The Tuesday, 12 April, meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education, ensued as metaphor for much of what ails the United States and public education at this juncture in the nation’s history.
The meeting was dominated again by students and parents (especially Hispanic) conveying their dissatisfaction with the additional 42 minutes to each school day and the additional two weeks necessary to meet state law regarding the total required 165 hours of time in class.
I alone among those making Public Comments spoke on another topic, opting not to go with Brutus’s exhortation to Cassius to “take the current when it serves” after all, having become convinced of how my knowledge of the life of Ella Baker could be used to challenge MPS officials and board members to meet her high standard for opposing the status quo.
Thus did I tell the members of the MPS Board of Education that Baker was an ardent activist who upon inspiration taken from the Montgomery Bus Boycott went to work for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) then, finding the pace of that organization too slow, became one of the organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). I told the crowd assembled that as she organized young people from that organization and from the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in sit-ins, multiracial bus rides, and voter registration drives, she also assisted Fannie Lou Hamer in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party when the Mississippi delegation sent an all-white slate to the 1964 Democratic Convention.
I related Ella Baker’s participation in the agitation that eventually led to Angela Davis’s release on trumped-up murder charges in California, then how she made common cause on an array of issues with white leftists Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. And I told the board and audience assembled that inasmuch as Ella Baker was a socialist working against the status quo for fundamental change, her spirit was much more of the kind animating my sister Adriana Cerrillo (I had already expressed my joy in seeing her and Sharon El-Amin ensconced in their places on the board) than in the status quo maintenance that characterizes most board members and many Davis Center (MPS central offices) staff members.
And I very pointedly in my parting comment said that the Ella Baker spirit would take umbrage at the back-room maneuverings for maintaining the status quo exhibited by board members Nelson Inz, Kim Caprini, Kim Ellison, and Jenny Arneson.
My comments took as their point of departure the renaming of two schools, Jefferson (named for the Founder) and Sheridan (originally named for Union General Phillip Henry Sheridan, who after the war worked to create and protect Yellowstone National Park but also led removal campaigns against Native Americans). The name of Jefferson was to be replaced with that of Ella Baker; the name of Sheridan was to be replaced by Las Estrellas (“the stars”). Implied in my comments was the signal that I would be observing and calling particular board members out upon the probability that they would, as has been done in the case of Martin Luther King, use this moment to invoke feel-good themes of racial harmony and white do-goodism while avoiding mention of the revolutionary spirit that characterized Ella Baker’s life.
I did not on this occasion take my limited Public Comment time to explain that, although our admiration for the real Ella Baker should run deep and inspire us to make fundamental changes for knowledge-intensive education and high-quality teaching, Jefferson is among the greatest Americans who ever lived, the person who set forth the ideals in the Declaration of Independence and, during his tenures as Secretary of State and U.S. President and as leader of the Democratic Republican Party, set in motion the processes by which the nation could become an ever more democratic society, a person who articulated ideals that found their way into James Madison’s U.S. Constitution and inspired Frederick Douglass and anti-lynching leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Thus we should not engage in simplistic thinking that fails to recognize that two and half centuries ago these men, whose lives did in fact feature the slaveholding abomination, nevertheless established the legal framework for the first nation in history to move toward ever greater equity and inclusive citizenship:
Jefferson was among those who made the career of Ella Baker possible.
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I doubt seriously if more than five people in the packed assembly room had the historical knowledge to comprehend my comments.
That lack of comprehension assuredly pertains to the students who arose and spoke to argue against the extended time in school, an advocacy that was poignant and expressed very real pent-up anger but was full of very telling implications:
>>>>> Speaker after speaker said that the extended time was burdensome, to students who had to defer the start of summer jobs and internships, families whose plans would be disrupted, and lives that needed the recuperation of summer after an exhausting and fraught school year. But I and the board members, including, Adriana Cerrillo and Sharon El-Amin, recognized the reality of needing the schedule extension to meet state laws--- so that every one of the speakers in opposition to the change was hopelessly naïve in thinking that they could change the inevitable board approval that came once the short post-Public Comments business meeting ensued.
>>>>> And, as is ever the case except in my own comments, not a single speaker recognized the real source of dissatisfaction in the drudgery that is the classroom experience of students in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Further, the speakers assumed that their teachers deserved the negotiated pay raises, when (however much as a practical matter for now they would inevitably get their two percent raise and other concessions) the typical teacher does not deserve the median $75,000 remuneration currently received: They are the ill-trained acolytes of education professors who provide such deficient subject area instruction and the basic skills that students move across the stage at graduation to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only.
>>>>> But the students were most definitely saying that they did not want to endure any more class time. My students in the New Salem Educational Initiative clamor for more of my time in the summer and sit waiting on a list 25 deep.
Thus did we have revealed at this Tuesday, 12 April 2022, meeting of the MPS Board of Education historical ignorance, facile reasoning, political naivete, lack of understanding of the actual sources of frustration, and disgruntlement expressed in ways deleterious to the interests of those conveying their disgruntlement.
As Malcolm X would say, staring straight into a television camera
as if he were going to break it,
“As you can see--- there’s a problem here.
Ever is there much for the actual agent of change to disentangle
before and as the process of change is activated.
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