You can't remember the last time you saw one of his movies or bought one of her records. For all intents, he or she had been dead to you for years.
Same is true for this 39-year-old relic. It has been so long since it achieved anything of note that news of its death is like reporting the sunrise.
Can't blame Judge Doris Smith-Ribner for that. The respected jurist transformed herself into an education advocate 15 years ago when she took charge of a suit filed in Commonwealth Court by the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission in 1970.
The judge's move that made my personal highlight reel is the time she threatened to lock up then-superintendent David Hornbeck for failure to implement full-day kindergarten.
Hornbeck decided that full-day kindergarten was a better option than rooming with some felon in a cell the size of his bathroom.
But after the laughter, he still had to move resources from one crucial need to another and the court never lifted a gavel to help.
The other problem with court intervention is that it had less to do with ending the achievement gap between minority and white students than it did with trying to improve the educational outcomes in general.
That's a laudable aim. But it reflects the courts inability to resolve the main complaint, that schools were "unlawfully segregated" in a way that "denied an equal educational opportunity irrespective of race."
There the court ran headlong into realities it couldn't alter. First, there is no way to desegregate when 87 percent of the students are minorities.
Minority students paid dearly for those ill-conceived desegregation efforts. Some 14,000 of them got up early to be bused miles from their homes. At the end of the day, they were back on the bus while their fellow students enjoyed after-school activities.
The most glaring examples, though, were in magnet schools like the High School for Engineering and Science. The district's informal protocol reserved 50 percent of the slots in those schools for white students in an attempt to voluntarily desegregate them.
Under that plan, qualified minority students could be denied admission to some of the city's best schools for the sake of achieving a better racial mix.
Secondly, there is little evidence that the predominantly white schools had significantly better resources or personnel than other schools.
In Philadelphia, as more white people moved out to the Northeast, newer schools had to be built in what were then white neighborhoods.
But differences in the buildings didn't explain the achievement gap. It is just as wide at the brand-new Edison High School, for instance, as it was at the old Edison High School.
Some of the highest achieving students are in older buildings like Central and Girls High.
Schools Superintendent Dr. Arlene Ackerman sees the agreement that will end the suit, if the court approves it, as an important step in her reform.
Her plan is to redirect resources to the lowest-achieving schools and for district-wide site selection to allow committees headed by principals to pick teachers to fill vacancies in their schools.
"The law that created the School Reform Commission gave them authority to do these things seven years ago," she conceded. "But, for some reason, the SRC has not used it.
"With this agreement, we can move on two fronts now. But it is still up to the SRC. Hopefully, by being very vocal, I can expect my SRC members to stand with me."
So, after 39 years, the parties of the first and second part are pulling the plug on a suit once hailed as a "landmark" in education reform.
It was a landmark on the road to nowhere. All of the improved outcomes over the last six years and any that Dr. Ackerman achieves in the next five will happen because we and the SRC make them happen.
If this suit has taught us anything, it is that reform doesn't happen by order of the court. *
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith
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