But I meant to point this sorry excuse for editorial thought out last Thursday.

Nashville failed school children at the polls Tuesday and in leadership.

City officials can’t turn their attention quickly enough to see that students aren’t harmed by the damage done. Schools may have to start cutting immediately for the $20 million shortfall expected next fiscal year that could mean as many as 700 teaching and support jobs. That sets back a five-year effort to improve schools and school funding. And just this year, concerns about fuel costs could put more of a strain on the school budget.

Logical fallacies abound. Assuming all other metropolitan funds earmarked for other priorities are immutable and cannot be diverted permanently to the school budget is unsupported by fact. Harping on “fuel costs”, though higher to be sure, further trivializes the need for the funds that The Tennessean so eloquently advocates. I think someone somewhere thought this would resonate with voters. That’s bad political strategy, and condescending to the voters.

It seems that The Tennessean editorial board deems shaming the populace as a viable advocacy strategy. Slapping 71% of the voters over the hand as if they were undisciplined children will certainly win them over the next time. Eh, not so much.

The people did not “fail the children” - if dollars expended on education are all that separate success from failure, such failure lies in one man’s lap. The mayor is the one who failed the children when he decided to make the sales tax hike a matter for education funding instead of for sidewalk and greenway funding, which it should have been.

Sixty-one cents of the last 67 cent property tax increase did not go to education. Bill, what happened to the 61 cents?