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 (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).
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.
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