The Civic Responsibility to Ask Tough Questions That Can Determine Life or Death

We have the civic responsibility to ask tough questions of those who bear the responsibility for imparting an education of excellence to our precious children.

 

Whether or not one has received an excellent education can determine life or death.

 

Because of the forces of history, too many African American people in the United States still dwell in communities at the urban core that cause severe strain on familial economy, safety, and relationships.  Restricted housing covenants first crowded many economically challenged families into certain areas of Minneapolis;  when fair housing laws made moving away from the central city a viable option for black middle class families, the latter frequently joined their white counterparts in flight to the suburbs.  Left behind in much of North Minneapolis and certain areas of South Minneapolis was an overabundance of the economically poorest families in the city.

 

From the 1970s until the present day, cheap housing attracted other poor families to these areas of Minneapolis, many of them African American migrants from Southside Chicago;  Kankakee, Illinois;  Gary, Indiana;  Detroit;  and the like.  Others migrated from Mexico and Central and South America.  And from Laos came Hmong immigrants who bore the burden of association with Americans on whose side they had fought in the Vietnam War.  From Somalia and other war-torn areas came immigrants hoping for a better life.

 

To the central city came so many people looking for a more promising future for their children.  Education is the key to that future, a future of professional satisfaction to be sure, but just as important a future of cultural enrichment and civic preparation.

 

We have an obligation to provide that future, and to provide that future we must develop a system of K-12 education that can serve all of our precious children.

 

If because of the circumstances of history, students from economically challenged families face an array of problems not as frequently faced by children of the middle class, we must help those students and their families solve their problems.  We must develop a system that meets their economic and social needs, gets them to school, and works persistently to ensure that they achieve grade level performance in math and reading and then move forward to a logically sequenced, knowledge-intensive education in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts.

 

Professionals at the Minneapolis Pubic Schools have never designed such a system for providing for the social well-being and educational advancement for students of all demographic descriptors. 

 

This can be deadly:

 

Young people who recoil from their home environments, and then find school an equally aversive place to be, with a high degree of frequency succumb to the life of the streets and find themselves running on a fast track to prison.  Some are murdered on the first laps of that track.

 

That’s the reality.  I’ve witnessed this scenario multiple times during my 25 years in North Minneapolis.

So impelled by the necessity to induce staff of the Minneapolis Public Schools to provide an education of excellence to students of all demographic descriptors,  I ask the tough questions.

 

I will keep asking until I get answers.

 

It’s a matter of life and death.