Further Reflections on Another Woeful >Imagine Minnesota< Event Staged on Tuesday, 2 May 2017--- and the Ultimate Inability of the Flunkies Hired by the Association of Metropolitan School Districts to Contain Voices of Truth

The second event staged under the banner of Imagine Minnesota was as woeful and as much of a sham as the first;  that first event was held at Southwest High School on 23 February 2017, the second just this past Tuesday 2 May 2017.  Once again the audience was substantially a mix of parents, school personnel, and community members;  but there was also substantial contingent of students, many of them from North High School.  A number of people who reside in North Minneapolis seemed to have responded to a communication from District 2 (geographically encompassing the Northside) member KerryJo Felder, and my sense was that a fair representation of African American teachers probably also responded to waves of communicative word set in motion by Felder.

 

The questions posed by Paula, head of the firm hired by the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, were essentially the same, with some added wording, as those at the first event.  The questions as posed on 3 May 2017 are given as follows:

 

1) Describe your vision of an equitable, integrated, and excellent education for all students.  What does it look like and feel like?  

 

2)  As you think about the challenges we face in delivering an equitable, integrated, and excellent education for all students, what is at the heart of the matter for you?

 

3)  (Two-part question)

 

What are the most urgent changes we need to make to be successful in our work?

What barriers do we need to move out of the way so that our work has the chance to be successful?

 

As before, participants moved to a different table as each new question was posed.

 

The format utilized for discussing these questions was the same as that for the 23 February event:  small-group discussion with four to seven people at a table.  That format is a defining element revealing this event as a sham.  The effort in all such formats is to confine discussion to quiet corners of the room and to dilute any comments made that condemn the education establishment by asking for reportage from a leader at each table that summarizes the conversation.  There was much in Paula’s instructions that encouraged non-confrontational discussion and much in the nature of the reportage methods stipulated by her consulting firm that produces synthetic, consensual accounts of the discussion.

 

Malcolm X  never would have approved of such a format or such a non-confrontational approach.  He knew that evil has to be confronted.  And the abysmal quality of K-12 education delivered by the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized systems of education in the United States is evil.   

 

At my table and the tables in general attendees were mostly community members and education establishment types who have very little grasp of how public schools are corrupted philosophically, programmatically, and pedagogically by an intellectually vacuous philosophy espoused by education professors (detailed at many places on this blog).  Such people may be kindhearted and well-meaning, but they overwhelmingly defend the system and the teaching force whose policies and methods have disastrous consequences for the lives of our children.  

 

I once again organized each of my responses around the critical matters in my five-point program for the K-12 Revolution:  1) curriculum, 2) teacher training, 3) tutoring for students functioning below grade level, 4) greatly expanded outreach with directly rendered and referred services to struggling families, and 5) paring of the central bureaucracy.  Veteran readers of this blog can surmise the essence of my responses to the questions, using these five points as referents.  

 

Reportage did not go as Paula and the Association of Metropolitan School Districts (AMSD) wished.  School board Rebecca Gagnon gave an innocuous report for her group that these entities would appreciate;  and KerryJo Felder issued a sloganeering, standard-issue lament about systemic racism;  but otherwise I rose to give my scathing assessment of the quality of education as delivered by the Minneapolis Public Schools, indicating the prevailing absence of but critical need for the five-point program indicated in the previous paragraph.

 

And two other speakers rose to make powerful, personal statements about the exact nature of racism in the classroom, hallways, and offices of K-12 institutions:

 

One young African American female teacher detailed her job loss after confronting a student in a near-suburban district for having called her the “N” word.  And African American teacher Courtney Bell of North High School rose to deliver a powerful extemporaneous speech bemoaning the characterization of students of color as “traumatized,” when in fact the system that she observes is itself the problem, itself traumatized by its own failure and ineptness in meeting the needs of students.

 

Clearly, the format preferred by the Association of Metropolitan School Districts cannot contain the truth as delivered by myself and these other speakers.

 

At future meetings I am going to be working hard to ensure that generous airing is given to authentically dissident voices exposing the corruption of the system overseen by the superintendents of the AMSD and by association promoted by the flunkies whom they have hired to do their bidding.