Volume IV, No. 11
May 2018
Journal
of the K-12 Revolution
Essays
and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota
A Publication of the New Salem Educational
Initiative
Gary Marvin Davison, Editor
Mediocrity of Star Tribune
Coverage of Issues Pertinent to the
Minneapolis Public Schools
and
K-12 Education
Part Two
A Five-Article Series
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
New Salem Educational Initiative
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Mediocrity of Star Tribune
Coverage of Issues Pertinent
to the
Minneapolis Public Schools
and
K-12 Education
Part Two
A Five-Article Series
Copyright
© 2018 by Gary Marvin Davison
New Salem Educational Initiative
Contents
Article #1
Introductory Comments
The Importance of Critical Analysis
and Looking for Subtext in Articles
appearing in the Star Tribune
Article #2
Katherine
Kersten, “Undisciplined”
(18 March
2018)
An Exercise for
My Readers,
Searching for
Subtext in a Star Tribune
Article #3
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)
Article #4
Subtext of Brenda Cassellius’s
Opinion Piece in
Opposition to a Katherine
Kersten’s Article
>>>>>
Nobody’s Right if Everybody’s
Wrong:
Two Sincere Friends Submerged in
Tangential Mire
Article #5
Consider This
Analysis of Katherine Kersten’s
Journalistic
Persona from Her Leftist
Revolutionary
Friend
Article #1
Introductory Comments
The Importance of Critical Analysis and
Looking for
Subtext in Articles appearing in the Star Tribune
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 nor Katherine Kersten discuss the most
vital matters for the overhaul of K-12 education. They mire themselves in matters tangential to
academic quality.
In this May 2018 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis,
Minnesota I present (Article #2) an opinion piece written by Katherine
Kersten in the 18 March 2018 edition of the Star
Tribune. The piece engendered quite
a bit of controversy, bringing assertions by Cassellius and others that Kersten
is a racist issuing attacks on African American behavior as a matter of
cultural flaws and insufficient dedication to the traditional institutions of marriage and the two-parent household. I also present (Article #3) the Cassellius
counterpoint, followed (Article #4) by my own analysis of the subtext in the
latter piece. And in the last article (Article
#5) in this edition of the journal, I return to the Kersten article, analyzing
this one for the peripheral issues of focus on the part of Kersten, who cares
deeply about social justice from a conservative framework but, like Cassellius
and so many others whose work appears in the Star Tribune, fails to focus on the actual impediments to the
provision of an excellent education to students in the Minneapolis Public
Schools and other iterations of the locally centralized school district.
My counsel to each of my readers, then, is to
always be aware of the subtext in every article that appears in the Star Tribune, informed on the basis of
my blog and journal articles and other serious reading, and exercising an
acuity of analysis capable of cutting to the core issues of importance, toward
the impartation of an excellent education to all of our precious children, of
all demographic descriptors.
Article #2
Katherine
Kersten, “Undisciplined” (18 March 2018)
An Exercise for
My Readers, Searching for Subtext in a Star
Tribune
Given
below is an article that appeared on the Opinion Pages of the Star Tribune on Sunday, 18 March 2018,
written by former columnist and still frequent contributor, Katherine Kersten.
Please
first read this article with analytical attention to subtext and with the goal
of forming your own views on the issues explicitly or implicitly raised. Then please proceed to the subsequent
articles of this journal that give the counterpoint, written by Minnesota
Commissioner of Education Brenda Cassellius, to Kersten’s article; and my own analyses of the Cassellius and
Kersten articles.
Please
now read the article, as follows >>>>>
Introductory
script from Star Tribune editorial
board, giving the thematic gist of
Kersten’s
article >>>>>
“A
state agency aims to eliminate
disparities
in schools’ response to
misbehavior. Its destabilizing
course
would only spread chaos in
our
classrooms.”
Article
(“Undisciplined,” 18 March 2018) written by Katherine Kersten >>>>>
Brace yourself,
parents of Minnesota. Here’s what’s
coming soon to a school near you:
Increased
violence, brazen challenges to teachers’ authority and a chaotic environment
where learning is an uphill battle.
Teachers who try to exert control will find their hands tied, and some
kids--- no longer accountable for their
behavior--- will feel free to provoke
mischief and mayhem.
If this happens
at your school, you’ll be able to thank the Minnesota Department of Human
Rights (MDHR). In fall 2017, the
department sent letters to 43 school districts and charter schools across the
Tom Connelly v. Center of the American Experiement state, announcing that the
schools are under investigation because their student discipline records
suggest that black and Native American students are disciplined at a rate that
exceeds their proportion of the student population.
MDHR has declined
to make public either the letters or the identity of the districts targeted,
citing ongoing investigations. But Human
Rights Commissioner Kevin Lindsey provided troubling details in a recent interview
with MinnPost.
Here, in essence,
is MDHR’s position: The primary cause of
racial discipline gaps is racist teachers and discipline policies, not
differing rates of student misbehavior.
Schools must move to end these statistical group disparities. If administrators don’t agree to change their
disciplinary practices in ways that reduce black and Native American discipline
rates, according to MinnPost, “Lindsey says that the state will initiate
litigation.”
We’ve seen this
movie before, most recently in the St. Paul Public Schools. There, it had devastating consequences for
students of all backgrounds. MDHR
bureaucrats must have been the only people in St. Paul who weren’t paying
attention to this debacle.
In St. Paul
schools--- as virtually everywhere in
the country--- black students, as a
group, are referred for discipline at higher rates than other students. Starting around 2012, the district’s leaders
tried to narrow this gap by lowering behavior expectations and removing
meaningful penalties for student misconduct.
For example, they spent millions of dollars on “white privilege”
training for teachers, and dropped “continual willful disobedience” as a
suspendable offense.
Violence and
disorder quickly escalated. In some
schools, anarchic conditions made learning difficult, if not impossible,
according to teachers. In December 2015,
after a vicious attack by a student left a high school teacher with a traumatic
brain injury, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi labeled the trend of violence a
“public health crisis,” according to news accounts.
By that time,
suspensions--- which had initially
fallen--- had surged to their highest
rate in five years. Black students,
about 30 percent of the student body, were 77 percent of those suspended. The St. Paul teachers’ union threatened to strike
over safety concerns, and families who valued education began flooding out of
St. Paul schools. In June 2016, the
school board voted out the superintendent.
Today, MDHR seems
intent on duplicating this failed social experiment throughout Minnesota. The department--- whose use of state law for this purpose
appears virtually unprecedented--- is
probably doing so because the federal government seems poised to back off on
enforcing Obama-era race-based discipline “guidance.”
In its campaign
to transform Minnesota schools, MDHR is operating under a shroud of secrecy.
Reportedly, officials in the 43 targeted districts and charters have not
informed parents that their schools are under investigation, most likely
because MDHR has threatened to initiate legal action against them unless they
cooperate and because they fear adverse publicity.
As a result, the
parents and communities affected will have no chance to examine the data that
allegedly expose their teachers as racists, or to influence the radical new
approach to discipline that MDHR is foisting on their children’s classrooms.
Is this how
things are supposed to work in our public schools?
The fact is,
public scrutiny is vital here, to expose the three deeply flawed premises on
which MDHR’s race-focused discipline campaign is based.
The department’s
first faulty premise is that teachers, not students, are to blame for the
racial discipline gap. MDHR bureaucrats’
key (if unspoken) assumption is that students with widely different
socioeconomic and family backgrounds---
as groups--- all misbehave in
school at the same rate. Relying on this
premise, the department attributes any significant group disparities to
discriminatory teachers and discipline practices, by default.
But consider
this: Nationally, white boys are
suspended at more than twice the rate of Asian and Pacific Islander boys, while
boys in general are suspended much more often than girls.
Is this because
teachers are biased against white students and boys? Or does it reflect real differences in
conduct?
There are, in
fact, real differences in group behavior.
For example, nationally, young black males between the ages of 14 and 17
commit homicide at 10 times the rate of whites and Hispanics of the same
age. Behaviors that lead to criminal
conduct are also likely to produce school misconduct. Tragically, black students’ discipline rate
is most likely higher than other students because, on average, they misbehave
more.
A groundbreaking
2014 study by J. D. Wright and colleagues in the Journal of Criminal Justice
appears to confirm this. Using the
largest sample of school aged children in the nation, the authors found that
teacher bias plays no role in the racial discipline gap, which is “completely
accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student.”
What accounts for
group differences in behavior? A
primary factor appears to be profound demographic differences in family
structure. Nationally, about 72 percent
of African-American and 66 percent of Native American children are born out of
wedlock, as opposed to 29 percent and 17 percent of white and Asian children,
respectively. Young people who grow up
without fathers are far more likely than their peers to engage in antisocial
behavior, as voluminous research makes clear.
MDHR’s flawed
premise is that black student’s higher suspension rates give rise to a “school
to prison pipeline,” which reduces their chances for future success. Lindsey told Minnpost that kids who miss
school aren’t as likely as other kids to learn or graduate, and so are more
likely to land in prison.
But the problem
of missed school days goes far beyond days missed for suspensions. Chronic absenteeism, defined in Minnesota as
missing more than 40 percent of school days, is linked with poverty and home
conditions. In 2015-16, 37 percent of
Native American and 21 percent of black students were chronically absent,
compared to 11 percent and 8 percent of white and Asian students, respectively.
If MDHR is
serious about keeping young people out of prison, it should focus its efforts
here.
MDHR’s third
flawed premise is that discipline policies that focus more on race than on
students’ actual conduct somehow benefit poor and minority children.
In fact, the
greatest victims of such policies are the children--- many poor and minority--- who come to school ready to learn. The classroom disorder these policies promote
can add insurmountable obstacles to their quest for an education.
Race-based
policies also harm the student troublemakers they are intended to help. Often, these young people aren’t taught
self-control or respect for others at home.
Their only chance to master vital social skills is at an orderly
school. But if instead they learn that
bad behavior and disrespect for authority carry no adverse consequences, how
can they ever hope to hold a job or become productive citizens?
The misguided
approach to discipline that MDHR is foisting on Minnesota schools has a dismal
track record, from Los Angeles to
New York.
In 2014, for
example, New York’s attorney general compelled the Syracuse Public Schools to
reduce racial disparities in suspensions.
Violence quickly
mushroomed out of control as behavior standards were lowered. In 2015, a teachers' union survey found that
the district’s teachers and staff felt “helpless” to combat it. Two-thirds of respondents reported worrying
about their safety, 57 percent had been threatened and 36 percent had been
physically assaulted--- shoved, kicked,
head-butted, choked or bitten. Many
described daily harassment in the form of crude and abusive language,
frequently racial or sexual in nature.
In 2017, after a
Syracuse high school student stabbed a teacher twice, the Onondaga County
district attorney issued an urgent call for reversal of the 2014 disciplinary
policy changes.
Minnesota parents
should demand to know whether MDHR has targeted their school district or
charter school. Other schools will also
be under pressure to alter their disciplinary policies to avoid finding
themselves in MDHR’s crosshairs.
Only prompt
citizen action can avoid potentially disastrous consequences for all of
Minnesota’s children.
Article #3
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)
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. The article written by Katherine Kersten drew two counterpoints published by the Star Tribune on Tuesday, 20 March 2018; and another from Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius on Wednesday, 21 March. Below I present the Cassellius article; in Article #4, I provide my own analysis of subtext, indicative of the critical frame of brain from which all articles published in the Star Tribune should be read.
The text of Cassellius’s opinion piece is 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.
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.
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
Article #4
Subtext of Brenda Cassellius’s
Opinion Piece in Opposition to a Katherine
Kersten’s Article >>>>> Nobody’s Right if Everybody’s Wrong:
Two Sincere Friends Submerged in
Tangential Mire
Please read again
the Cassellius article, this time with attention to my comments interspersed
with the text given in Article #3. An
interesting and useful exercise for my readers would be to compare my comments
to your own thoughts and analysis induced by reading the Cassellius piece. My aim is to promote the necessity of
bringing one’s own powers of analysis to reading any article in the Star
Tribune on K-12 education, so errant in focus
is almost every article on public education appearing in that newspaper.
Here, then
consider again the Cassellius article and my own comments:
>>>>>
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 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) , negative reinforcements (withdrawal of rewards), and punishments
(aversive experiences) to which a given person is subject, individually and as
a 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).
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 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 of 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, and 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 will must access that favorable terrain of humanity
on which we will experience a better quality of life and in so doing redress of
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 matter aside and concern
ourselves with the core constituents of academic excellence.
Article #5
Consider This
Analysis of Katherine Kersten’s
Journalistic
Persona from Her Leftist Revolutionary Friend
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), negative reinforcements (withdrawal of rewards), and punishments
(aversive experiences) 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 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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