A Note to My
Readers >>>>>
As you scroll on down
this blog, you will come to a bevy of articles that I am posting for a
multiplicity of reasons. The overarching
reason concerns the low-grade quality of most of what gets published in the Star Tribune pertinent to K-12
education.
Star Tribune editorialists and staff members themselves have very little
knowledge of K-12 education and are largely ignorant of the inner workings of a
local school district such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.
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 impedes movement toward K-12 excellence.
Because of the lack
of knowledge betrayed by both Star
Tribune staffers and most of the opinion writers whom the editorial board
opts to publish, readers must ever be attentive to subtext and the underlying
issues. This blog provides the
information that readers need to be properly informed about K-12 education
generally and the locally centralized school district represented saliently by
the Minneapolis Public Schools
specifically.
As you scroll on the
blog, you will soon come to an article written by Katherine Kersten that drew
two counterpoints published by the Star
Tribune on Tuesday, 20 March (today as I tap out this note). Before I post my own response and
interpretation of the Kersten article, please read these responses and evaluate
the arguments of writers who pose themselves against Kersten and the very
conservative Center of the American Experiment, with which she is associated..
First of the two
responses was written by Tom Connell;
this article is actually in reply to an earlier 9 March report from the Star Tribune that focused on Minnesota
state legislation backed by the Center of the American Experiment addressing
the issue of liberal bias that conservatives assert is rampant in both K-12 and
post-secondary classrooms.
The text of Connell’s
opinion piece is as follows >>>>>
Tom Connell, “Let’s
Discuss Race Issues in Schools---
Calmly: That Means the Star Tribune Must Not Be a Tool of the
Flame-Throwing Center of the American Experiment” (Star Tribune, Opinion Exchange, 20 March 2018)
Propaganda from the
Center of the American Experiment has inspired dangerous racists to threaten
several Edina teachers with physical
violence. This situation goes beyond
normal political discourse, and we ask editors of the Star Tribune to refrain from reprinting the center’s incendiary
materials without placing them in proper context.
The March 9 story,
“Bill aims to limit politics in school” focused on testimony before a state
Senate education committee regarding a bill that would prohibit teachers from
directing students to research and argue for ideas that they don’t agree with.
The bill was inspired
by the center’s irresponsible but extremely well-funded allegations of
“indoctrination” in the Edina schools.
Unfortunately, the news story didn’t mention the threats to Edina
educators that arrived after the center’s claims were picked up by a neo-Nazi
website. The news story also failed to
report on testimony exposing problems with the center’s original report.
Had these two
elements been included in the story, I hope the online version would not have
been illustrated with the cover of the center’s magazine from October. That cover showed a 1950s-style female
teacher instructing two white children.
On a blackboard behind them is the phrase, “A is for activist.” Below the children is a provocative headline
beginning, “Whose values?”
The report has a
veneer of scholarship but is full of errors and distortions. Perhaps the worst is the reference to the
book featured in the illustration. When
Newt Gingrich wrote about the center’s work in an Oct. 25 column for Fox News,
he said that “grade school-aged students in the Edina system are learning the
alphabet by reading a book called “A is for Activist.”
This is verifiable
nonsense. As I testified in the hearing,
there is only one copy of the book in all of the Edina Public Schools. It exists only at one elementary school, and
it has never been checked out. I presented
the media center’s records to the committee.
The center’s report
is intentionally misleading from the cover page. The sole purpose of the publication and those
that followed was to create fear and anger in our community. And that they certainly have done.
Also worth noting is
that as these mischaracterizations and distortions made their way from Fox News
to Gingrich to Breitbart to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer (all during
the two weeks before Edina’s very contentious school board election), then
intensity of the criticism and viciousness of the threats grew
exponentially. My colleagues and I now
work in a climate in which teachers have been subjected to brutal harassment
and threats of violence for teaching the official curriculum--- literally for doing our jobs. Security has been increased in our schools.
While I do believe
the center distorted our school’s work in teaching a curriculum proven to close
achievement gaps in our increasingly diverse student body, I also doubt the authors
intended for things to go this far.
Likewise, a senator’s outburst during the committee meeting at a
testifier who mentioned the Nazi website was probably a gaffe and not evidence
of darker sympathies. The newspaper’s
decision to give the center free advertising by republishing the cover of its
report presumably wasn’t designed to make a bad situation worse.
However, giving
everyone the benefit of the doubt doesn’t change the fact that at a time of
heightened concern about violence in schools, every one of these acts increases
the scrutiny of our teachers in Edina, thus further threatening our security.
It’s time to take a
breath. The center and its national
network of allies must clearly and publicly renounce violence and
harassment. It’s time for politicians to
listen with more sympathy. And we all
need Minnesota’s newspaper of record to make more careful choices in how it
reports this story.
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