Knight data-mining civic ideas

One of the chief concerns (and often a legitimate one) in just about any community is that responses to problems and/or opportunities are almost always top-down approaches.

This is a chance to do it differently. Creative and thoughtful people in Columbus and 25 other sites served by the Knight Foundation have an opportunity to put Knight’s money where their ideas are.

The third annual Knight Cities Challenge officially kicked off Monday, inviting ideas for community improvement and innovation from anybody who has ideas to share. The first two years of the challenge saw approximately $10 million in grants handed out, three of them benefiting Columbus.

Two of those grants involved connecting midtown and downtown, the first through a “minimum grid” alternative transportation project, and the other intended to promote small-scale development through recruitment and training programs for would-be entrepreneurs. The third, “Urban Glen,” is a greening and reclamation project to create attractive public spaces from what are now abandoned and deteriorated properties.

Anybody is welcome to share ideas, which will be taken online through Nov. 3 at knightcities.org, the only qualification being that it must be in or affect one of the Knight cities. (Those are the communities, including this one, where the former Knight-Ridder published newspapers before it was acquired by McClatchy in 2006.)

If you have original ideas about making this a better place, now is the time to share them. There are no losers in this competition.

Old problem worsens

A shortage of public school teachers is a chronic problem. A report in the October issue of Georgia Trend magazine suggests that in Georgia it’s a growing one.

Start with the teacher pipeline: In the short period between 2011 and 2015, enrollment in schools of education in University System of Georgia institutions dropped 14 percent; the production of new teachers feel even more — about 20 percent. At the beginning of the current school year, many of Georgia’s 181 public school systems were still trying to complete their teacher rosters.

Of the people who do enter the profession, almost half decide to leave it within five years, according to state schools Superintendent Richard Woods. The reasons are familiar — ever-increasing demands, sometimes bleak working conditions, low pay.

Thomas Koballa, dean of the college of education at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, said there’s another, intangible factor: a widespread lack of respect.

“It’s part of the culture right now,” Koballa told the magazine. “Students are not interested in becoming teachers because of what they see in the media and because they have been part of that school culture. Young people are seeing teaching as not a very glamorous profession.”

Good educators, of course, don’t teach for glamor, any more than they do it for the money. There are too few doing it at all.

This story was originally published October 10, 2016 at 5:29 PM with the headline "Knight data-mining civic ideas."