The Opportunity to Move Beyond Uprising and Past Rebellion to Revolution at This Night’s 6:00 PM Meeting at North Commons Park in North Minneapolis

An uprising represents an outcry against conditions as they are.

Rebellion is more prolonged than an uprising and may take quite a while for the old order to quell.

A revolution moves far beyond either uprising or rebellion to thoroughgoing change that topples one regime or mode of operation and replaces things as they are with new procedures and people to implement the new program of action.

With regard to K-12 education, we need revolution rather than uprising or rebellion. 

We need the thoroughgoing change that moves beyond uprising, rebellion, or meager attempts at reform (the latter meaning adjustments to the current system), toward complete overhaul of the people and processes that have given us the current abominable curriculum and teaching staff occupying the core of our K-12 dilemma.

Tonight there will be a meeting of North Minneapolis community members at 6:00 PM at North Commons, just off of Golden Valley Road and east of Penn Avenue North.

 

This meeting represents an opportunity to move beyond uprising and past rebellion to revolution.

 

In addition to North Minneapolis community members, the meeting will in all likelihood be attended by participants in the Black Liberation Project, Black Lives Matter, and other assemblages of people who are incensed by local and national incidents of police misconduct.  The former group seems to be a force in organizing the event.

 

At this past Tuesday’s (8 August 2017) meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education, such groups joined NAACP Education Director Leslie Redmond and others at the time for Public Comment to make forceful arguments against the installation of 14 (down from 16 in academic year 2016-2017) School Resource Officers (SROs, police positioned in or as floaters among the schools of the district).  When the board predictably voted (by an 8-1 margin) to approve the plan as presented by Superintendent Ed Graff and staff, the large crowd grew even more restive, vociferous, and angry.  Outbursts in the main meeting hall on the lower level of the Davis Center (1250 West Broadway in Minneapolis, housing MPS central offices) eventually shut down the meeting in that setting;  similar outcries in a conference room on floor five (to which MPS Board of Education Chair Rebecca Gagnon moved the meeting in attempt to proceed), led to Graff exiting the room and Gagnon calling the meeting to an end. 

 

One protester told Gagnon:  “You are trash.  You are literally trash.”  

 

Outbursts such as those that occurred at this meeting represent angry cries against injustice.  They are a form of uprising.

 

If members of the angry mob were to follow through with threats to work for the defeat of members of the school board in looming elections, and for the ouster of Graff, they would have moved into a more prolonged stage of rebellion.

 

But what we need for fundamental change to occur is the design and implementation of a knowledge-intensive curriculum;  training of teachers capable of imparting that curriculum;  a coherent tutorial program for struggling students;  a program of resource provision and referral to struggling families;  and dramatic bureaucratic paring for the transfer of resources to the other four planks of the revolutionary program.

 

I will be arguing for moving beyond uprising and past the stage of rebellion all the way to revolution in K-12 education at tonight’s 6:00 PM meeting at North Commons.

 

If you live in the Twin Cities Metro and care about K-12 education, join me.