Irony of an Inept Group of MPS Board of Education Members Justifiably Excoriating Bob Walser at the Tuesday, 7 January, Meeting of the Finance Committee

Bob Walser is the silliest, most trivial member of any school board I have witnessed in my 49 years working with students living at the urban core and following events in locally centralized school districts closely.

 

Walser got everything he deserved in his excoriation at the Tuesday, 7 January meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education Finance Committee.

 

But there is supreme irony and multiple constituent ironies in the spectacle of this particular assemblage of committee members justifiably taking Walser to task for making a nuisance of himself with his facile calculations, specious reasoning, and ludicrous demands of one of the nation’s most talented finance chiefs, Ibrahima Diop, and Diop’s highly skilled staff in the Finance Division.

 

Under Diop’s leadership and with the work of Budget Director Tammy Frederickson and others at MPS Finance, a budget that once evidenced a $39 million deficit now is structurally balanced.

 

Diop and staff are among the best in the nation. 

 

Walser’s persistent errors in calculating monthly expenditure and revenue projections that, contrary to his simplistic reasoning vary widely from month to month, became more than a nagging nuisance and resulted in the acid responses he received from committee members and Superintendent Ed Graff at the Tuesday, 7 January meeting.

 

Graff, while astute in matters of bureaucratic rationalization and finance, is an intellectual lightweight who has been a failure in matters of academics, the core focus of any locally centralized school district.

 

And this assemblage of MPS Board of Education members is politically corrupt and academically clueless.  They are bought and paid for by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT).  They look beyond the weak training that teachers bring with them into the district and either are ignorant, in denial, or clearly corrupt in failing to recognize the mediocre-to-wretched quality of teaching at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Time after time they report having gone for prearranged visits and come away so very impressed, when in fact at each site teachers hand out too many packets, show too many irrelevant videos, give too many “free” days (especially on Fridays), assign too many group projects conducted in the absence of contextualizing information, have students design too many posters, and while engaging in all of this insubstantial pedagogy fail to impart vital knowledge and skill sets or to engage students in lively whole-class discussions.

 

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As a group, members of the current MPS Board of Education are variously ignorant, in denial, or corrupt in failing to recognize the grave problems pertinent to curriculum and teacher quality at the Minneapolis Public Schools.    

 

The particular members of the Finance Committee have, in addition to general faults as a group, their own individual failings and trespasses.

 

>>>>>           Jenny Arneson has been on the board for nearly a decade, helped produce a farce of a scheme in the Acceleration 2020 Strategic plan, has nothing to show in the way of student academic progress during her long tenure, and has made inane comments that betray her lack of understanding of the time needed to master American history and other key subject areas and her assertive naivete in claiming that every student at the Minneapolis Public Schools is “career or college ready.”

 

>>>>>           Nelson Inz played a part in bringing Bob Walser on the board.  At-large member Kim Ellison, ex-member Rebecca Gagnon, and Inz did the bidding of the MFT by recruiting candidates to run against reformist members Josh Reimnitz and Tracine Asberry.  Inz specifically endorsed Bob Walser.  Read that again:  Nelson Inz did the bidding of the MFT by helping to bring on to the board and endorsing the silliest, most trivial school board member I have ever witnessed.  Further, Inz regularly makes variously clueless and corrupt comments, often born of desire to ingratiate himself with members of the MFT and staff at the hapless Department of Teaching and Learning.

 

>>>>>           Kim Caprini evidences the ignorant, denying, corrupt traits that describe Arneson and Inz and is determined to display them with her accounts of great things happening in the schools and willingness to look the other way or betray ignorance in her failure to note those packets, videos, “free days,” aimless projects, and knowledge-empty courses.  When community members note ongoing problems at the long-troubled Harrison school for severely emotionally disturbed students, Caprini takes great umbrage and makes exaggerated claims for programming at the school while failing to acknowledge the long-abiding reality of a very tense and too often violent school environment.

 

>>>>>           Ira Jourdain shows the same general tendencies and evidences his particular faults.  He has discouraged objective assessment of student progress.  He bowed to pressure form an affluent parent group by voting for a budgetary amendment that restored $6.4 million that Diop and staff had meticulously and thoughtfully trimmed.  He has attended meetings of leaders of schools with significant American Indian attendance without asking a single question pertinent to lagging academic progress.

 

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Superintendent Graff is a failure as an academic leader.

 

These board members are variously ignorant, in denial, and corrupt.

 

The justifiably acrid criticism of Bob Walser, the worst of their own sorry crew, does not erase any of this motley assemblage’s group and individual failures.