Katherine Kersten is ideologically pugnacious, but she is no racist.
I write this as her leftist revolutionary friend.
Like most people, Kersten 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.
Katherine Kersten is a devout Roman Catholic with a deep moral sensibility.
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.
Kersten is more knowledgeable than most people as to United States and world history. She is intellectually positioned for deep consideration of the African American historical experience; for this consideration, key points of reference are the Middle Passage, slave auctions, Civil War, Reconstruction failure, vitiated Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, 15th), 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).
But Kersten 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.
Like most conservatives who originally supported the principles that undergirded the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislative program for academic standards and accountability, Kersten in time came to distance herself from that most promising K-12 legislation since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of which NCLB 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 Kersten 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.
The real problem in K-12 education, adversely affecting students of all demographic descriptors, concerns wretched academic quality. The abominable quality of K-12 education in Minnesota and across the United States falls most heavily on students of ill-educated and financially impoverished parents in dysfunctional families, households not positioned to provide compensatory and supplementary educational experiences that in some measure fill in gaping academic holes.
Only 30% of students taking the ACT in Minnesota are academically proficient in all areas covered on the exam. At least a quarter of Minnesota’s high school graduates are so academically ill-prepared that they need academic remediation once matriculating on college campuses, and although graduation rates have improved they remain low for students in many demographic categories. 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 conducive to a better quality of life, and in so doing redress the injustices of history that have abused many people.
Kersten has the capability to pierce the outer layers tangential to the core K-12 dilemma in Minnesota and across the United States. She has the keen intellect for contemplating root causes and the path to a more rewarding future for all of our precious children.
Kersten has an admirable pugnacity reminiscent of her late liberal counterpart, Molly Ivins. She refuses to accept easy explanations that seduce others. But she is too concerned with matters tangential to the provision of an excellent education, too distracted by issues important to those who inhabit her conservative ideological universe.
If she really is concerned about addressing the vexing problems of society in the United States, Katherine Kersten needs to consider the program that will bring excellent education to young people of all demographic descriptors: knowledge intensive curriculum; knowledgeable teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum; academic enrichment, including highly intentional, coherent, comprehensive tutoring as necessary; resource provision and referral for families struggling with challenges of finances and functionality; and a slimmed and rationalized bureaucracy redesigned for the implementation of such a plan.
Like so many other authors whose articles gain print in the Star Tribune, Katherine Kersten strays from the central issues, gravitating toward those that are controversial and engender much discussion but never penetrate to the core of the K-12 dilemma.
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