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