Not many teachers would admit they had taught eight or nine murderers and a number of criminals in over four decades on the job. Coach and educator Steve Finesilver makes this confession in his book Hard Knocks & Dirty Socks: Through the Eyes of Coach. The book is 80 percent indictment of the Denver Public School system (DPS) with the remaining 20 percent devoted to inspirational stories of kids, coaches and instructors who rose above DPS’s continued and growing failures. In Finesilver’s words, “Our current system cheats kids, rips off taxpayers, and sucks the energy and creativity out of teachers.” At the same time, “where I and my colleagues work are places where lawlessness prevails.”
Finesilver, the son of the famous U.S. District Court judge Sherman Finesilver, was a star offensive lineman at Washburn University in the 1970’s. This writer was one of his teammates. Fino was always earnest and idealistic and Hard Knocks shows that now Coach Fino hasn’t changed. The Denver Post called the Finesilver family “Colorado wrestling royalty” when Coach’s two sets of twin boys finished their high school careers. The four young Finesilvers would go on to have successful collegiate careers on the mat, wrestling for Duke. Besides coaching and teaching, Coach founded Jobs By George, a non-profit organization that places students in jobs around Denver. For a man who has achieved much, Jobs By George may be his greatest legacy.
Those hoping Coach Fino tells numerous tales of hard knocks from the gridiron or the wrestling mat will be disappointed. How George Washington High School fared on the field during Coach’s four decades is left out. Like all good stories this one is about people. The kids and teachers are the good guys (other than the murderers). The bad guys are the school bureaucrats. The “suits” don’t have the teachers’ backs, there are too many of them, and they are a waste of money. Millions of dollars from taxpayers and the Gates Foundation go to pay administrators and these people never come in contact with students. And these “thirty-somethings-with-a-fancy-resume” have the audacity to require Coach Fino to document his activities.
Coach has plenty of ideas how to repair the Denver government school system’s steaming pile of failure but misses the root problems, the government and the Colorado Education Association (teachers’ union). The CEA website says “We are educators from across Colorado, working together in a strong union to ensure all students get the exceptional public schools they deserve.” These are the same schools Coach Fino wants to break down the walls of because the system “has cheated our children and robbed and stripped them of what could have been.”
Economist and historian Tom DiLorenzo explains,”As Milton Friedman once wrote, government bureaucracies — especially unionized ones — are like economic black holes where increased ‘inputs’ lead to declining “outputs.” The more that is spent on government schools, the less educated are the students. The more that is spent on welfare, the more poverty there is, and so on. This of course is the exact opposite of normal economic life in the private sector, where increased inputs lead to more products and services, not fewer.”
Parents have wised up and are either moving to suburban Denver districts or homeschooling their kids, which Coach takes particular issue with: “These are hidden and forgotten children and families.” Homeschooling parents and the homeschooled children don’t feel hidden or forgotten, they feel empowered.
As for dirty socks, in the movie “Apocalypse Now” Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore famously said “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.... smells like..... victory.’’ For Coach Fino it’s the smell and smothering humidity of the room where wrestlers practice and sweat. “The (wrestling) room smelled like a cross between a herd of goats and my sock drawer (which smells worse).” He could have added, it smells like victory.
Coach Fino has forty-plus years of material to draw from, so more books are coming. A book about the criminals and murderers as students would be especially enlightening.
