An
Open Letter to Erin Golden, Star Tribune
State of Minnesota Education Beat Reporter, Regarding Her Sunday, 25 July 2021, Article, “School Boards See Mass Exit”
July 30, 2021
Erin---
Your article, “School Boards See Mass
Exit” (Star Tribune, 25 July 2021) is
yet another serviceable mediocrity of the sort regularly submitted by you, Mara
Klecker, and Anthony Lonetree, providing useful information but, as to the
actually gravest impediments to public school excellence, either missing those
issues altogether or skirting them while recording ironic statements by members
of the educaton establishment.
Let’s examine the article of
reference >>>>>
The article begins as follows >>>>>
…………………………………………………………………………….
Text of Article
An unprecedented number of school
board members are resigning after an unrelenting year of community angst over
school closures and mask mandates, budget cuts, reckonings over social justice
and battles about curriculum.
My Comment
The span of time
from March 2020 to the present has indeed been a period of unusual
challenge. Dedicated public servants and
those who, like myself, are committed to activist endeavors for change accept
challenges as motivating factors for heightened alertness, not excuses to
recoil from responsibility.
Budget considerations
ever abide as matters needing board attention;
they typically involve controversies that should be no surprise for
anyone who runs for a seat on a school board.
Social justice issues are also typically matters of focus, fraught with
emotion; the George Floyd murder brought
elevated attention to racial injustice---
but social justice concerns ever abide, and these unusual months have
brought us to a potentially pivotal time in history that should be embraced as
opportunity for a dedicated public servant or activist.
But the matters
discussed above are not the most vexing issues in a system that should be
providing students with a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum--- so that battles over curriculum should above
all be embraced as opportunity to make transformative change toward the design
of logically sequenced, knowledge-intense curriculum that would require
training teachers capable of imparting that curriculum.
Text of Article
In a typical
academic year, 12 to 15 board members statewide leave their seats before their
terms end. This year there have been
more than 50.
The reasons for
those departures vary, but board members in districts of all sizes--- rural, urban, suburban--- have similar
stories to share: email and voicemail
in-boxes filled with passionate and sometimes threatening messages about what
will happen if they vote to require mask wearing, or if they do the
opposite. Packed school board meetings
where community members disregard rules and common courtesy to vent their
frustrations, sometimes on topics over which the board has no control. Personal, stinging accusations that school
board members don’t understand or care about students, families or the
communities in which they live.
My Comment
Notice that content of the emails and
voicemails typically has little to do with the gravest K-12 dilemmas of
knowledge-deficient curriculum and teacher ineptitude at the median; nor do they address central office bloat or
the insubstantial academic training of those making curricular decisions.
This is typical; community member emotions are ever aroused by
issues that may be important in the moment but are not central to the core
academic dilemmas: Cops in the schools,
shifting students to new schools to meet the conditions of a new Comprehensive
District Design, the termination of a contract of a beloved hockey coach.
Rare is the community member that
addresses the central dilemmas of curriculum, teacher quality, and central office
bloat and academic incompetence.
Be aware, though, that assertions that
those who send emails or make Public Comments are not “following the rules” or
observing “common courtesy” are ploys utilized by people in positions of public
responsibility who maneuver to maximize their control and have at many
junctures of the nation’s history used that power for nefarious purposes.
Did Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King,
Mohandas Gandhi, Gloria Steinhem, Kwame Toure, Cesar Chavez, or Saul Alinsky
“follow the rules” or exhibit “common courtesy”? This is matter of personal perspective, often
determined by race, ethnicity, gender, and whether one is an activist or a
member of the political--- or, pertinent to matters of focus herein,
education--- establishment.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
Text of Article
“If you think of it as a volume knob,
everything that would normally be a 3 or 4 is at an 11,” said Kevin Boyles, a
Brainerd school board member.
School boards have always have always
dealt with controversies. Talk about
budget cuts, changing school boundaries or replacing school mascots can quickly
become heated issues for school systems and their communities. But some board members say the past year,
with emotions and fear running full blast, has been something different
altogether.
Among those who have resigned is Pat Lindberg,
who said she enjoyed the first few years she spent on the school board in
Robbinsdale.
After retiring from a long teaching
career, she was looking to serve her community and thought her experience of
use, so she ran and was first elected in 2014.
Things started to change a few years
later, when the district was embroiled in a controversy over a principal’s
reassignment that led to an audit of the district’s financial management.
Lindberg said that prompted a wave of
often personal criticism from community members. And when the pandemic hit, with frustrations
mounting over a long list of topics, it started to feel like a tsunami of
anger. Lindberg hit a breaking point in
April, when she and other board members received what she described as a
“particularly egregious, abusive” email.
She waited it out until the end of the
school board meeting last week, mostly because she was concerned about the cost
the district would incur if she stepped down earlier and triggered a special
election.
State law requires school districts to
hold a special election if more than a year remains on the board member’s term,
and costs can rise into the tens of thousands of dollars.
At the Robbinsdale meeting, a visibly
emotional Lindberg said she’d had enough.
“The hate is too much,” she said. “I no longer feel respected, nor effective.”
My Comments
Pam Lindberg should have never run for
a seat on the school board. If she was
the typical teacher and union member, she was poorly trained and among those
most resistant to the changes needed in K-12 education. She had only vague reasons for running for
school board, hoping to do something useful with her retirement years. And, quite evidently, she did not have the
commitment to persevere through tough times, in the way that an activist such
as myself will always do, and in the manner of all great change-makers in
history.
And yet the way you present her
situation, the average reader is likely to have sympathy for her reasons for
quitting.
Text of Article
New personal
attacks
Rochester school board chairwoman Jean
Marvin said, neither she nor any of her colleagues plan to resign. After seven years on the board, she knows
that listening to criticism and dealing with community members’ frustrations is
a big part of the role.
She’s accustomed
to the constant flow of emails, which hit close to 100 per day at the height of
the pandemic. But she said the level of
personal attacks lobbed at board members this year is new.
“It wasn’t the majority
of them, but there were some frequent flyers who kept coming and coming and coming. It was not about the issue anymore, it was about
that we were substandard human beings and morons and didn’t understand: ‘You don’t get how this works, you don’t
understand children, and
What do you know about education,’”
she said, several people
At a recent meeting in Rochester,
several people disregarded meeting rules and shouted above board members
protesting mask wearing and the teaching of critical race theory, an academic concept
that is not part of Minnesota’s statewide curriculum standards but has become a
political flashpoint in recent months.
Similar scenes have played out across
the state, including in a recent school board meeting in Brainerd, where one
man quoted the Bible and threatened to dump hot coals on the heads of school
board members if critical race theory was taught in the district’s schools.
Teaching that concept, which suggests
that racism is built into the legal and political systems that shape American
society, was not on the evening’s agenda, or that of any upcoming meetings.
Jackie Magnuson, chairwoman of the
Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school board, said she understands why people have
been coming to their school boards with frustration and anxiety this year. She said that she tries to talk with people
to understand their concerns and answer questions but finds some don’t want to have
a conversation--- they just want to
vent.
Sometimes the angry messages that fly
her way aren’t even from the people with a stake in the district. She’s had emails from people in such places
as Texas and New Hampshire, saying she should be ashamed to show her face in
her own community.
“People are afraid, people are scared,
people are grieving, and that all comes out sideways,” she said.
My Comments
This secton demonstrates particularly
the misguided reasoning and peripheral issues that citizens bring to the school
board. Inevitably, the expressed concerns
have nothing to do with academics, that which should be at the core of any
locally centralized school district. In
this regard, the given school board members have exercised compassion,
understanding, and perseverance.
But they, too, never address the key academic
dilemmas of school districts throughout the nation. Thus, the agenda that board members set,
typically following the lead of inept superintendents and central office staff,
will never be sufficient. Activists must
always bring matters pertinent to the academic enterprise as important addenda
to the agenda of those members of the education establishment who are the most
ardent resistors to the overhaul of curriculum and teacher quality.
Text of Article
Single-issue
candidates
Magnuson said she has no plans to step
down, but she wonders if the events of the year might give would-be school
board members reason to pause before signing up for the job. After all, it’s hardly glamorous. Board members might get a few thousand
dollars a year for a position that can demand 20 hours a week of work, including
mundane responsibilities related to budgets and other practical parts of the
public schools.
Greg Abbott, spokesperson for the
Minnesota Schools Boards Association, said he worries school districts and
communities will lose if people interested in the wide-ranging topics that shape
education decide to sit out.
“You may attract a lot of one-issue
people who run,” he said. But education
has multiple issues to deal with and once that issue is dealt with, then what
do you do?”
My Comment
At the Minneapolis Public Schools,
board members get more than “a few thousand dollars a year.” They receive $20,000 per annum, a significant
supplement to the income of most of the current members. Whether the job is glamorous or not should be
irrelevant: Decisions made with regard to
locally centralized school districts are the most important in the nation; better informed citizens would make for more
effective policy, both domestic and foreign.
Greg Abbott”s speculation about
single-issue candidates becoming a problem is fanciful. The real problem is that candidates are
bought and paid for by the DFL/Education Minnesota cohort that resists change
that would bring knowledge-intensive curriculum, conveyed by knowledgeable
teachers to our schools. Politically
purchased school board members constitute one of the most vexing issues in K-12
education
……………………………………………………………………………..
Erin, you write articles that are
serviceable mediocrities that will never have any impact on the insubstantial
academic program of our wretched but vitally important public schools.
You do the bidding of the education establishment,
presumably follow the dictates of your editors, collect your paycheck, and abide
as part of the corrupt context in which public education operates.
