Reading for Subtext, This Time with Consideration of Underlying Issues in Daniel Bordman’s “School Policy Balance Bill Threatens Good Citizenship --- It would neuter education in civic discourse just when it is needed most.” (Star Tribune, Opinion Exchange, 22 March 2018)

A Note to My Readers   >>>>>

 

Among those articles that you have been given an opportunity to analyze in the course of these last few days is a piece published on the opinion pages of the Star Tribune on 22 March 2018 by social studies teacher and graduate student Daniel Borman.  This article was engendered by a bill before the Minnesota Legislature that would proscribe requirements that students express personal viewpoints for class participation and credit.

 

As I have done with several other articles, I now give that opinion piece again below, interspersed with my own comments.  Remember that I have asserted that articles in the Star Tribune should always be evaluated for subtext;  coverage of K-12 education issues at that publication is serviceable at best, so that the reader needs to be conscious of underlying issues, many of which staff writers are not even aware.  And those whose opinion pieces are published in the Star Tribune rarely give much evidence of understanding matters at the core of the K-12 dilemma;  hence, in these cases, too, the reader needs to glean what truly important information can be attained while reflecting how if at all the authors’  own expressed concerns may relate to truly important issues pertinent to K-12 education.

 

Please now consider again Bordman’s article, this time interspersed with my own comments, as follows  >>>>>

 

Daniel Bordman, “School Policy Balance Bill Threatens Good Citizenship ---  It would neuter education in civic discourse just when is needed most.”  (Star Tribune, Opinion Exchange, 22 March 2018)

 

Last week, while observing a student teacher teach social studies to sixth graders, I overheard a student ask whether a friend was going to walk out in protest of gun violence.

 

Instead of talking about crushes, their Snapchat streaks or what was on the math tests, these 12 year-olds were engaging in civic discourse about a pressing topic concerning them and the broader community.

 

Often, stakeholders in education forget that our stunts are also citizens.  The proposed Academic Balance Policy Bill in the Legislature does this and therefore should not become law.

 

University of Minnesota School of Social Work Profs. Ross Velure Roholt and Michael Baizerman write that “young people are systematically marginalized, if not outright excluded, from everyday citizen work on issues meaningful and consequential to them, for others, and for a community.”

 

Citizenship is not an innate human characteristic;  it must be taught and practiced.  Schools are one place where students get to interact with their peers and other adults.  If the Academic Balance Policy were to become law, the ability of schools to be these sites of democracy would be neutered.

 

My Comment    >>>>>

 

Bordman’s characterization of the two grade 6 students as engaging in civic discourse is overwrought. 

 

I frequently find that students are not really equipped to have meaningful discourse.  Students who come to me from the Minneapolis Public Schools have learned or retained little knowledge of the United States Constitution;  how legislation is proposed and passed;  the specific roles assigned to Senators and members of the House of Representatives in the United States Congress in proposing, considering, or passing legislation;  or the comparable roles of members in the two houses of the Minnesota State Legislature.  They have little understanding of constitutional amendments, including the wording of, history behind, or specifics of positions taken by participants in the current debate regarding, the Second Amendment.  Remember that I follow my students when they transfer to other school districts, and that I have observed many school settings.  The poor quality of instruction in history and government is pervasive in the schools of Minnesota and throughout the United States.

 

Genuine civic discourse is difficult to conduct in the absence of information on the pertinent issues and arguments on both sides of a debate.  Should Bordman prove to have conveyed more genuine knowledge to his students than does the typical civics teacher, then he should also know that the more abiding mediocrity of civics instruction is nevertheless the real problem impeding civil discourse in the classroom setting.

 

Citizenship cannot in fact be taught;  students can only go forth to practice citizenship when they have obtained the requisite knowledge for informed civic discourse.

 

Bordman’s referenced quotation from University of Minnesota School of Social Work Profs. Ross Velure Roholt and Michael Baizerman that “young people are systematically marginalized, if not outright excluded, from everyday citizen work on issues meaningful and consequential to them, for others, and for a community” strikes me as having the same limited value as proclamations produced by education professors.  The statement is overgeneralized, platitudinous, and murky.  How are students confined to the margins of citizenship?  My reply to the question would be that marginalization occurs when young people and the adults that they become are not given the necessary knowledge for civic participation.  The gravest problem is weak curriculum and teachers of limited knowledge and pedagogical talent, not whether this particular piece of legislation will be passed by Minnesota lawmakers.

 

Bordman continues    >>>>>

 

The bill says school districts must create a policy that “prohibit(s) school employees, in their official capacity, from requiring students or other school employees to express specified social or political viewpoints for the purpose of academic credit, extracurricular , or as a condition of employment.”

 

I understand that people go into teaching to indoctrinate students.  There may be a few bad apples who do.  However, professionalism dictates that as teachers we treat our students not as pawns or widgets, but as humans capable of their own agency.

 

There are two main problems that would occur if the bill were to become law:

 

First, a chill factor would set in;  teachers would not know what was or was not considered controversial.  Is it controversial to debate the legalization of marijuana in a social studies classroom?  To some, absolutely.  To others, the debate is germane because it is a replica of what is happening in state legislatures, including Minnesota’s.

 

How one teacher evaluates controversy may differ from another, or from a student, parent, administrator, or overzealous lawmaker.  It is much easier to avoid controversy altogether and not have a discussion.

 

But lack of discussion would leads [sic] to the second problem---  students leaving school not knowing how to discuss current events and political issues.  Social-studies scholars Walter Parker and Diana Hess have argued that schools are a space to learn using discussion.  If schools are not sites where such skills are practiced, students will turn to other influences around them.  In an age when, over and over again, we’ve seen that people are exposed to fake news and cannot tell what is fake news or not, forbidding our students to practice media literacy and argumentation---  both of which are codified in state learning standards---  would be educational malpractice.

 

My Comment      >>>>>

 

Note the indicated inappropriate rendering of “leads” where “lead” should have been used with careful writing or editing.

 

Observe another reference to lightweight scholarship, this time indeed provided by education professors.  There is deep irony in the fact that both Walter Parker and Diana Hess are professors of social studies, she at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he at the University of Washington-Seattle.  This places them in the pseudo-professional position that has sent so many ill-prepared social studies teachers forth to K-12 classrooms.  Social studies is a field invented at mid-20^th century in a shift from instruction in the genuine academic fields of history, government, and economics to lightweight fare trained on matters of family, neighborhood, and community familiar to the student’s own experience.

 

Social studies professors and teachers have done more to deny students proper preparation for citizenship than the legislative bill of Bordman’s concern will ever deny if passed.  Knowledgeable and creative teachers will find a way to convey knowledge and encourage discussion.  If teachers lack such knowledge or retreat to positions as “guides” or “facilitators,” as encouraged by education professors, then passage of the law to limit discussion will not matter.

 

Bordman continues    >>>>>

 

I was a high school student in the lead-up to the Iraq war.  I had just published a commentary in my high school newspaper saying I did not believe the war was justified when my chemistry teacher went on five-minute tirade about why Saddam Hussein needed to be bombed.   After all, he did 9/11, or so my teacher said.  I sat in that room with no recourse, feeling targeted.  I take this memory into my classroom on a daily basis.  I share it with my students who are learning how to be social studies teachers.

 

That incident does not mean to me that we should ignore controversy all together [sic].  Let’s remember that one of the reasons the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida have been so effective at creating a movement is that their school allowed them the practice to learn how to communicate a clear, articulate message.  We have seen them organize matches, organize support and challenge elected officials.

 

I understand why some in the Legislature would want to avoid empowering students.  However, as evident by the sixth-graders I saw last week and the thousands who marched in protest, they do so at their own peril. 

 

My Final Comment

 

Note another [sic] indication.  The proper word selection at that point is “altogether,” meaning “completely,” not “all together,” meaning ”in unison.”

 

I agree with Bordman that legislation limiting issues for class discussion is not wise.

 

But more perilous is the generally poor to mediocre quality of most social studies instruction, and curriculum or lack thereof that generally prevails in this course of questionable provenance;  such classes typically fail to impart strong knowledge sets from the truly important fields of history, government, and economics.

 

Journalistic reports indicate that students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida are given the benefit of instruction from a teacher who is a specialist in civics, meaning the fundamentals of United States government and applications for citizenship.

 

As unwise as the legislation referenced by Bordman is, the greater lack of wisdom resides in our own timid citizenship for not demanding more such teachers of excellence.

Another Article with Interspersed Commentary for Cultivating Awareness of Subtext: Understanding that Journalists at the >Star Tribune< Are Prominent Among the Many Culpable Parties Sustaining Wretched Systems of K-12 Education

A Note to My Readers   >>>>>

 

Most articles pertinent to K-12 education published in the Star Tribune are mediocre and of tangential importance.  Very few articles broach matters of curriculum and teacher quality that go to the core of the K-12 dilemma.  No questioning of Davis Center (Minneapolis Public Schools central offices, 1250 West Broadway) staff quality or effectiveness gains coverage in the Star Tribune.  There is an absence of any mention of educational philosophy or structural impediments preventing the impartation of an excellent education.  An excellent education is not defined.   Editorial board and staff writers typically resort to generalized terminology much in the contemporary conversational ether, mere shibboleths offered in the absence of any genuine understanding of K-12 education.  

                                                                              

Those who write opinion pieces and secure publication in the Star Tribune focus on particularistic concerns of the moment but rarely discuss the most fundamental factors abiding in the education establishment that impede movement toward K-12 excellence.

                                                                                       

Because of the lack of knowledge betrayed by Star Tribune staffers, and the particularistic concerns of opinion writers that rarely go to the core of the K-12 dilemma, readers must be ever attentive to subtext and the underlying issues.

                                                         

You have now had a chance to review my provision of subtext for articles written by Katherine Kersten and Brenda Cassellius.


Please now read another article with my interspersed analysis of subtext, this one by Julia Hill & Dana Bennis, in which the authors range themselves against Kersten's opinion piece, "Undisciplined," that also drew Cassellius's reply. 

 

Julia Hill and Dana Bennis, “Let’s Discuss Race Issues in Schools---  Calmly:  Katherine Kersten’s recent commentary on school discipline brought the fear, not the facts.  It won’t work---  people know better.”  (Star Tribune, Opinion Exchange, 20 March 2018)

 

Katherine Kersten’s contemptible March 18 commentary “Undisciplined” was yet another attempt to create fear of people of color in order to further dangerous and racist policies---  in this case a fear of students of color in order to instill even harsher school discipline policies.

 

Yet Minnesotans can see through her scare tactics, her misleading claims and her cherry-picking of data.

 

Kersten begins by making up a false argument:  that those working to reduce racial disparities in  school suspensions believe that racist teachers are to blame.  In her mind, there has to be someone to blame, so rather than teachers she blames the students of color themselves, allegedly proving her case by selecting a few incidents.

 

This is the typical dog whistle meant to portray people of color as either lazy or violent.  The truth is there is no one person or group to blame.  Disparities in school suspensions exist for the same reasons we have mass incarceration of people of color:  an incredible wealth gap between white people and people of color, disparities in rates of homeownership and much more---  the pervasive, centuries-long history of institutionalized and systematic white supremacy and racism.

 

This is not the time for a blame game.  This is a societal reality whose existence and solution involves every one of us.

 

My Comments    >>>>>

 

This apparently is the time for the blame game, despite pretensions to the contrary by Hill and Bennis.  The blame placed by Hill and Bennis is on a society pervaded by institutional and systematic (they might have added, in many cases, individual) white supremacy and racism.

 

Indeed they are right.  More specifically than the authors convey, the blame should be on American society in history, with key terms being Middle Passage, slave auctions, Civil War, Reconstruction failure, vitiated Reconstruction Amendments (13^th, 14^th, 15^th), Plessy v. Ferguson, vigilante lynching, Northern Migration, restricted housing covenants, urban poverty concentration, cyclical poverty, wretched K-12 education (weighing most heavily on the urban poor).    

 

Julia Hill and Dana Bennis continue      >>>>>

 

Kersten then brings out the tired statistics about out-of-wedlock births and the myth that fathers of color are not involved in their kids’ lives.  In fact, a 2013 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that black fathers are actually more involved in playing with, reading, and feeding their children than are white fathers, whether or not they live with their children.

 

What’s most important to know here is what Kersten conveniently left out:  that schools and districts around the country are implementing policies to reduce racial disparities in suspensions using research-based practices such as restorative justice and circle processes that are tremendously effective.  They provide young people and educators with the chance to see one another as humans, to look at the reasons behind the actions, and to seek out solutions that result not only in reduced violence but also greater understanding of how to sustain strong communities of support and trust.

 

Furthermore, in the St. Paul Public Schools in particular, where 82 percent of the teaching staff is white while 79 percent of students are children of color, the district and the St. Paul Federation of Teachers are trying to take on the real work of supporting teachers to own and understand the role that white privilege and institutionalized racism play in the struggles we face in public education.

 

My Comments      >>>>>

 

Despite Hill and Bennis’s meager claim to the contrary, out of wedlock births, lack of father figures, and absence of male role models do in fact weigh heavily on many children living at the urban core.  Statistics pertinent to single mother households in the aggregate are daunting by comparison to those relevant to two-parent households.  Children emanating from the former are more likely to flounder academically, fail to meet even meager standards for graduation, live wandering and dangerous post-graduation lives, repeat deleterious patterns from the households of their nativity in establishing their own families, end up on the public dole, and maintain behavioral patterns leading to incarceration.

 

But what neither Kersten nor Hill & Bennis observe is the culpability of our systems of K-12 education in maintaining the injustices of our linear history and the patterns of cyclical poverty by delivering an academically insubstantial curriculum.

 

Knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education delivered by the locally centralized school district should provide the means by which children of poverty break the familial cycle.  As my readers have had a chance to review at many places on this blog, the breakthrough would come with a revolutionized system producing curriculum overhauled to provide logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets, thoroughly retrained teachers, academic enrichment with aggressive skill remediation as necessary, resource provision and referral for struggling families, and paring of the central office bureaucracy.  The first, second, and third parts of this five-point program are academically central to the revolution;  the fifth is needed to capture scarce resources for the other parts of the program;  and the fourth is absolutely essential in resolving the environmental impediments for children from families facing challenges of finances and functionality.

 

We must play the blame game lest we be victims of the vicious games played by actors in history and the present.  We must blame society past and present.  We must create conditions whereby no blame will be necessary in the future, because we have overhauled K-12 education for the provision of abundant knowledge and skill sets to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors, so that all go forth to lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.     

 

Julia Hill and Dana Bennis continue      >>>>>

 

Scare tactics and dog whistles won’t work any longer.  People are wising up and rising up.

 

My Final Comments      >>>>>

 

We can jettison dog whistles but we need to be scared.

 

People, most of all decision-makers at locally centralized school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools, show no sign of wising up.

 

So you, my readers, need to rise up and join me in the K-12 Revolution.

Subtext of Brenda Cassellius’s Opinion Piece in Opposition to Katherine Kersten’s Article >>>>> Nobody’s Right if Everybody’s Wrong: Two Sincere Friends Submerged in Tangential Mire

A Note to My Readers   >>>>>

 

Brenda Cassellius and Katherine Kersten are both friends of mine.

 

I have come to regard them each as having a sincere, driving interest in K-12 education.

 

I met Katherine when she and a conservative group among her friends took an interest in one of my articles, discerning common ground in my appeal for substantial change in K-12 education;  our interests converged on highly sequenced, specified knowledge sets for impartation in grade by grade sequence---  the quality of education for which both political liberal E. D. Hirsch and political conservatives William Bennett and Chester Finn have advocated.  Kersten was the most sincere of the group with whom I met after the publication of the article of reference;  soon after the meeting she came to observe my work with three of my students who would star as my daughters in my compressed version with all original Shakespearean dialogue for performance of King Lear at the annual banquet of the New Salem Educational Initiative.  She and I have met multiple times for lunchtime discussions of K-12 education.  

 

I met Brenda when she was one of two candidates for Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools in spring 2017.  I was at the outset of her candidacy fervently against her nomination.  I regard most of her major policy initiatives up to that time as errant.  Most likely at the urging of Governor Mark Dayton and teachers’ unions (Education Minnesota, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers [MFT]) that buy Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) politicians, Cassellius moved as soon as possible to avoid No Child Left Behind strictures by applying for a waiver under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top;  she oversaw the installation of the murky Multiple Measure Rating System and the jettisoning of state exams for writing (grade 9), reading (grade 10), and mathematics (grade 11) as graduation requirements.  But to my astonishment, when I met with Brenda and engaged her in many conversations during the period of her MPS superintendent candidacy, she conveyed a strong sense of what needed to be done at the level of the locally centralized school district to impart a knowledge-intensive education of excellence to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

But in their most vigorous public statements, neither Brenda Cassellius not Katherine Kersten discuss the most vital matters for the overhaul of K-12 education.  They mire themselves in matters tangential to academic quality.

 

As you scroll on down this blog, you will come before long to the article by Kersten to which Cassellius responded in the following opinion piece.  My readers had a chance to read both articles on this blog, as I offered them as an exercise in looking for subtext.

 

Below I give Cassellius’s article again, this time interspersed with my own comments, as follows:

 

Brenda, Cassellius,  “What Kersten Can’t Grasp About Schools But Readers Should---  The state Department of Human Rights is not embarking on a campaign to allow chaos.  Violent offenses and criminal activity will always be taken seriously.  The focus is on lesser infractions, which clearly produce an unequal pattern of suspensions.” (Star Tribune, Opinion Exchange, 21 March 2018)

 

While Katherine Kersten’s divisive diatribes in the Star Tribune have become all but predictable, the hateful premise in her most recent commentary reaches a new low.

 

In “Undisciplined” (March 18), Kersten stated that efforts by Minnesota’s Department of Human Rights to identify and work with school districts with disproportionately high rates of suspensions and expulsions of students of color will almost certainly lead to “mischief and mayhem” in our schools.  She painted a grim picture of anarchy and lawlessness in our classrooms, and bolstered her outrageous claims with strawman arguments, unsourced blog posts and selectively cited statistics from reports that reinforce the fear she incites.

 

Her arguments were misleading, reckless and---  worst of all---  flat out racist.

 

In previous articles, Kersten has slammed efforts to make schools and classrooms safer for transgender students.  She has claimed that the deep racial-equity work some districts are doing to break down structural barriers that prevent kids of color from having access to the same opportunities as their white peers is nothing more than coded “indoctrination and intimidation.”  She has opposed efforts to integrate schools and complained that Minnesota’s 2014 antibullying law went too far in trying to protect LGBT students from bullying and harassment.

 

My Comment

 

Katherine Kersten is not a racist. 

 

None of her writing should be considered to emanate from racist motivations. 

 

She is a devout Roman Catholic with a deep moral sensibility. 

 

Like most people, Katherine has a naïve attachment to the misguided notion of free will, and as a conservative she believes adamantly in personal responsibility.  She also discerns a liberal bias in both K-12 and collegiate classrooms.  She is suspicious of categorical advocacy for students along gender, transgender, and racial lines.  She believes that such categorization distracts from the mission to serve all people and invidiously promotes the balkanization of society.    

 

Like most conservatives who originally supported the principles that undergirded the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislative program for academic standards and accountability, Katherine in time came to distance herself from that most promising K-12 legislation since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of which it was an iteration.  Disregarding the fact that the best systems of public education in the world (Taiwan, Singapore, Finland) are nationalized, Kersten came to take the conservatives’ anti-centralization view of NCLB, viewing federal mandates as an intrusion on state and local power. 

 

So Katherine has not been consistent in her view regarding K-12 education, nor has she relentlessly focused on programmatic features that would overhaul the K-12 system for delivery of excellent education.

 

These are real flaws, but not those argued by Cassellius. 

 

Cassellius continues      >>>>>

 

In her latest piece, she once again has single mothers and black boys in her sights.

 

Enough is enough.

 

No doubt, every student and teacher deserves safe and orderly classrooms.  But Kersten is not an expert on our schools, our teachers or our students.  No reader of this newspaper should accept the illusion that she is.  Her unsubstantiated arguments, once and for all, must be called for what they are:  falsehoods.  

 

For instance, Kersten’s complaints that Minnesota parents and community members cannot access discipline data are simply untrue.  A simple search of the Minnesota Department of Education’s Data Center would easily have confirmed that the department reports discipline data every year and summarizes them in a report to the Legislature.  Both the raw data and the report are public information that numerous organizations---  including civil rights groups and the Solutions Not Suspensions coalition---  have used to call for exactly the kind of attention to this issue that the Department of Human Rights has now undertaken.

 

Had Kersten done any legitimate research, beyond the reach of her favorite right-wing sources, a close look at the data would have made it abundantly clear that a number of Minnesota schools are suspending kids of color at far higher rates than their demographic proportion.  For example:

 

• American Indian students are 10 times more likely to be suspended or expelled than are their white peers.
• African American students are eight times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.
• Students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended or expelled as are peers without a disability.

 

My Comment

 

Kersten is influenced by rightwing media sites but she is exceptionally well-read, and she is an adept researcher.  She appears to have erred in not seeking out the Minnesota Department of Education’s Data Center information, but she would acknowledge the data cited by Cassellius immediately above;  in fact, she gave similar evidence in her own article.  Her conviction is that out of wedlock births, the absence of fathers from many African American households, and the dysfunctional nature of too many families of the urban poor produce behaviors that logically lead to suspensions.

 

There is truth in those observations that many liberals deny or give little evidence of discursive eagerness.

 

But there is a grave flaw in the observations of Kersten and fellow conservatives. 

 

They imply that individuals and families could just make better decisions if they had the will, that will of the free sort in which they errantly and naively believe.

 

In fact, human behavior is produced according to the array of positive reinforcements (rewards), punishments (aversive experiences), and negative reinforcements (withdrawal of punishments) to which a given person is subject, individually and as part of a group with similar experiences in history.

 

I have many times urged Katherine to consider more deeply the experience of African Americans in history, with key points of reference prevailing as the Middle Passage, slave auctions, Civil War, Reconstruction failure, vitiated Reconstruction Amendments (13^th, 14^th, 15^th), Plessy v. Ferguson, vigilante lynching, Northern Migration, restricted housing covenants, urban poverty concentration, cyclical poverty, and wretched K-12 education (weighing most heavily on the urban poor).

 

Katherine is too dedicated to the notions of free will and personal responsibility to give proper attention to the weight of experience and the actual determinates of human behavior.

 

Thus, her reasoning is gravely flawed.

 

But again Cassellius misses the main point and wanders to the tangential area for discussion onto which Kersten enticed her with her article.

 

Cassellius continues:

 

These figures, in and of themselves, should make us want to pause and ask why.  Instead, Kersten shifts to scare tactics about crime in our communities, ignoring the fact that the MinnPost article she references shows that the Department of Human Rights effort is focused on suspensions that result from subjective infractions, such as talking loudly or disruptive behavior for which students of color are treated more harshly than their white peers.

 

Contrary to Kersten’s claims, no one wants to take away a principal’s ability to suspend or expel a student for violent offenses or criminal activity, which we all agree will never be acceptable.  The Department of Human Rights is not calling for a moratorium on suspensions or expulsions.  Instead, after removing violent offenses and criminal activity from the data set, it is calling for school officials to seriously examine solutions to suspension data that year after year demonstrate significant and troubling disparities over time.

 

The data also show that students with disabilities make up about 50 percent of all our suspensions, a disturbing reality that is not even mentioned in Kersten’s column.

 

In Kersten’s world, all we really need to do to eliminate unruly behavior in children is to make sure that they all come from a two-parent household.  But the real world isn’t that simple.  As we begin to really dig into and understand the root causes behind these large disparities, then engage in the hard, uncomfortable work of dismantling the systems and behaviors that perpetuate them, it is crucial that we embrace complexity and reject the temptation to settle on simple solutions.

 

Minnesota needs an educated, skilled population to ensure shared social and economic success.  An education system that works for all students must be our highest priority, and the truth is that currently, school discipline practices are hindering too many of our children’s chances at academic and social success. 

 

It doesn’t have to be this way.  We can say:  “Enough.”  We can set high expectations for acceptable behavior in our classrooms.  We can hold all students accountable for meeting them.  We can defend teachers’ ability to maintain orderly classrooms where all students can learn.  And we can reject the fearmongering and racial resentments that Kersten and the Star Tribune inflame when they give divisive and hateful words column inches and oxygen.

 

This newspaper’s readers deserve better.  More important, our children and teachers deserve better---  much better.

 

My Final Comment

 

What our children and society need most is the excellence of education that Cassellius has not ensured for the students of Minnesota in her role as education commissioner.

 

Her arguments are fatally weakened by her own culpability in the morass that is education in Minnesota, wherein only 30% of students taking the ACT are academically proficient in all areas covered on the exam, wherein at least a quarter of students are so academically ill-prepared that they need academic remediation once matriculating on college campuses, wherein graduation rates have improved but remain low for students in many demographic categories, and wherein even graduates with high grade point averages (GPAs) are lacking in key knowledge and skill sets pertinent to mathematics, natural science, history, government, economics, literature, fine arts, and vocational fields requiring manual skills.    

 

Better behavior will follow from excellent education.

 

The impartation of an excellent education is the door through which we must access that favorable terrain of humanity on which we will experience a better quality of life and in so doing redress the injustices of history that have abused many people.

 

At their core, Kersten and Cassellius have keen intellects that should be used in contemplation of root causes and the path to a more rewarding future for all of our precious children.

 

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.

 

We’ll have better K-12 education, better behavior, and a better society when we put tangential matters aside and concern ourselves with the core constituents of academic excellence.