Fix the Village. Fix the CHhld.

No - that's not a typo in the headline! It's an illustration to support the concept...

Not too long ago, then First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote a best-seller called It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. In the book, she focused on how diverse individuals and groups, not associated with, or those outside the family, do whether for better or otherwise, leave a lasting impression that is connected to a child's well-being. Society, then, according to the author must meet the needs of the child.

Locally and recently, the public school administration and the school committee have been expressing their frustration and anxiety of ever plummeting graduation rates. A possible culprit could be, according to these public school representatives, charter schools. Why? Well, it seems the charter schools have skimmed the cream off the top and, the result of this is, the traditional public schools have what’s left; special education students and those whose first language is not English. Plus, most of the public school children in the system are from the lower economic households.

Charter schools; talk of a perfect example of perfuming the pig. Or, better yet, a brilliant counter measure against integration. Actually, it was a well-planned agenda by those who didn’t want their children in inner-city schools and more specifically bused to schools outside of their neighborhoods. The busing “solution” was an ill-conceived solution to a still festering, thirty year old, problem.

Once you gave “these” parents the option of where to send their children to school, those who were the most upwardly mobile took advantage. The families of “those” children were again left with little option. Yes, I’m painting this snapshot with a broad brush and mixing my metaphors. The neighborhood (village) schools all pretty much stayed the same; while the new charter schools came on line with the best of everything including smaller classes, better facilities and fewer problems. Most of those problems were left in the neighborhood schools.

So many businesses solve one, several or all of their marketing mix problems the same way. Remember: internal factors are controllable factors. Returning to the public school issue totally in a marketing light, here’s what’s at the core of it all. Neighborhoods have not been supported and sustained. With the flight to suburbia, the urban vacuum was filled with those on the bottom of the economic ladder. Block upon block of multi-family apartments were allowed to be bought up as income property or investment portfolio stuffing. When the cat’s away… Mismanaged or under-managed properties are like corn fields. Corn strips the soil bare of its essential nutrients. So to do most properties that are not properly managed and, those are, for the most part non-owner occupied.

Already we see the genesis of a ground zero for the public school problem. There is a theory out there that’s existed since the eighties. Some call it an urban myth. But, a theory was introduced in an Atlantic Monthly article in 1982 James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Wilson and Kelling were by social scientists who offered one of many examples, “Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.”

Some of us may say it’s no theory. We’ve seen neighborhoods deteriorate before our own eyes. Perhaps the reason for this is that those who have the power; status, education and good paying jobs don’t live in those neighborhoods. In South Boston, the old-timers have a less than endearing term to describe those in the neighborhood who moved to the suburbs. They call them two-toilet-Irish. These suburban Irish left their neighborhoods, their parish and their pubs for the luxury of having more than one toilet in a new home; turning their backs on who and what they were. Those who owned owner-occupied multi -family dwellings sold to absentee landlords and there, based on the old-timers opinion, went the neighborhood.

Maybe mentioning South Boston and busing in the same article in an iffy venture on my part. But look at it this way. Good neighborhoods where the residents are invested in several ways, whether financially, emotionally or culturally are just that. Good schools are found in good neighborhoods and utilized and supported by good neighbors. Every school can be a “charter” school. The quality of education is not solely dictated by the neighborhood’s diversity as by its economic base. Residents of these neighborhoods own shops and other small businesses in the neighborhood that employ the people who live there.

Fix the neighborhoods and fix the schools. Fix the schools and fix the children. Fix the children and fix the future. It takes a village to raise a child is said to have originated from the Nigerian Igbo culture. The source and attributed proverb are still debated but regardless of the concept’s pedigree, neighborhoods house and sustain families whose children's futures are dependent on the entire village. Not just the parents or the schools but everything and everyone in the neighborhood that forms the social and cultural and individual identities of everyone who lives there. David Ogilvy said, "A blind pig can sometimes find a truffle. But it helps to know that they're found in oak forests."