The Most Important Election in November 2018 Will Be For the MPS Board of Education

Given popular disgust with both the congressional and presidential spectacles in Washington, D. C., the November 2018 election is much in the public discourse.  But the most important election that will take place next November will be that for the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education.

School board elections get short shrift by comparison to congressional elections, which in turn do not draw as many voters as do presidential contests.  But school board elections are in fact the most important in the United States, pertinent as they are to the core problems that chronically vex this body politic.

In his book, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), Ta-Nehisi Coates details in eight essays the level of racism that continues to haunt citizens of the United States.  The aggregate message of these essays is that the history of the United States conveys two prime narratives, one portraying the nation as a testing ground for the great ideals of the Enlightenment;  the other revealing the nation to have been a police state for African Americans.  Remarkably, there is much truth in each of these narratives.  For white Americans, representative democracy built upon the principles of Locke and Montesquieu and applied by Thomas Jefferson and John Madison, has largely been a reality.  For African Americans, the conditions of slavery and the failure of Reconstruction have yielded a history in which the conditions of slavery, sharecropping, and segregated urban life have been abiding realities, even for those who through herculean effort were able to escape.

The aggregate account that can be assembled from three other books provide further insight into the imagined and actual degree of democracy in the United States.  The books are E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996);  Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform (2001);  and Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World (and How They Got That Way) (2013).  The composite history of education in the United States that emerges in these books is the following:

In the 19^th century, Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann envisioned common schools that would give every citizen, of all economic classes, the fundamental information in natural science, mathematics, English composition, history, and government to become economically viable and well-functioning citizens.  In the early 20^th century, an anti-knowledge creed was promulgated by education professors in teachers colleges that became attached to universities;  desperate for relevance in a context whereby field-specific professors were better positioned to provide content knowledge instruction, education professors maintained that factual knowledge is not important and that the pedagogical mission of teachers is to cultivate in students an ability to think critically and to acquire a drive for lifelong learning.  As immigration from southern and eastern Europe ensued, and inasmuch as these populations were deemed to have aptitudes mainly for manual labor, a tracking system became another defining element in American education.

The upshot of these trends was that the education professor creed took hold over the course of many decades, culminating in a generally anti-knowledge approach to education with enough of a begrudgingly administered college track curriculum to allow a few students to satisfy university entrance requirements.  And there abided an assumption that the great bulk of students needed much less of the broad knowledge for citizenship envisioned by Jefferson and Mann.

The dual realities of suburbanization and fair housing laws in the late 1960s induced both white and black middle class flight from the inner city, leaving behind the poorest of the poor at the urban core.  From the 1970s forward, the conditions of life for African Americans living at the urban core defined the circumstances of those living in the major cities of the United States.  For African American students, the assumptions about the vocational propensities of southern and eastern European immigrants now were applied to them, and the anti-knowledge views of education professors now were entrenched.  Given the rise of crack cocaine and gang activity in the nation’s cities from 1980 forward, administrators and teachers were faced with additional challenges to which they have never articulated a viable response.

Thus do we have those students in systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools who either fail to graduate or who graduate with little knowledge and with skills so low as to need remediation once attempting matriculation on college and university campuses.  The only answer to this debased situation is to overhaul curriculum for knowledge and skill intensity and to articulate a program that allows students of all demographic descriptors to go forward to lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.

In doing this, we will be able for the first time in the history of the United States to resolve the tension between the historical narratives of the nation as Enlightenment testing ground and racist police state, finally achieving democracy for people of all demographic descriptors.

To do this, we will need to overhaul leadership at the locally centralized school district, including the election of a new school board membership.  Administrators and teachers are all trained in the education professor creed that has deprived generations of students of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.  School board members, even when growing contentious with school district leaders, remain under their sway as to matters of curriculum and teacher quality.  Since both public school administrators and school boards formulate or approve policies typically consonant with the anti-knowledge creed of education professors, we must move to transform both administrative leadership and school board membership.

In the context of a nation fixated on local control, we must work to make a single locally centralized school district a model for others.  We have the responsibility to make the Minneapolis Public Schools such a model.  We should work on overhauling administrative leadership in this school district, and we should work to overhaul the membership of the MPS Board of Education in the November 2018 election.

The inadequate educational preparation of our nation’s citizens is at the root of all our most vexing, intransigent dilemmas.  Hence, school board elections are more important than either congressional or presidential contests.  Accordingly, because they manifest the most deleterious features typical of school board members, we should oust Rebecca Gagnon, Nelson Inz, and Don Samuels from their positions on the MPS Board of Education next November, monitoring the votes and propensities of Siad Ali and Jenny Arneson in the meantime.

When we do these things, we will be on our way toward resolving the tensions in our competing historical narratives;  and we will for the first time in our nation’s history provide an excellent education to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.