If education remains weak, region won’t be able to grow

July 14, 2005

By Maurice M. Eisenstein
Post-Tribune guest columnist

Mayor Tom McDermott Jr. and Purdue University Calumet Chancellor Howard Cohen are to be commended for reaching an agreement for PUC to manage and develop Hammond’s technology incubator. This is an economic benefit to PUC and Hammond.

PUC is also developing the new Water Institute, which is to study the primary natural resource of Northwest Indiana — Lake Michigan. Fresh water is becoming as valuable, and scarcer, than oil. To get ahead on this economic resource could provide great possibilities for NWI, as could the Hammond incubator.

Over the past decade, these are the only two serious economic development projects that have been presented. What is ironic is that because NWI is dragging itself down educationally, it could jeopardize the chance that these two projects will have any positive effect in the long run.

The major problem with NWI’s culture is that it neither respects education nor understands of what education should consist.

More than half of Lake County’s population lives north of the Borman Expressway — the area that consistently graduates some functional illiterates from its schools. Although this has been going on for decades, the same incompetent individuals remain in charge, with astronomical salaries that can only be characterized as thievery.

How can one explain John Flores still being in charge of education in East Chicago, except that incompetence rules? How can one justify all the principals in Gary keeping their jobs, when they cannot graduate more than 1 in 6 who can read and do math at the ninth-grade level? The Hammond schools have been supporting the Carpenters union with plenty of new buildings, while most graduates have less-than-adequate reading and math skills.

There is a complete lack of response on the part of the elected officials. And where are the citizens who are allowing this to happen? This is the core of our tax crisis.

Property in Hammond, Gary and East Chicago is devalued because no one wants to come into a community knowing their children won’t receive proper educations. Until the K-12 system changes, the property tax problems will continue.

If the people north of the Borman don’t care, those south of the Borman shouldn’t give them any more money. There is no evidence that NWI would be any worse off if we canceled school in Hammond, Gary and East Chicago and left the kids home to watch TV.

Finally, evidence of how little our so-called leadership understands education was provided by the last meeting of the NWI Quality of Life Council. The council is comprised of business, political and educational leaders in NWI. Their last speaker was an economic development expert from Cleveland. The speaker told them what they wanted to hear, “NWI has world-class universities to build economic development on.” Everyone there nodded in agreement.

Who is fooling whom? The rest of the world knows we don’t even have a state-class level of higher education. Every other part of the state has more universities, spends more tax dollars per student and has more students per capita. Even our leaders don’t know what we don’t have. So how can they correct it?

The absolute, unequivocal truth is, as long as you have lower than mediocre primary, secondary and higher education, no economic development program can get NWI out of being a major loser economically.