One of the problems with achieving the
action needed at the local level is that most people lack the courage for the
required commitment to confrontation as necessary.
The revolutionary must have no regard for
the feelings of people in their professional capacity. This is different from caring about people in
their personal lives:
I wish everyone well in their familial
lives and within their personal universes:
I hope that their marriages are successful, that their children thrive,
and that everyone in their private sphere is happy and healthy.
But if people propose to occupy positions
that only exist to promote excellence of education for our precious children of
all demographic descriptors and, frequently receiving sizable salaries
under that guise but failing to act in ways beneficial to children, I have no
reluctance to hurt their feelings with brutally honest assessments of their
failed performances and moral reprehensibility.
Members of the Minneapolis Public Schools
Board of Education do not earn big salaries but many of them have outsized
political ambitions, often accompanied by a need to resolve problems pertinent
to personal identity. The current
composition of the school board of KerryJo Felder, Don Samuels, Jenny Arneson,
Siad Ali, Kim Ellison, Nelson Inz, Bob
Walser, Rebecca Gagnon, and Ira Jourdain is among the worst I have seen among
many other wretched school boards.
Bob Walser is the worst.
He walked into a hornet's nest in the
aftermath of the Thursday, 29 November, meeting of the MPS Board of Education
Finance Committee and will never recover.
There Walser encountered a hornet that he should have known
was eagerly willing to render the confrontational sting.
Walser had taken up a great deal of time at
the Finance Committee meeting with questions posed variously to auditors
(technically the regular finance meeting had given way at a certain point to an
annual audit meeting) and to MPS Finance Chief Ibrahima Diop, purportedly
seeking greater accuracy of information rendered for citizens rather than
specialists, the kind of information sought by Walser and the subcommittee of
concerned citizens formed in the expressed interest of accountability and
transparency.
In the aftermath of the meeting I greeted
Sharon El-Amin, whose candidacy in the recent 6 November 2018 electoral contest
for an At-Large seat on the MPS Board of Education I vigorously supported. She was in the audience, as matters were
revealed to me, as an extension of her participation in the Walser
subcommittee. As our conversation
ensued, I conveyed to her the abiding reality that ibrahima Diop is one of the
best school finance chiefs in the nation, served also by many staff members
working under him that are among the best at their own position. I told Sharon that if she sought additional
information on the financial health of MPS, which had just been given a very
favorable review by the auditors, she should seek that information directly from
Diop rather than Walser. A big part of
Diop’s modus operandi is transparency and accountability, campaign themes for
El-Amin that make her interest in the putative aims of Walser understandable.
But I told her that Walser did not have the
wit to realize that finance is not the current major dilemma of the Minneapolis
Public Schools; that dilemma is in fact
the academic program that is the whole reason for a school district existing. I told Sharon that Walser’s parroting of the
philosophically corrupt rhetoric of education professors and position as
Minneapolis Federation of Teachers sycophant renders him the very worst member
of a terrible board.
At that point, Walser came up, interrupting
the conversation that Sharon and I were having and, hearing his name in my reference,
asked, “What about me?”
Wow.
Walser did not know about or hadn’t the
sense to realize the danger lurking in that hornet’s nest.
I lit into him with a recall of the above
account of his intellectual corruption and misplaced focus.
I challenged him to debate me in a public
forum under formal rules of disputation.
He avowed that he was no debater.
I told him that, yes, I was certain that he was speaking accurately on
the matter of his inability to express himself coherently in public but that he
was cowardly to continue to spout his rhetorical nonsense in the absence of the
wherewithal to put those views before the public in the context of my cogent
views.
Walser strolled away sheepishly, metaphorical
tail hanging metaphorically listlessly.
El-Amin had borne witness to the truth
about Walser.
We walked together out of the assembly
room. El-Amin must now process what she
heard as she circulates in other groups of which she is leader or participant
in the interest of students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Walser walked into a hornet’s nest and
endured a sting of enormous moral force.
That hornet will now be at heightened
pursuit of this unwary intellectual wanderer.
For this hornet stings willingly those who
bode harm for the precious creatures in the nest.
And so it goes in the confrontational
spirit demanded of the revolutionary activist willing to call people at the
local level in face to face conveyance of their corruption and their failure.
