Board of Education Member (District #4) Bob Walser is Perpetually the Parrot of the Education Establishment: If He Weren’t So Silly and Derided by the Best Thinkers at the Minneapolis Public Schools, He Would be Capable of Inflicting Further Intellectual Carnage on Students Already Damaged by Those of His Ilk

At the Tuesday, 25 September 2018, Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education Committee of the Whole meeting, MPS Board of Education Member (District #4) Bob Walser demonstrated his consistent willingness to be the parrot for the excuse-making machine that is the education establishment, the intellectually laggardly assemblage of shallow thinkers that begins with education professors and then includes those teachers and administrators whom they have damaged irreparably.    

At the meeting of reference, the superlatively talented MPS Chief of Research and Accountability Eric Moore (now also head of academics) delivered a report on the academic performance of MPS students for academic year 2017-2018 that revealed another year of failure.  As an expert data-cruncher and interpreter, Moore was at pains to point out signs of progress as demonstrable with small gains in reading proficiency and slightly reduced percentages of students falling academically behind.  But math proficiency is at best flat and overall MPS student proficiency rates still languish under 47 percent, with an appalling continuance of a multiyear pattern whereby not even 20 percent of African American and Native American males demonstrate proficiency in either reading or mathematics.

In response to this level of dismal academic performance, the education establishment typically offers a bevy of excuses rooted in the societal and familial conditions that students bring with them into the classroom.

And they do indeed bring these problems, bearing the weight of a brutal history along with them.  The collapse of Reconstruction upon the shameful Democrat and Republican connivance in forging the Compromise of 1877 brought a police state into being under the apartheid conditions of Jim Crow (it was this system that inspired the infamous South African system of apartheid).  African Americans sought escape via the Great Northern Migration, scrambling to New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Gary (Indiana) and thence westward to East St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, where restricted housing covenants herded these arrivals into sections of the city such as North Minneapolis along with Jews and southern and eastern Europeans.

When 1960s civil rights and fair employment and housing legislation opened the way for middle class black flight coincidental with the white phenomenon, left behind at the urban core were the poorest of the poor.  Cyclical poverty is famous companion to familial dysfunction and feelings of desperation productive of debilitating drug use and violent psychological and physical wounds.

With terrible timing, the period from the 1970s to this very year of 2018 was also the time when the degraded anti-knowledge philosophy of education professors that had been festering since the 1920s finally became ingrained in the K-12 school systems of the United States.  Knowledge does not matter, the nonsensical education-professor-speak goes;  students can always access information that they want, with classroom presences as guides or facilitators to assist their personal explorations.

This has meant that just when African Americans and those Hmong, Hispanic, and Somali populations that followed in their wake needed knowledge the most, a degraded approach to education took the needed information base away from them.  Teacher training programs sent increasingly knowledge-impoverished teachers into the classroom to deliver a subject area curriculum that was in any case vacuous.  Disillusioned, with too little intellectual or emotional nourishment provided at home or at school, young people took their satisfaction where they could, collapsing into lives whereby babies have babies and fertile young brains give themselves to the life of mean streets leading to prison or early death.

And thus the Bob Walsers of the world, those vicious parrots of an education establishment keen on offering excuses, ramble on about the impossibility of providing a substantive education to young people with too many familial and societal dilemmas.

Providing the young people stuck at the urban core with a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education is the central mission of the public schools.  We do that by overhauling curriculum for knowledge and skill intensity, thoroughly retraining teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum, aggressively remediating skills as needed, and providing all needed counsel and assistance to families struggling with dilemmas of poverty and functionality.

We then get these precious young people to school and give them an education that will allow them to end cycles of poverty and proceed to lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

We stop making excuses.

We jettison the Bob Walsers of the world from the school board as soon as possible and never again elect his ilk to a position so vital to precious young people waiting to escape from a history marred by the cruel conditions of a brutal police state.