my generation's outsized influence on American culture over the last fifty years and on its inevitable passing. It strikes home at events like the Oscar ceremonies where I found myself familiar with more faces in the "In Memoriam" tribute than with faces of the young presenters of the awards. Symbolically, I pictured the whole Baby Boom generation, standing on the stage, giving its acceptance speech for the "lifetime achievement" award, when the first faint notes of the orchestra begin to be heard, signifying our time is up, it's time to leave the stage.
After the jump, other signs of approaching obsolescence.
