Jenny Arneson Should Either Issue a Public Apology for Remarks Made at the 11 December 2018 MPS Board of Education Meeting--- or She Should Resign

The saddest moment of all at the Tuesday, 11 December, meeting of the MPS Board of Education was at the same concluding segment that featured the Ira Jourdain inanity (see article as you scroll on down this blog).

 

The comment came from the best member of this board, which is a bit like citing the best member of the 1962 New York Mets, so bad in their inaugural season (40-120 won-lost record) that manager Casey Stengel was moved to write a book entitled, Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?.

 

Jenny Arneson is the member of note here.  Included in her comments at this concluding segment of the board’s 11 December meeting was a reference to her son, a senior at Edison High School.  She relayed proudly that he had been accepted at his first choice, Grinnell College in Iowa.  She then offered this stunner:

 

“So this proves that MPS students are indeed college and career ready.”

 

You can imagine how this whammed into the moral consciousness of one Gary Marvin Davison, who sent Beloved Son Ryan Davison-Reed to public schools but never trusted those schools to give him his education---  as many a delightful evening with mathematics and Shakespeare and Core Knowledge books and writing stories together will attest.

 

Consider that this is a district with an overall four-year graduation rate of 62%, in which fewer than 50% of African American and Native American students graduate in four years, and at which the average ACT score  at Edison High School specifically and most MPS high schools generally is approximately 16---  indicating a middle school level of education at best.  And grade level proficiency in mathematics and reading is across the district just over 40%, and for African American, Latino/ Latina, Hmong, Somali, and Native American students hovers on either side of 20% proficiency.  One-third of MPS graduates who matriculate on college and university campuses need to take remedial curses.  

 

With these stark facts in view, Arneson’s comments are clueless or consciously dissembling.  Her remarks are not necessarily overtly but rather definitely covertly racist.  They partake of the institutional racism that pervades the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

For such ill-considered and racist comments, Jenny Arneson, who as the best-informed and typically most thoughtful member of this wretched assemblage of the MPS Board of Education now just symbolizes the intellectual and moral corruption of this board, should do one of the following:

 

Jenny Arneson should apologize for the cited remarks.

 

Or she should resign.