Those who care about preK-12 education should be acutely aware of the critical importance of the contest for three open seats on the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education in the 9 August primary.
Consider why the contest is so important:
In their formative years, young people have three major possible sources of knowledge and ethics: family, religious institution, and school. People are influenced by their social networks and group affiliations, but in the impressionable years of childhood, as ethical values are formed and knowledge is attained, family, religious institution, and school command the young person’s greatest time commitments and exert the greatest influence.
At present, these institutions are greatly flawed. The burden of a brutal history has left too many families, most wrenchingly those at the urban core, ill-positioned to provide the sustaining values beneficially instructive to a child. Religious institutions so vary in their promulgations and emphases as to lack any coherent message for most young people to internalize. And the schools of our system of public education have operated for fifty years on the basis of an anti-knowledge ideology antithetical to the transmission of objective information and values commonly shared across religious affiliation, ethnicity, gender, and social class.
Family and religious institutions are only as effective in the impartation of knowledge and ethics as the people who inhabit them. Most people who inhabit these institutions at present have mostly attended and, in percentages unacceptably low, graduated from public schools. Thus, they have low knowledge bases and insufficient ethical frameworks upon which to govern their personal lives and to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. And from such a base of citizenry do we reap the violent, irrational, chaotic society that we witness if we pay even petty attention to contemporary events.
We will get nothing right until we overhaul public education to provide knowledge-intensive education and opportunities to conduct vigorous discussion of a range of issues informed by mathematics, natural science, history, government, economics, quality literature, and the fine arts. From those vigorous discussions, conducted respectfully on the basis of factual information and across varying viewpoints and ethnic identities, we have hope of reconstructing society on the basis of objective fact and commonly shared ethical standards.
In the United States our emphasis on local control means that our attention must be riveted on locally centralized school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). Of a sudden, opportunities abound to make that district into a model for the delivery of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education:
Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox has for a quarter of a century occupied professional positions at MPS in early childhood education, special education, and in the top-tier role of associate superintendent. She is a person of enormous love for children and an unusual grasp of the changes needed to reinvent MPS as a model worthy of emulation across the nation. In just a few weeks, she has already acted with purpose and courage to make staffing and departmental changes conducive to the needed overhaul.
Now she has the opportunity to work with an MPS Board of Education that will grasp and abet the wisdom of her leadership as she moves forward with needed change and oversees the process for securing a long-term superintendent by the time her term expires on 1 July 2023.
Josh Pauly resigned one of the at-large positions last February and interim replacement Cindy Booker is not seeking the position in the August primary, from which four candidates will emerge to run in the general election of November. The candidates for the two open seats are Keri Jo Felder, Collin Beachy, Sonya Emerick, Jaton White, Harley Meyer, and Lisa Skjefte. Remember that I operate leftward on the political spectrum when I convey that the DFL endorsements of Felder and Beachy should sway voters away from their candidacies: The DFL has a close relationship with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) which, as good unions do, advocates effectively for members’ wages and working conditions; however, that union is inevitably opposed to the systemic changes needed in our institutions of public education.
Of the four candidates not endorsed by the DFL, Jaton White applied unsuccessfully for the interim position upon Pauly’s resignation but has been scant with information upon which voters can make a judgment on his candidacy. Harley Meyer vows success as a teacher of reading and mathematics in Thailand and Mexico, but his application for the interim position lacked specificity and coherence.
I recommend that voters in the 9 August primary opt for Sonya Emerick and Lisa Skjefte in the at-large contests. Emerick is an MPS parent of a child with special needs and an experienced and passionate advocate for substantive education for young people of all demographic groups. Skjefte, the vice president of community engagement for the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center, has had multiple community involvements and in those roles has demonstrated skill in uniting people of varying perspectives for mutually beneficial outcomes.
Seats for District 1 and District 3 are uncontested; thus, those seats will be filled with candidates Abdul Abdi and Fathia Feerayarre respectively.
Candidates for the District 5 seat are Lori
Novelle, Leslie Haugland-Smith, Laurelle Myhra, and Elena Condos.
Norvell
is a ten-year resident of Minneapolis who has children in the Minneapolis
Public Schools and has worked for MPS
as a special education assistant, substitute teacher, and middle school math
teacher; but as the DFL-endorsed
candidate in this race, she is not well-positioned to advocate for systemic
overhaul. Haugland-Smith has adopted a
low profile and offered little information in support of her candidacy. Laurelle Myhra, a member of the Red Lake Band
of Ojibwe who holds a doctorate in Family Social Science and Marriage and
Family Therapy, has training and personal experiences that give credence to her
avowed mission to be an advocate for racial equity.
But the strongest candidate for the District 5 position is Elena Condos. Condos holds an undergraduate degree in political science and an MBA; she has accumulated impressive experiences in the corporate and nonprofit spheres, has volunteered for multiple organizations (including MPS), and is a board member of education nonprofit African Connections with demonstrated commitment to educational equity.
Votes for Sonya Emerick and Lisa Skjefte in the at-large contest, and for Elena Condos in District 5, would offer the most support for MPS Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox in her energetic effort to bring needed change in behalf of the long-waiting students of the district.
Def. recommend Sonya, good choice!
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