Speaking of insanity: Why you should never back another Salem-Keizer Schools money measure

In the great tradition of the corporate pirates want to build monstrous boondoggles over the Willamette and Columbia Rivers and pave over French Prairie, the unguided missile known as Salem-Keizer Schools has condemned land in West Salem once owned by Governor Bob Straub (you might recall the gift he and his wife made that became the wonderful Straub Environmental Learning Center in the heart of Salem).

There is no justification for this project whatsoever except in the cozy world of contractor-school district relations, where spending money on boondoggle edifices and sports facilities is about the only thing administrators can do to feel like they've made a difference. The schools continue to operate on a model of a factory and a calendar of a farm, while failing to attain anything like the efficiencies of either.

A school district with its students' interests at heart would recognize that they are setting their students up for failure with their antiquated butts-in-seats-in-schools model of instruction and the huge expenditures on infrastructure -- shiny new buildings built with lots of shiny new money that ultimately does nothing but promote sprawl and the illusion that we're going to have a carburban future just like we've had for the past 50 years.

We won't. And the school district is guilty of gross malfeasance and willful blindness in condemning the Straub land. Of course, the present senior administrators will all be happily into their comfortable retirements before the chickens come home to roost on this one, and they'll get to be giving the tours for the shiny new buildings and they'll get to write the glowing press releases about how wonderful the buildings are and how they'll "facilitate enhanced world-class linkages and learnings" and other jargon-laden bs that is the distinctive hallmark of Edspeak, the language of a bankrupt elite. So it's all good for them -- even as Oregon and Salem's finances are swirling around the drain, they'll get to plow a bunch of money into shiny new buildings and when, later, there's no money for maintenance of the older buildings, their successors will cry poor and ask voters for more money "for the children."

Enough. The era of factory schools served by fleets of buses and armadas of parents ferrying their little snowflakes around is O.V.E.R. No more school buildings until the schools adopt a year-round, two-shift calendar and makes full use of the existing buildings and establishes small neighborhood school centers in the many vacant commercial buildings and school outposts in workplaces all over town.