Sharon El-Amin’s strong
showing in the 6 November 2018 election as a candidate for one of the two
At-Large seats contested for the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of
Education has occasioned this five-article series that concludes with the
present article.
This concluding article
proceeds in five acts, as follows:
Act I
Sharon El-Amin campaigned hardest of any of
the four candidates in Tuesday’s (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.
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.
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 proved herself as a political
candidate in this electoral contest. At
the same time, unlike other school board candidates and members, El-Amin
remains a force on the ground and out and about in the community. She continues as president of the North Polars
parent organization and to serve the community in multiple capacities,
including the provision of 100 meals to hungry Northsiders and others in
Minneapolis, twice a month at Masjid An’nur mosque, where husband Makram
El-Amin is imam. El-Amin is an
exceptionally well-qualified candidate now positioned to run successfully in
2020 if she wishes, as Kim Caprini did after her narrow loss to KerryJo Felder
in 2016; and in the meantime she is a
force in on-the-ground organization for student and community good.
Act II
As
thankful as I am for the support garnered by Sharon El-Amin in the 2018 contest
for one of two At-large seats on the MPS Board of Education, I also am
impressed all over again with the cluelessness in many quarters as to the
prevailing reality that describes public K-12 education in the United States
generally and in Minneapolis specifically.
The electorate in Minneapolis as a whole
remains duped and ignorant. Voters and
community members have little knowledge of the real issues underlying all of the
rhetoric and the multiple walls of obstruction that impede genuine
understanding of the lamentable condition of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Community members get exercised over
hot-button but evanescent issues. People
show up in droves to voice opinion on whether or not to keep a reading
curriculum the implementation of which has promoted some academic success but
has woeful racist streaks in depicting literary characters. They get all excited about whether or not to
keep police officers (School Resource Officers) in the schools. They do not like cutting of funding for the
specific schools of their own children and will advocate for funding
restoration even if the overall impact on MPS finances is harmful.
Voters think simplistically, time after time
falling for the pitch that a vote of “Yes” on referenda issues is a vote for
students, when in fact it is a vote for a status quo that includes overpaid
central office staff, knowledge-poor and skill-deficient curriculum, and
ill-trained teachers. And a candidate
must work enormously hard to be as successful as was Sharon El-Amin to cut into
the support for candidates endorsed by the powerful political lobby that is the
Minneapolis Federation of Teacher (MFT).
There, too, most voters fall for the assumption that endorsement by a
teachers union must be good for students, when most union platform stances are
deleterious to the development of an academically excellent education (see
previous Article #4 in this series). A
neophyte such as Josh Pauly, who otherwise would run a poor fourth in a
four-candidate race, becomes formidable entirely on the strength of MFT
abundantly to fund various forms of candidate promotion.
And beyond voters, there is cluelessness in
many quarters:
Star Tribune staff writers and editorialists are
astonishingly devoid of knowledge as to the most vital issues affecting K-12
education. Most proponents of reform
cannot define the excellence of education that they say they want; and those who get the closest do no more than
spout a tired century-old creed long inflicted on those trained by education
professors. At MPS, the least qualified,
most lamentably incompetent people are those in the Department of Teaching and
Learning, putatively the creators and implementers of an in fact mostly empty
academic program, particularly in K-5 and K-8 schools.
Only when we induce decision-makers at the
Minneapolis Public Schools to design and implement knowledge-intensive
curriculum, retrain teachers, provide remedial instruction to the many students
who need such due to having been academically abused, connect impoverished and
dysfunctional families to needed counsel and services, and slim the bureaucracy
to capture resources for those four items, will we produce an education of
excellence for students who have been waiting a very long time for this nation
to live up to ideals claiming democratic aspiration but lacking the reality of practice--- for only will democracy become a reality
when we provide excellent, knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to
students of all demographic descriptors in locally centralized school districts
such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Until the public becomes better apprised as to
the real issues pertinent to the provision of an education of excellence, we
will continue to get overwhelming referenda approval, MFT-supported members of
the MPS Board of Education, and the maintenance of things as they are--- which is to say a system of education that
relegates large swaths of a historically abused population to lives that go
nowhere good, often along paths leading to institutions of incarceration.
Act III
Ever the optimist,
though, I return for the final act of this article and this series to the
promising candidacy of Sharon El-Amin in the election of 6 November 2018--- and to the magnificent humanity of this
extraordinary person.
El-Amin is one of those
very few, committed, demonstrably good human beings. She is about the reality rather than the rhetoric of
service. She cares. I have been persistently about demonstrable
caring for at least 47 years. No one can
fool me about the quality of dedicated and manifest caring.
No one.
No one.
Sharon El-Amin cares. She is a natural leader of North
Minneapolis; by extension, she is a leader
who cares about all young people in all of Minneapolis; she is, though, especially connected to the
Northside, where for 26 years she has been embedded deeply in that community,
proving that she cares and that with her actions she brings that caring to the
lives of people in need.
Over the course of the
next months, I intend to use the various venues and platforms (blog, academic journal,
book on the Minneapolis Public Schools, television show, public appearances,
and most of all my daily instruction in two academic programs of my
supervision) to bring knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to MPS students,
with the backing of a mass movement for change.
The kind of energy that
El-Amin awakened with her vigorous candidacy will be among the sources of
people power that I will tap in achieving the aims of K-12 revolution.
And I know that Sharon
El-Amin will continue with her own crystal pure efforts on behalf of the
forgotten, the homeless, and the dispossessed.
I will love my sister
for that, and I will have abundant faith that our individual efforts will
inevitably coalesce for the common good.
You are a rare human
being, Sharon El-Amin.
Thank you for all that
you are, all that you have achieved, and for all that you will achieve in the
months and years ahead.
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