MPS Board of Education District #4 Member Bob Walser Steps Over Line of Proper Conduct with Simplistic Analysis and Ludicrous Request at 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.

 

This is the guy who has claimed that middle grades education did not exist until the 1950s.  He has urged on the basis of a single study focused on the Houston, Texas, geographical area that language immersion programs can be a prime means for boosting student achievement.  He has claimed that students need not necessarily learn to read until they are age ten.  He has argued against objective assessment of student academic performance.  And he claimed to be moved by an African American parent who stated to him that the problem with education at the Minneapolis Public Schools is that it is based on a northern European model.

 

These claims of Walser are variously facile and ludicrous:

 

>>>>>         Middle grades education began with the advent of junior high schools in 1909;  Walser had run into some reference to the advent of regrouping of middle grades students into middle schools (grades 6-8) rather than junior high schools (grades 7-9) beginning in the 1950s.

 

>>>>>         Many parents find language immersion programs appealing, but such programs are hardly a prime means of boosting student achievement.  Students who speak a language other than English at home do get off to a better start in reading English if they first read well in the language spoken at home.  But these gains are lost if they do not read advanced material in English as they move into later elementary, middle, and high school;  low scores on the ACT are due heavily to advanced vocabulary issues.

 

>>>>>         The assertion that age ten (10) is that which find students ready to read takes cue from  the approach at Waldorf schools but runs counter to data indicating that students who do not read well by grade three (3), and therefore ages eight (8) and nine (9), have great difficulty catching up with peers who were reading at grade level by those ages.   

 

>>>>>         Objective assessment is critical to pinpointing skill development in mathematics and reading and highly useful in determining grasp of subject area information;  the best school systems in the world vary in their emphasis on and style of testing, but objective measurement of student progress is assertively utilized in all of these systems, including those of Finland, Taiwan, South Korea, and Germany.

 

>>>>>         Northern European political and cultural formations languished behind those of China, Muslim Arab civilization, and Byzantium throughout the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE).  Then, from the European Renaissance (1300-1600) and Enlightenment (1600-1800) periods forward, rising European nations synthesized the works of the Greeks and Romans with the seminal contributions of the Muslim Arab world as historical dynamics gave rise to European economic and political advancement in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  The educational system that developed in modern Europe (which in professional historian terminology means from approximately 1450 CE forward) was based on knowledge accumulated internationally over many centuries.  The curriculum utilized in advanced economies of the 21^st century is similar from nation to nation, the result of this internationally accumulated body of knowledge;  the curriculum is mastered poorly by Americans and better by East Asians than by northern Europeans.

 

Thus, heretofore, my personal objections to Bob Walser’s membership on the MPS Board of Education have been based on his specious reasoning and insidious ideology.

 

But he has also offended with similarly facile comments on finance and budget as a member of the Finance Committee.

 

On Tuesday, 6 January, at approximately 5:15 PM, he crossed over the thin line separating his offensive comments from stark impropriety of conduct.

 

……………………………………………………………………………

 

MPS Chief of Finance Ibrahima Diop is among the two or three best chiefs of public school finance in the nation.  Under his leadership, the budget at the Minneapolis Public Schools has been ratcheted down in stages, from a $39 million deficit to a deficit of $19 million, to what is now the momentous achievement of a structurally balanced budget.

 

At yesterday’s (Tuesday, 6 January) meeting, Chief Diop and his department proudly presented a concise, reader-friendly version of the monthly financial statement that among many other pieces of information showed year-to-date (YTD, month ending on 30 November 2019) actual expenditures of $190,722,357 of a projected total for fiscal year (FY) 2020 of $632,192,699 approved by the MPS Board of Education.

 

Understand that for each of the several past meetings Bob Walser has requested that Superintendent Ed Graff, Chief Diop, and staff at the MPS Finance Department produce monthly documents that explain the discrepancy between what Walser presumes should be the expected expenditure in given months, based on the total projected and approved FY 2020 expenditure. 

 

At this meeting, Walser did a bit of his facile calculation, taking the figure of $632,192,699;  dividing by 12 to get $52,682,725;  then multiplying by five (representing the YTD months of July-November 2019) to get $263,413,620.  On the basis of these crude figures, Walkser noted that $263,682,725 minus the $190,722,357 YTD yields a $72,960,368 discrepancy.  The fact that the discrepancy involved fewer expenditures than would be projected, which would presumably be favorable by comparison to greater than expected expenditures, was not mentioned;  and in a sense this was beside the point, because Walser’s assertion was that the discrepancy was in itself large and that the board deserves explanation for the difference between his expected figures versus actual YTD figures.

 

For each of the past several meetings, Graff, Diop, and members of the Finance Division have patiently explained that individual months vary widely in revenue received and expenditures necessary.  Federal, state, and levy-produced revenue are released and rendered at various intervals in the fiscal year;  similarly, the pace for making expenditures at the district’s over seventy sites and for seasonal programs varies from month to month.

 

But on 6 January first members of the Finance Committee and then Graff clearly lost patience: 

 

Finance Committee Chair Jenny Arneson and committee members Nelson Inz, Kim Caprini, and Ira Jordain, confronted Walser with the accusative nature of his simplistic calculations, his repetitive assertions, and his unreasonable requests. 

 

Then Graff told Walser that he had crossed over a line separating genuine concern for receiving accurate and timely information from repetitive posing of the same questions that had been answered over and over again by his nationally award winning finance staff.  He said that staff members are academically trained in matters of public finance, give monthly reports that meet the highest professional standards, and that in moving forward he and staff were not going to respond to further simplistic and trivial queries;  they would, rather, continue to produce professionally proper monthly financial statements and take responsibility for fulfilling the budgetary expectations for fiscal year 2020 approved by the board.

 

Chief Diop then made very brief allusion to his superlative experience and credentials that include a long tenure in Omaha, Nebraska, and a master’s degree in economics;  his nationally award-wining finance team;  and the ongoing efforts, demonstrated in the very YTD finance statement of note, to give board members the clearest, most accurate, professionally recognized financial accounting.

 

And then, with the proverbial patience of the biblically proverbial Job, MPS budget expert Tammy Fredrickson detailed why a November financial statement will not feature the same items or amounts of expenditures as those of, say, July, August, September, and October.

 

…………………………………………………………………………….

 

Only at this point was the MPS Finance Committee able to move on to its most important agenda item for the day:  a discussion of the implications of the forthcoming, developing, MPS Comprehensive District Design for finances, with an emphasis on aligning available resources to drive the best educational outcomes for students.

 

Committee Chair Arneson graciously tried to make sense of the tawdry scene created by Walser and to highlight the importance of the Design discussion for a scout troop that was visiting as part of an effort to earn a public governance merit badge.

 

And then I, with the portion of the meeting pertinent to MPS academics in which I am most vitally interested just now up for a discussion, had to scramble off to run the Tuesday evening program of the New Salem Educational Initiative.

 

………………………………………………………………………………..

 

MPS Board of Education Finance Committee members, Superintendent Ed Graff, and superlative Finance Chief Ibrahima Diop had previously been most gracious to the errant and offensive Bob Walser.

 

On Tuesday, 6 January 2020, they with transcendent justification lost patience.

 

Given his other transgressions, facile statements, and errant reasoning, Bob Walser should put all of us out of our misery and resign not only from the Finance Committee but from the MPS Board of Education.