Jul 30, 2021

Article #5 in a Series of Open Letters to >Star Tribune< Reporters Anthony Lonetree, Erin Golden, and Mara Klecker Concerning the Moral Abhorrence of Their Cowardly Journalism

 

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  >>>>>

 

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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.

 

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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

 

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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.

 

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