Results of Election for MPS Board of Education, August 2018 Primary: The Vulnerability of Rebecca Gagnon in the November 2018 General Election

Arriving well under the radar of staff writers and commentators at the Star Tribune and other media sources, the run-off in the Tuesday, 14 August 2018, primary for seats on the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education nevertheless attracted a respectable amount of interest on the part of voters and featured some very interesting and significant results:

 

Kimberly Caprini, a North Minneapolis resident with children who have matriculated at Patrick Henry High School and other Northside schools, garnered a commanding number of votes, thirty percent (30%) of those cast.  Next in order of votes cast, bunched tightly together, were Rebecca Gagnon, Josh Pauly, and Sharon Al-Amin.  Perennial candidate Doug Mann lagged well behind and is now eliminated for the November 2018 general election.

 

Thus, the results yield four candidates who will contest for the two open At-Large seats on the MPS Board of Education.  Our paramount objective in the November 2018 election must be to defeat Gagnon, who over the years of a tenure on the school board dating to January 2011 has proven to be a lackey of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT)/ Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) cohort but ironically failed to get the endorsements for this contest.  Gagnon, whose political calculations this time proved errant, lost her bid for endorsement to Caprini and Pauly.

 

Caprini is a longtime education activist who lost narrowly to KerryJo Felder for the District 2 North Minneapolis seat in November 2016;  her MFT/DFL ties are problematic, but we could do worse that her candidacy.  Sharon El-Amin is free of MFT/DFT obligations and based on views expressed so far would bring the acumen of a businesswoman who, in the absence of endorsement, is relatively unencumbered by the highly influential MFT/DFL political force that inevitably resists measures that would address the wretched academic performance of MPS students.   

 

My nod at present, then, would be toward the November 2018 candidacies of El-Amin and, more tentatively, Caprini.  I’ll be evaluating both Caprini and Pauly more closely and, for that matter, will be seeking clarification as to the specific education policy positions of El-Amin.

 

What is certain is that we must defeat Gagnon, who in this run reveals herself to be extremely vulnerable, running as she did in a virtual dead-heat with Pauly and El-Amin, the latter two of whom entered this race with much less name recognition than Gagnon.

 

Here are the 14 August 2018 primary results for the two At-large seats on the MPS Board of Education:

  

Candidate                                           Number of Votes             Percentage of Vote

 

Kimberly Caprini                                     36,113                                            30%

Rebecca Gagnon                                     26,390                                            22%

Josh Pauly                                                  25,071                                            21%

Sharon Al-Amin                                        24,912                                            21%

Doug Mann                                                 8,355                                              7%

 

Inasmuch as school board elections (lamentably, since public education is our best hope for genuine democracy) do not attract as much attention as statewide races and legislative contests, the number of votes cast for the seats given above was encouraging.  Caprini received about half of the votes, for example, as did Ilhan Omar in her run to represent Congressional District 5, for which Keith Ellison did not run again (the latter contesting instead, successfully, for the DFL Minnesota Attorney General slot in the November 2018 election).

 

Compare:  

 

Ilhan Omar                                              64,569                                            48%

Anderson Kelliher                                  40,413                                            30%

Patricia Torres Ray                                 17,427                                            13%

Jamal Abdulahi                                          4,939                                              4%

Bobby Joe Champion                                3,801                                              3%

Frank Drake                                                2,434                                              2%

 

Compare also, though, how many more votes Tina Smith, for example, garnered in her run for the Senate seat vacated by Al Franken (to which Smith was appointed by Governor Mark Dayton):

 

Tina Smith                                               421,037                                            76%

Richard Painter                                        76,077                                            14%

Ali Ali                                                          18,512                                              3%

Greg Iverson                                             17,213                                              3%

Nick Leonard                                            16,097                                              3%

Christopher Seymore                               4,907                                              1%

 

No politician occupying a seat in a city, state, or local legislative body is in a position to effect change in the locally centralized school district, where the K-12 Revolution must take place.  For the overhaul of K-12 education to take place, we must act according to precepts articulated in the over 700 articles on this blog.  We must concomitantly overhaul the MPS Board of Education for composition by board members responsive to measures of transformation.

 

As part of that effort, we must now focus intensely on the November 2018 election, oust Rebecca Gagnon,  and elect two candidates who are most responsive to our program of knowledge-intensive, skill replete education, bringing thorough transformation of education at the level of the locally centralized school district.