Article #5
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.
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