Defeating Rebecca Gagnon is the paramount objective in today's run-off among five candidates, four of whom will go on to the general election in November.
Given popular disgust
with both the congressional and presidential spectacles in Washington, D. C.,
the November 2018 election is much in the public discourse. But the most important election that will
take place next November will be that for the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board
of Education--- and your vote in today’s
14 August 2018 primary will determine the precise slate of candidates that will
appear on the ballot in November.
School board
elections get short shrift by comparison to congressional elections, which in
turn do not draw as many voters as do presidential contests. But school board elections are in fact the
most important in the United States, pertinent as they are to the core problems
that chronically vex this body politic.
In his book, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017),
Ta-Nehisi Coates details in eight essays the level of racism that continues to
haunt citizens of the United States. The
aggregate message of these essays is that the history of the United States
conveys two prime narratives, one portraying the nation as a testing ground for
the great ideals of the Enlightenment;
the other revealing the nation to have been a police state for African
Americans. Remarkably, there is much
truth in each of these narratives. For
white Americans, representative democracy built upon the principles of Locke
and Montesquieu and applied by Thomas Jefferson and John Madison, has largely
been a reality. For African Americans,
the conditions of slavery and the failure of Reconstruction have yielded a
history in which the conditions of slavery, sharecropping, and segregated urban
life have been abiding realities, even for those who through herculean effort
were able to escape.
The aggregate account
that can be assembled from three other books provide further insight into the
imagined and actual degree of democracy in the United States. The books are E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have
Them (1996); Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:
One Years of School Reform (2001);
and Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest
Kids in the World (and How They Got That Way) (2013). The composite history of education in the
United States that emerges in these books is the following:
In the 19th
century, Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann envisioned common schools that would
give every citizen, of all economic classes, the fundamental information in
natural science, mathematics, English composition, history, and government to
become economically viable and well-functioning citizens. In the early 20th century, an anti-knowledge
creed was promulgated by education professors in teachers colleges that became
attached to universities; desperate for
relevance in a context whereby field-specific professors were better positioned
to provide content knowledge instruction, education professors maintained that
factual knowledge is not important and that the pedagogical mission of teachers
is to cultivate in students an ability to think critically and to acquire a
drive for lifelong learning. As
immigration from southern and eastern Europe ensued, and inasmuch as these
populations were deemed to have aptitudes mainly for manual labor, a tracking
system became another defining element in American education.
The upshot of these
trends was that the education professor creed took hold over the course of many
decades, culminating in a generally anti-knowledge approach to education with
enough of a begrudgingly administered college track curriculum to allow a few
students to satisfy university entrance requirements. And there abided an assumption that the great
bulk of students needed much less of the broad knowledge for citizenship
envisioned by Jefferson and Mann.
The dual realities of
suburbanization and fair housing laws in the late 1960s induced both white and
black middle class flight from the inner city, leaving behind the poorest of
the poor at the urban core. From the
1970s forward, the conditions of life for African Americans living at the urban
core defined the circumstances of those living in the major cities of the United
States. For African American students,
the assumptions about the vocational propensities of southern and eastern
European immigrants now were applied to them, and the anti-knowledge views of
education professors now were entrenched.
Given the rise of crack cocaine and gang activity in the nation’s cities
from 1980 forward, administrators and teachers were faced with additional
challenges to which they have never articulated a viable response.
Thus do we have those
students in systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools who either fail to
graduate or who graduate with little knowledge and with skills so low as to
need remediation once attempting matriculation on college and university
campuses. The only answer to this
debased situation is to overhaul curriculum for knowledge and skill intensity and
to articulate a program that allows students of all demographic descriptors to go
forward to lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional
satisfaction.
In doing this, we
will be able for the first time in the history of the United States to resolve the
tension between the historical narratives of Enlightenment and racism, finally achieving
democracy for people of all demographic descriptors.
To do this, we will
need to overhaul leadership at the locally centralized school district,
including the election of a new school board membership. Administrators and teachers are all trained
in the education professor creed that has deprived generations of students of a
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.
School board members, even when growing contentious with school district
leaders, remain under their sway as to matters of curriculum and teacher
quality. Since both public school
administrators and school boards formulate or approve policies typically
consonant with the anti-knowledge creed of education professors, we must move
to transform both administrative leadership and school board membership.
In the context of a
nation fixated on local control, we must work to make a single locally
centralized school district a model for others.
We have the responsibility to make the Minneapolis Public Schools such a
model. We should work on overhauling
administrative leadership in this school district, and we should work to
overhaul the membership of the MPS Board of Education in the November 2018
election.
The inadequate
educational preparation of our nation’s citizens is at the root of all our most
vexing, intransigent dilemmas. Hence,
school board elections are more important than either congressional or
presidential contests. Accordingly,
because she manifest's the very worst features typical of school board
members, we should oust Rebecca Gagnon and prepare the way for an election in
November.
There are five candidates in the run-off
for two At-Large seats on the MPS Board of Education, four of whom will go on
to the general election in November:
Sharon El-Amin
Doug Mann
Kim Caprini
Josh Pauley
Rebecca Gagnon (disregard and do not vote for this
candidate)
Kim Caprini and Josh
Pauley are the MFT/ DFL endorsees; the
other two candidates besides Gagnon are Sharon El-Amin and Doug Mann. I know Kim Caprini and like her personally,
but the MFT/ DFL endorsement is problematic.
Mann is a perennial candidate of the sort whose political pursuits can
become stale over time; he seeks to
address teacher turnover issues and to support academically lagging students
and schools that struggle with declining enrollment. El-Amin is an MPS parent and businesswoman
who may be the best and freshest presence on the school board election scene.
By ousting Gagnon and
giving our full attention to today’s election and the general election in November,
securing much more responsible membership on the Minneapolis Public Schools
Board of Education, we will be on our way toward resolving the tensions in our
competing historical narratives; and we
will for the first time in our nation’s history provide an excellent education
to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.
No comments:
Post a Comment