May 26, 2017

The Crisis of Conscience at West Franklin and South Girard >>>>> The Comfortably Complicit Culpability of the Upper Middle and Wealthy Classes for the State of K-12 Education

North of the junction of West Franklin and South Girard in the toney Lowry Hill area of Minneapolis, there resides a neighborhood of good-hearted hippy-dippy liberals who live with a gnawing crisis of conscience in their comfortably complicit culpability for the state of K-12 education.

 

In this neighborhood there resides one of the foremost bundlers of donations in Minnesota, those people capable of getting on the phone and raising money in an instant for any cause deemed worthy.  Nearby lives the beneficiary of a large family inheritance who is known for promoting numerous worthy causes, most especially those pertinent to climate change. 

 

And so it goes along this stretch of South Girard north of West Franklin, with many personal and familial stories different in detail, similar in theme. 

 

Some of these people send their children to those public schools of Minneapolis that yield the best test scores and ultimately send the most students to college;  the schools are no better than those on the Northside, and in many cases not as good as Patrick Henry Senior High School in far North Minneapolis, but the demographic indicators accurately predict better MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) and ACT scores;  despite serving the poorest students no better than do the more challenged schools of the Northside, these schools of Lowry Hill and Linden Hills get the reputation for better academic results.  Such schools are adequate for the aspirations of the upper middle class and wealthy classes, providing some foundation upon which training under private tutors or around the dinner table of university graduate parentage can produce those results likely to abet attendance at first-tier colleges and universities.  

 

But many of these people residing in the neighborhood north of the West Franklin-South Girard junction pay lip service in support of the public schools while sending their children to the private schools Blake, Breck, and St. Paul Academy.  Many of these people are good hippy-dippy liberals who voted for Betsy  

Hodges or her opponent Mark Andrew in the last mayoral election, who dutifully send Mark Dayton and DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) members to important political positions, and as strong supporters of Education Minnesota and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers fancy themselves advocates for public education.

 

Thus do those near West Franklin and South Girard manifest their shallow understanding of K-12 education:

 

The DFL and the national Democratic Party are no better than the Republican Party on issues of public education.  Democrats are bought and paid for by teachers’ unions and the Republicans place a forlorn faith in local control and school choice.  Neither Democrats nor Republicans tackle---  and may not have the wit to tackle---  the core problems vexing public education:  abominable teacher training, an abased education professor ideology, and the resulting knowledge-poor curriculum and mediocre teacher quality.

 

Yet on the upper middle classes surge with their hippy-dippy liberal lives, voting for progressive candidates, raising funds for good causes, mugging for photo shots at socialite fundraisers, doing the occasional stint in a food line, or even going off to New Orleans, Haiti, or Central America as two-week saviors of the masses---  all while maintaining their fondness for imposing homes and a plethora of material trinkets.

 

So it is that they continue sending their children to private schools and hiring private tutors while professing support for public education, posing as defenders of the teaching establishment, and dutifully voting for those liberal Democrats who are better (from my perspective as a leftist revolutionary) on most issues than Republicans.  But with each vote for a DFL candidate, each production of a governor such as Dayton, for every instance of faith placed in the frivolous promises of a Betsy Hodges, each hope that R. T. Rybak will do what he never did as mayor, the scions of the upper middle and wealthy classes demonstrate their cluelessness on K-12 issues.

 

Scions of the upper middle and wealthy classes have absolutely no experience with what it means to awake to shots in the night, police and fire trucks racing nightly down one’s residential street, the need to constantly dodge creditors, the imperative to seek constantly for cheaper housing, the thin line between survival and doom, the forces of history that have carved out the urban ghetto.

 

There are many culprits who are complicit in maintaining the state of public education as manifested in our local iteration, the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Deep in the thought processes of the morally sensitive but ingenuous folk who reside north of the West Franklin and South Girard junction there is a crisis of conscience rooted in their comfortably complicit culpability for the state of public education.

A resolution of that crisis would abet the cause of community-based activists who understand the nature of the dilemma in K-12 education and are prepared to commit their lives to the cause.  In the absence of any epitome leading to such a resolution, we activists will do what we need to do on our own: 

not just talk or vote or volunteer in do-gooder

fashion but to act to induce fundamental change.

 

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