I was on 4th Street a bit after 4pm when I approached a couple and a small girl.

“What the fuck are you screaming about?!” the mother screamed at her daughter, her intemperance rendering her oblivious to the hyprocrisy she committed.  Her voice crescendoed in a single bar, going from the quiet coo of a courted single mother to fissile psychotic in a child’s breath.

The mother’s voice cracked as she shook the hell out of the child right in front of me.  “IT’S RIGHT FUCKING THERE, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?” she shrieked, pointing a manicured talon toward the park behind me while nearly tearing the little girl’s arm out of her socket.  Her tiny limbs flailed about in full ragdoll, her feet only slapping the ground occasionally as her mother’s voice finally became unintelligibly shrill.  All this to the seeming delight of her mother’s beau who chuckled and stood by like he was watching a Tyler Perry movie.

The girl, of course, only starting crying more sending her mother further into a rage as she was evidently interrupting her mother’s date.  “Imma gonna BEAT YOU IF YOU DON’T…”

Suddenly, the insane mother stopped mid-slap, calming so quickly it was disquieting.  I had been walking steadily past the scene, but the woman’s sudden change of temper was enough to stop me dead in my tracks.  She and her boyfriend gave me the stinkeye, but remained silent, occasionally looking behind me.

I turned to see the police cruiser slowly glide past.  The mother waited until it and I were a safe distance away before she made good on her promise of physical abuse.

Earlier in the week I had watched Meet the Press and seen Arne Duncan, Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton together to tackle education reform.  I remembered thinking that this was just two much.  Worst unemployment in decades, a war in Afghanistan that may be already lost, a war in Iraq that can never be won, a looming debt held by the only other global superpower serving as primary creditor, and a broken healthcare system that is killing people everyday – how much can the Obama administration realistically be able to fix in a single year.

Why this was a Sunday news show feature, why Duncan’s “Race to the Top” initiative had billions of dollars in funding, why “education reform” was even on the message calendar was beyond me.  This was not a cause even my bleeding heart could squeeze out little juice for given the other weighty issues of our day.

But then I saw that little girl’s body shook completely senseless in broad daylight right in front of me on a public street.  Then I saw the product of our nation’s negligence of education.  Arne Duncan calls American schools “dropout factories,” the busted cogs of a broken system.   As I watched that girl shake and imagined what she would have received in their own home, I recognized how the immediacy of the problem.

America is raising the third generation of broken children.  For the streets of San Francisco at least, the fix can’t come soon enough.

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