Nov 26, 2018

Journal of the K-12 Revolution, Vol. V, No. 6, December 2018, Article #5 >>>>> Sharon El-Amin Emerged as Potentially Powerful Force in Movement for Academic Excellence in the Minneapolis Public Schools as a Result of Her Candidacy for an At-Large Seat on the MPS Board of Education

Sharon El-Amin campaigned hardest of any of the four candidates in the Tuesday, 6 November 2018, election for two At-Large seats on the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.  She and her family, along with able campaign director Undrea Patterson, the Isaiah group, other volunteers and myself, campaigned all over the city and generated great enthusiasm for an independent candidacy that had multiple endorsements of like-view agents of change.


 

The results of the election were as follows:

 

Candidate Name      Number of Votes    Percentage

Kim Caprini                        86,739                      33.84%

Josh Pauly                           73,994                     28.87%

Rebecca Gagnon               48,567                      18.95%

Sharon El-Amin                 47,000                      18.34%

 

To have garnered 47,000 votes and the support of nearly one-fifth of the electorate was an enormous accomplishment for Sharon El-Amin and her hardworking group of ardent supporters.

 

To understand the power of El-Amin’s campaign, one must understand the political dynamics at work in this election for the two At-Large MPS Board of Education seats:

 

Caprini and Pauly were endorsed by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT), which in turn is allied with Education Minnesota, the second most powerful political lobby in Minnesota, capable of spending levels only topped by the National Rifle Association (NRA).  Caprini is a well-known parent and community activist in North Minneapolis, but Pauly is a largely unknown presence, a teacher of short tenure at Sanford Middle School who is now a professional in a South Minneapolis-based non-profit.   Pauly gives indication of caring about issues pertinent to the homeless and the dispossessed, but he has none of the community involvements of Caprini and El-Amin, none of the heart and soul understanding of key community issues in the manner of El-Amin, and none of the political savvy of Gagnon.  Pauly had a slim campaign of his own initiative:  His victory was entirely the result of MFT support, with its member network, phone banks, and enormous publicity-generating capacity.

 

The matter of Gagnon’s political savvy is ironic, given that she committed a number of fatal political errors in the last few months.  In the wake of the 2016 elections, Gagnon’s star was on the rise.  She had gained a good deal of cache for her long chairing of the MPS Board of Education Finance Committee.  She was well-connected to many school board groups across the state and nation and formally served as member in many of these.  She was conniving but diligent, undergirding her political maneuvers with a thorough knowledge of the public school establishment and the issues considered important by that establishment.  She was elected chair of the board, albeit soon offending enough fellow members to lose a subsequent election to current chair Nelson Inz.

 

Then when MPS financial woes became fully apparent, she was implicated in those miseries via the financial tanking of the district on her watch as finance committee chair.  Next she showed her disrespect for current MPS Finance Chief Ibrahima Diop by taking the lead in restoring $6.4 million dollars to funding for high schools with the most affluent populations, after Diop---  one of the very best-trained, consummately well-educated school district finance chiefs in the nation---  had worked with Superintendent Ed Graff and the other chiefs over many months to craft a budget that put the district on a course toward structural balance.       

 

Gagnon sought Democratic -Farmer-Labor Party endorsement for a legislative seat and was set to exit the board;  but when she did not secure the endorsement, she retreated to another run for an At-Large seat.  But by this time, Caprini and Pauly had secured the endorsement of the MFT/DFL cohort for which Gagnon had long served as sycophantic go-fer.

 

The MFT/DFL political machine went into its powerful motion once perennial candidate Doug Mann was eliminated in the August 2018 primary and the above four candidates had progressed to the general election.

 

Thus, we have the context for Sharon El-Amin’s strong performance.  Those of us who campaigned for her did so to win.  Ms. El-Amin is current head of the North Polar (North High School) parent group, is a community activist who twice a month prepares 100 meals for those in need, for many years ran the successful El-Amin Fish Shop on West Broadway Avenue, and has been involved in multiple community organizations and issues.  Husband Makram El-Amin is the imam of Masjid An’nur mosque on Lyndale Avenue North;  wife and husband have deep connections to the Muslim community in general and the Somali contingent specifically.  El-Amin’s natural base of support is expansive and deep;  the last of four school board candidate forums in this 2018 election season brought forward a crowd at the University of Minnesota community engagement center at 2100 Plymouth Avenue North (across from the Minneapolis Urban League) that was overwhelmingly and vocally expressive in support of her candidacy.    

 

Sharon El-Amin went up against a canny and seasoned political rival in Rebecca Gagnon and two endorsees of the powerful MFT/DFL machine.  She and Gagnon together received 21,573 more votes than did Josh Pauly.  El-Amin ran just a fraction behind Gagnon;  the two ran essentially even, garnering 18.34% and 18.95% of the vote respectively.

 

That Sharon El-Amin ran such a strong campaign is testimony to a level of genuine public backing unmatched by Pauly, certainly, but also unrivaled by Caprini and Gagnon.

 

For reasons that I will explore in subsequent articles, Sharon El-Amin emerges from the MPS Board of Education electoral campaign of 2018 as a major force for education change, a likely victor over KerryJo Felder in the 2020 campaign for the MPS Board of Education District 2 (North Minneapolis) seat should she decide to run, and a key figure who will be among those ringing the political death-knell for the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers as I and others draw upon the kind of energy expended in that 2100 Plymouth Avenue Forum to build a powerful counter-force to the MFT/ DFL machine.

 

In the aftermath of the election of 6 November 2018, the death knoll can be heard immediately and with clarity into the distance for the overweening influence that the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) has wielded in elections for seats on the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education.

 

Consider:

 

Michelle Rhee spent four years (2006-2010) as chancellor of the Washington, D. C., public schools, for a while enjoying the backing of many community members and Mayor Adam Fenty in seeking to oust ineffective teachers protected by the local affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA), clashing multiple times with NEA President Randi Weingarten.  When Fenty lost a reelection campaign in large measure because of his support for Rhee, and as the NEA rallied segments of the community formerly supporting Rhee, her days as chancellor came to a close.  She soon launched a national organization, StudentsFirst, to continue her work on a national level.  A key goal was to create a lobbying counterforce to the power of the NEA and its affiliates, so as to break through seniority strictures and union protection of low-performing teachers.  She sought most of all to gain the political clout to change policy at the level of state and, as possible, national government.

 

This was a misguided strategy, and Rhee turned out to be a very disappointing leader.  In time, she gave the appearance, sporting heavy makeup and tottering around on stiletto heels, of being interested in becoming a big player on a national scale to satisfy the expectations of ambitious South Korean parents while achieving something good for young people. 

 

Her aim was wrong:  

 

Education policy in the United States is made at the local level, at which we have a focal mania with an accompanying mantra repeatedly demanding local control.  Rather than seeking to make big changes at the state or national level, where the best education systems of the world do focus attention, we must play the game at the field of our putative focus, which with regard to public education must be the locally centralized school district.  Funding will continue to be important as emanating from national and state governments;  but changes in curriculum and teacher quality must be conceived and implemented at the level of the locally centralized school district.

 

Inasmuch as this is true, we must take Rhee’s idea of forming a union counterforce to the local level.  Rhee’s organization is now moribund in Minnesota and limping well under the radar of national and state politics and policy;  the erstwhile head of the Minnesota chapter of StudentsFirst, Kathy Saltzman, has not sounded any public message for several years.  But the idea of confronting the union is sound;  our aim must be true and local.

 

Remember at this juncture that I am a leftist:

 

I respect the general mission of the NEA, Education Minnesota (a composite union with links to both the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers [AFT]) and its local MFT affiliate to agitate for better pay and working conditions for members. 

 

But these organizations also claim to have the best interests of students at heart, and this is decidedly not true:

 

The MFT favors policies that would limit objective testing to determine student achievement levels, has a view of curriculum derived from the degraded formulations of education professors that devalue sequentially acquired knowledge and skill sets, and defends ineffective teachers with the protections of tenure and seniority.  Student achievement is neither sought objectively nor prioritized politically.

                                               

The campaign of Sharon El-Amin and a key event that occurred during that campaign signals the death knoll of overweening MFT influence in electoral contest for seats on the MPS Board of Education.   

 

……………………………………………………………………..

 

In the election of note, Caprini and Pauly were endorsed by the MFT and had the backing of Education Minnesota, the second most powerful political lobby in Minnesota, behind only the National Rifle Association (NRA).  Caprini is a well-known parent and community activist in North Minneapolis, but Pauly is a largely unknown presence;  he had a slim campaign of his own initiative, with victory occurring for him only as the result of MFT support.

 

Gagnon is a political savvy operator who ironically got caught in a web of heavily damaging political errors.  Her rising star faded as she failed to gain MFT endorsement, and that of the union’s political backer and beneficiary, the Democratic Farmer Labor Party;  the MFT/DFL political machine went into its powerful motion not for her, but for Caprini and Pauly.

 

El-Amin’s natural base of support is expansive and deep;  the last of four school board candidate forums in this 2018 election season brought forward a crowd at the University of Minnesota community engagement center at 2100 Plymouth Avenue North (across from the Minneapolis Urban League) that was overwhelmingly and vocally expressive in support of her candidacy.   

 

……………………………………………………………………………………….

 

A mass movement for change in the Minneapolis Public Schools began on 30 October 2018, at the 30 October 2018 event, the Parent-Led School Board Candidate Forum, held at the University of Minnesota Urban Research and Outreach Engagement Center in North Minneapolis (2100 Plymouth Avenue, across from the Minneapolis Urban League), and sponsored by KWST Behavioral Development Group, Little Earth of United Tribes, STANDUP, Centro Tyrone Guzman, Latino Youth Development Collaborative, UPLIFT-MN, the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ), and Voices for Effective Change.

 

Unlike the immediately preceding events held respectively at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church (15 October, sponsored by the Isaiah group and others) and at Franklin Middle School (22 October, sponsored by Pollen Midwest in conjunction with the Graves Foundation), the organizers and moderators of the 30 0ctober very avidly encouraged participation by members of the audience, who expressed themselves with emoji signs of frowns and smiles, applause, groans, cheers, and questions written down on notecards and posed to the candidates.

 

The night belonged as candidate to Sharon El-Amin. 

 

Her message has emotional resonance with many different constituencies in North Minneapolis, the Cedar-Riverside area, and an expanding base throughout the city.  The Somali community was out in force at this gathering, clearly listening intently to each statement from El-Amin.   This was true, too, for the sizable Native, Latino, and African American contingents in the audience.

 

Over the course of these next two years, I am going to be heightening my efforts to organize this potentially massive force for change.  El-Amin, as a well-known education and community activist in North Minneapolis all of whose children are either graduates or currently matriculating at North High School, is a natural to run for the seat (District 2, North Minneapolis) now held by MFT-backed KerryJo Felder.

 

I am going to be using the multiple venues and forms of advocacy that I have created over the course of the last four years to organize the community behind education change, with knowledge-intensive curriculum and teacher quality as the foci. 

 

El-Amin’s energetic campaign and community enthusiasm stirred prove the prevalence of a public ready to respond to a message of educational excellence, wherein student academic nurturance rather than adult agendas is the focus.

 

May MFT agitation for favorable wages and conditions live on.

 

But may its leaders know that the death knoll of the MFT as paramount influence in elections for the MPS Board of Education sounded in the campaign of 2018 and with the strong performance of Sharon El-Amin on 6 November.       

In the aftermath of the election of 6 November 2018, the death knoll can be heard immediately and with clarity into the distance for the overweening influence that the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) has wielded in elections for seats on the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education.

No comments:

Post a Comment