Why KerryJo Felder and Kim Ellison Must Be Ousted in the Election of 3 November--- And Why the Abdication of Bob Walser Is Such a Relief
KerryJo Felder and Kim Ellison are ineffective members of the MPS Board of Education who must be ousted so as to clear the way for the articulation and implementation of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education for the benefit of the students of Minneapolis. The fact that Bob Walser decided not to run for the District 4 seat he has held since January 2017 clears the way for the election of Adriana Cerrillo.
Below I give an analysis of the political corruption and ineffectiveness of Felder, Ellison, and Walser.
KerryJo Felder
We Must Rid the MPS Board of Education of This Fraudulent Claimant to North Minneapolis Leadership
Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education member KerryJo Felder represents District #2, encompassing North Minneapolis. She was endorsed by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) for her winning candidacy in November 2016. She also has firm ties to the Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party that looms behind the MFT front powerfully to influence the outcomes of school board elections.
Thus, Felder is a political hack doing the bidding fo the MFT/DFL cohort, as is the case for all nine members on this unfortunate current assemblage of the MPS Board of Education.
Felder has children in Northside schools and was active at MPS sites and at board meetings many years before she ran for a seat. She had an unsettled childhood and adolescence, mostly growing up in South Minneapolis. Her personal accounts allude incoherently to an academician father who held a doctorate--- and to a life of poverty as a youth. Also in her shadowy background is a young adulthood spent for many desultory years in a lifestyle lacking firm vocational articulation in California.
Those South Minneapolis and California sojourns do not denote a firmly rooted Northsider.
Felder has little connection to the North Minneapolis of the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, W. Gertrude Brown, Harry Davis, Bertha Smith, Marion McElroy, Larry Brown, the Edmund Cohen Community Center, old Sixth Avenue, North High School in its academic heyday of Jewish and African American composition and friendship, or even to the more recent influence of the Way and Opportunities Unlimited (where Syl Davis, Gwen Davis, and Spike Moss held sway) and the City, Inc., as a successor to the Way.
And yet Felder projects an image of herself as a Northsider out to claim resources for MPS schools that have been previously denied investment for buildings, athletic fields, and academic programs by comparison to sites and programs in other areas of the city.
But Felder is a fraud, as a claimant to firm Northsider status, and as an advocate for the schools of North Minneapolis.
She is a corrupt politico with very little knowledge of the history and philosophy of education.
Felder is a particularly objectionable member of the MPS Board of Education for pretending that she is an advocate for academic quality in what she abidingly refers to as “my schools” for “my Northsiders.”
When confronted with student reading, mathematics, and science proficiency rates at North High School that are less than seven percent (7%) and ACT scores averaging 15.7, Felder has no comment. When she is told that there are classes at North that are so out of order that teachers have quit teaching, she utters not a word. When Felder is told that an English teacher pretending to teach The Autobiography of Malcom X has absolutely no knowledge of that towering personage, she sits silently and never thenceforth addresses the problem. When told by Hispanic parents that the pre-K-5 and preK-8 schools of North Minneapolis are failing, she gives appearance of the denial that is her wont.
KerryJo Felder is a fraud as pretender to firm Northsider status.
She is a corrupt political hack typical for a group that to a member is beholden to the MFT/DFL cohort.
Felder has no grasp of the history or philosophy of pre-K-12 public education.
And she is in immoral, neglectful denial of the rampant deficiencies of curriculum and teacher quality in the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Felder projects the image of a fighter.
She should fight her way among her fellow miscreant Kim Ellison, out the door of the Davis Center.
Kim Ellison
Time to Expel a Member Who Should Have Departed a Long time Ago
At a Tuesday, 22 October 2019, Committee of the Whole meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education, at-large member Kim Ellison chimed in with a remark of her own that, when taken together with her nearly decade of ineffective participation on the board, should induce her resignation and departure with Arneson out the Davis Center door.
After hearing Executive Director of Teaching and Learning Aimee Fearing and Chief of Research, Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability Eric Moore engage in double talk and jargon-infested presentation of an academic plan that has no hope of success, Ellison felt impelled to make a comment pertinent to Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Ellison commented that Graff’s emphasis
on Social and Emotional Learning resonated with her immediately because of her experience as a teacher at an alternative school. She did not mention the name of the school, but the school of reference was known as Plymouth Christian Youth Center (PCYC) for a number of years, now rendered as Plymouth Youth Center (PYC) Arts and Technology High School. Ellison said that at her school there was a strong emphasis on teacher and staff relationships with students, with the implication that this produced student success.
Ellison is half-right but the half-wrong part reveals the abominable level of academic substance delivered at such schools. The City, Inc., and the Street Academy/Minneapolis Urban League High School were schools at which relationship building was touted; those schools are now defunct. The Minneapolis Public Schools contracts with seven privately run alternative schools to provide academic and other services to students whom MPS failed to engage. Those contract alternative schools are 800 West Broadway, Loring Nicollet, Menlo Park, Merc, PYC Arts and Technology (Ellison’s school of reference), Tatanka Academy, and Volunteers of America (VOA) High School. Academic performance for many years at these schools has stagnated at levels witnessed in the following aggregate results for academic year 2018-2019:
Percentage of Students Proficient at MPS Contract Alternative Schools
(Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment [MCA])
Mathematics 2%
(52 tested)
Reading
(32 tested) 22%
Science
(30 tested) 13%
Many more than 52 students are enrolled at these alternative schools, so that even the number (52) representing students taking the mathematics MCA fails to capture the number of students enrolled. But absences are high; on any given day, a small percentage of enrolled students actually are in attendance. There was also some formal opting out, as well as spontaneous refusal to take the tests.
Staff members at alternative schools do tend to build amicable relationships with students and to reach out to families with a persistence and compassion not prevailing in mainline MPS schools. In that sense, the overwrought term, Social and Emotional Learning, could resonate with Kim Ellison’s experience at PYC High School. That she would only mention this facet of the school, though, is telling.
Ellison is a politico firmly tied to the MFT-DFL cohort that impedes any effort to achieve meaningful change. She should have been gone yesterday.
Bob Walser
Why Ousting the Silliest and Most Offensive Member of the MPS Board of Education Will Be Such a Relief
MPS Board of Education District 4 Member Bob Walser is the silliest, most offensive member on this and any school board that I have witnessed during my half-century of observation. This iteration of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education is by far the worst that I have witnessed during my particularly close five-year scrutiny of this motley assemblage.
Walser is a disaster.
Walser was among the group recruited by Nelson Inz, Kim Ellison, and Rebecca Gagnon to run for the MPS Board of Education in 2016. Gagnon eventually got caught in her political manipulations and was ousted in 2018. Inz remains as District #5 (South Minneapolis, east of I-35) representative; he was for a time board chair; Ellison as one of three At-Large members. Inz, Ellison, and Gagnon recruited candidates friendly to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) to run against the independent voices of Josh Reimnitz and Tracine Asberry (the most assertive actor for better academic results); and for the At-Large seat vacated by Carla Bates.
Walser, who represents the toney areas of Bryn Mawr, Lowry Hill, and Linden Hills, is a salient example of that creature who assigns to himself the appellation of “progressive” on matters pertinent to preK-12 education, thus a participant in a sordid history traceable to Teachers College at Columbia University. Consistent with the various strands of this ideology, Walser rails against objective assessment of student performance and spouts the jargon of putatively child-centered education.
The most stupid verbal fodder spills from Walser’s mouth:
Two recent whoppers demonstrate the facile, grating nature of this lamentable school board creature:
>>>>> At one meeting that involved the fate of middle schools versus preK-8 schools in the district, Walser wondered why we have middle schools and asserted that we have only had this type of student grouping since the 1950s. In making this comment, Walser demonstrated the typically shallow nature of his reading and research. He had apparently come across a reference to the advent of the middle school (grades 6-8), which did from the 1950s mostly replace junior high (grades 7-9). But Walser’s reference maintained that grouping at the level of the middle grades did not begin until the 1950s. In fact, the first junior highs appeared in 1909.
>>>>> At the September meeting of the MPS Board of Education, Walser mentioned during the final, tortuous comments that members make on the cusp of each meeting’s adjournment that he had attended a number of community meetings lately and found the comment of one African American mother especially moving. Walser said that she identified the problems of the Minneapolis Public Schools as grounded in the northern European approach to education taken by the district.
I have been deeply embedded in the African American community for forty-eight years:
African Americans do in public forums occasionally have recourse to the same jargon of “cultural relevance” and “cultural competence” with assertions of Western bias as do hippy-dippy white liberals of the sort that my radical leftist inclinations find abhorrent. But face to face, I never hear such jargon. When African American parents, the largest familial contingent in the New Salem Educational Initiative, come to me in behalf of their children, their plea is in essence,
“Please impart to my baby the mathematical and reading skills that the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools fails to render, along with strong college preparatory knowledge sets that MPS does not deliver.”
They trust and know that I have a strong grasp of European-based culture and history and also the traditions of Asia, Africa, African America, and a bevy of other ethnicities. What they want for their children is the best education that can be had, so that those precious young people can be the vanguard that leads the family forth from cyclical poverty and centuries of abusive history.
Armchair white liberals of the Walser type are offensive to most African Americans. They sense that those who shout adoring phrases from afar are frauds, full of condescension and paternalism. Bob Walser has offended most African Americans in positions of leadership at the Minneapolis Public Schools. They know a fake and a patronizer when they encounter one.
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In any case, the approach taken by the Minneapolis Public Schools is not northern European, except inasmuch as it is through British conveyance that a curriculum consisting of knowledge gathered from the entire globe was delivered to American colonists and thence to the fledgling United States of America. The knowledge thus conveyed came prominently from southern (not northern) Europe, China, India, and from the Muslim empires of the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman dynasties. The best contemporary masters of modern curricula are students of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Note the absence in any of those references from the last two sentences of anything identifiable as northern European.
Bob Walser is the silliest, most intellectually trivial board member I have witnessed on the MPS or any other board of education.
Walser mercifully opted not to run in the 2020 election.
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