And he could there do no mighty work. . . .

Is Louisiana fixed yet?

After all, it has been the better part of a week since the Messiah took office. Robert Kennon Buddy Roemer Bobby Jindal, by his mere presence and tough talk on ethics, was to instantaneously transform a state that's been mired in varying degrees of dysfunction since the dawn of the 18th century.

SO, WE FIND that, thus far, the status quo is hanging tough in the Gret Stet. The business community and LSU are fighting over the resignation of Chancellor Sean O'Keefe, forced out amid political machinations by the school's new president and its board of supervisors.

Also in Baton Rouge, existing downtown casinos, through front organizations, are airing anti-casino TV ads to keep a competitor from opening and sucking gamblers to a new "resort" in the southern part of town, where -- on a different matter -- some residents are fighting tooth-and-nail to stop the kind of mixed-use, commercial/residential development that most American cities lust after.

Meanwhile, murder rates are soaring in both New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and the mayor of the Crescent City is still a preening doofus.

And my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High School, is still a dump. Despite having one of its own in the governor's mansion.

Any moment now, I expect that disillusioned Louisianians will begin denouncing Jindal, asking what use have they for a messiah who can't turn water into wine, much less a Third World entity into something resembling a functioning civic society. And do it instantly.

Remember, you read here first that -- even under the most miraculous permutations of great good fortune -- the best Bobby Jindal can do is futz around the edges of Louisiana's pathology, perhaps fixing a doodad here and a thingamabob there. Maybe a couple of thingamabobs, which probably would earn him a vice-presidential slot on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket.

That's about it, though . . . fixing some doomaflatchies and whatsits. Because Jindal can't legally do anything about the real problem with Louisiana -- the people who live there.

It takes people to make a culture, and it takes people to generally care so that government might generally work. Your score in the Louisiana Bowl, after 300 years of play, is Violent Dumbasses 76, Prosperous Functioning Society 14.

The coach, alas, is only as good as his players.

LET'S LOOK, in a metaphorical vein, at the governor's old school and mine -- Baton Rouge Magnet High.

Over the past generation or so, it has been allowed to fall into an extreme state of disrepair. Quite literally, it has been falling apart around students, teachers and administrators . . . which is not exactly the way a state tells its best and brightest young people "I love you. Please stay."

Football programs quickly learn they can't recruit good players when Whatsamatta U's athletic facilities are falling apart. Louisianians never learn, however, and demographic data has shown for some time that the state pays the price.

When I was a child, Baton Rouge's public schools were pretty dumpy, and the school system pretty much sucked. Except for one school -- Baton Rouge Magnet High.

Now, as reported by the Baton Rouge Business Report (and everyone else), the school system still pretty much sucks and the facilities have nosedived well into "Good God ALMIGHTY!" territory:

About a year ago, workers employed by the East Baton Rouge Parish School System were looking to perform some fairly routine repairs to Baton Rouge Magnet High School. But the more they looked, the more problems they found. For starters, the brick and mortar of the venerable main building were no longer even connected to the exterior walls.

The findings were no surprise to Dot Dickinson, who watched a tile fall from the ceiling before a performance of the school’s orchestra, which included her son, in the mid-1990s. Luckily, the wayward tile landed on empty seats.

“Seems someone would have noticed the need for maintenance at that time,” she says.

Most likely someone did. But at the time, every public school in the parish needed work, and there was virtually no money to pay for it, school officials say. The system isn’t in the crisis mode it was in 10 years ago, but there are still a number of school buildings that are drafty, leaky, moldy or otherwise disheveled.

The School Board was scheduled to discuss—and most likely finalize and vote on—the system’s facility plan on Jan. 10. The futures of Baton Rouge Magnet High, which is in line for a $62 million renovation, and Lee High School, which the system had considered closing before Superintendent Charlotte Placide proposed building a new Lee High on the same site, have elicited the strongest emotions.

(snip)

Revenues over the next 10 years, including a $20 million surplus, are expected to be more than $489 million, assuming the renewal of a one cent sales tax. That covers what the system believes are the most pressing needs.

But making all the needed repairs could cost about $800 million if everything is fixed by 2011, system spokesman Chris Trahan says. Meanwhile, the parish’s older schools will continue to deteriorate. Placide says the system needs more money to catch up, but will parish voters pony up, especially since so many abandoned the public school system years ago?

For more than three decades, the system didn’t build a single new school. From 1964-98, parish voters approved enough tax renewals to keep the system operating, but not nearly enough to make any significant capital improvements, Trahan says. There were no bond issues, and no dedicated stream of revenue for infrastructure. The system didn’t even have a building maintenance fund like most districts.

Placide says there are “various reasons” why voters wouldn’t approve significant fees for capital improvement, which she didn’t attempt to list, but allowed that the problem was “related to the desegregation issues the community struggled with for some time.” The parish settled its 47-year-old desegregation case with the federal government in 2003.

IN OTHER WORDS, since 1981 -- the beginning of "forced busing" as a desegregation tool in Baton Rouge -- white residents steadily and relentlessly removed their children and their financial support from the public schools. The numbers don't lie.

Sheer racism may or may not have played a major role in the ethnic and financial "cleansing" of the local schools. For the first wave fleeing the East Baton Rouge public schools for brand-new private schools (and to neighboring parishes), race played a big role. Or at least I suspect it did.

For later waves of refugees, that abandonment probably was due to being sick and tired. Sick of fighting against growing urban decay and the resulting educational dysfunction, and bone tired from the fight.

Nevertheless, the result was the New Orleanization of the capital city's public schools, and civic support for public education cratered. Again, from the Business Report article:

In 1997, the system put together a comprehensive facilities plan that identified millions in needed work. Perhaps hoping to take advantage of goodwill engendered by the end of forced crosstown busing the previous year, school officials put together an ambitious proposal, asking voters to approve a 25-year, $475 million bond issue and a 35-year 1% sales tax for constructing and maintaining new school buildings. Both propositions were soundly defeated at the polls.

Thus chastened, school officials came back the next year with a proposition that had been drastically scaled back: a penny sales tax, levied over five years, about half of which was earmarked for a pay-as-you-go repair and construction fund. The tax passed and was renewed for another five years in 2003, and the system built seven new schools with that money.

(snip)

“The school system is one of the greatest detriments to economic growth that we have here,” says Fred Dent, chairman of a Baton Rouge financial consulting firm and spokesman and founding member of TaxBusters, which works for lower taxes and streamlined government. “When we keep getting headlines about the lack of performance of schools, it does not engender a lot of trust for any school board that has that problem. … It’s not about the money, it’s about performance.”

(snip)

Thirty percent of children in East Baton Rouge Parish do not attend public schools, nearly double the state average of 16%, which the Louisiana Department of Education says is the highest rate in the nation. The private schools can pick and choose whom they want to let in, while public schools take all comers. Public schools tend to have nearly all of the special education and special-needs students, while private schools grab many of the high-achievers.

For middle- and upper-class children, private schools are the rule, not the exception. Nearly 77% of the students left in East Baton Rouge public schools are poor, as measured by how many qualify for free or reduced lunch. Often, poor children come from unstable homes or dangerous neighborhoods, and they bring those problems with them to school. Parental involvement in a child’s education, a key factor in academic success, is often lacking in poorer homes.

EVERY STATISTIC in this story is staggering. And very few of them can be ameliorated by even as great and talented a political messiah as Bobby Jindal.

In Baton Rouge -- and in New Orleans . . . and all across the Gret Stet -- the problem with public education lies in the people. The people have the freedom to elect good stewards of the public trust . . . or lousy ones.

The people can commit themselves to strong public education for the good of society . . . or not. They can give public education -- and desegregation -- a chance . . . or not. They can vote for taxation sufficient to support good public schools and then hold officials accountable . . . or not.

The people of Baton Rouge, and Louisiana, can be OK with the sorry state of one of the state's best schools . . . or not.

So far, the people's job performance hasn't been exactly inspiring.

And the Business Report article makes it sound like passing the tax renewal won't exactly be a slam-dunk. Even in the face of damning evidence that Baton Rougeans have fallen down on their job -- the job of creating a functioning civic society that offers all its citizens equal access to the necessities of modern life.

Like a decent education.

IN STATES not Louisiana, public education has a history dating to 1635, with the establishment of the Boston Latin School. Universal education as a function of the state had one of its early champions in Thomas Jefferson, and the idea took off in the mid-19th century.

As it has been understood in the United States, free public education is a basic service civic society -- through local government -- provides to all its citizens without regard to status, creed, nationality or race. As it has played out in Baton Rouge, among other unfortunate examples, free public education is what you get when you are unable or unwilling to pay for private or parochial school.

And like the segregated education African-American children routinely received in the South of my childhood, public education in my hometown once again is separate and unequal. Some 83 percent of those children on the public side of Baton Rouge's resegregated educational realm -- many of whom are doomed to attend classes in substandard, crumbling facilities -- just happen to be black.

Separate. Unequal. Still.

Faced with the picture of children -- if not theirs, somebody's -- trying to learn in squalid classrooms such as those at my alma mater, Baton Rouge High, "activists" like Fred Dent balk at setting tax rates adequate to erase the shame of a city.

"It’s not about the money, it’s about performance.” That's what the man says.

Really? Couldn't it be just a little bit about, "I got mine. Screw the ghetto dwellers"?

Or does Dent really think the rational response to a crumbling, failing school system is to cut off the money and kill the sucker dead? And he and his ilk are working to replace the unacceptable entity with . . . what, exactly?

MEANWHILE, it'll probably take a brutal fight to pass enough of a tax renewal to assure repairs to Baton Rouge High, Lee High and all the other dung heaps where Baton Rougeans are content to warehouse their children. If it even passes at all -- despite all the shocking pictures, despite all the gallons of ink used to print the story of a city's shame.

"America's Next Great City," as its mayor laughably calls it.

Louisianians wait with bated breath for one of their occasional political messiahs to pull off a miracle well beyond the pale of mortal man. And soon enough, they'll crucify him because cheap grace was something that would not materialize out of his insufficient incantations.

A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty work. . . . And he marvelled because of their unbelief.