What’s going on with the MPS Board of Education?

BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE

The spectacular failure of the search for a new permanent superintendent of the Minneapolis public school system is very like an iceberg. It’s a massive frozen thing blocking your progress, threatening your safety, and concealing who knows what further ugliness lies beneath the surface. Here is a recap of the events of 2015 and an attempt to explore the roots of the problem      that brought us to this place.
In early 2015, a few new board members were sworn in. Bernadeia Johnson had just quit in late 2014, and Michael Goar, her second in command and author of the MPS reform project Acceleration2020, was chosen as interim superintendent. Southside Pride wrote about this a year ago, and in that article, we asked, in terms of Goar’s possession (or not) of the “vision thing”:  “Is his the most consensual vision, or is it in fact too corporate and therefore too divisive? Or is this even an issue? Because one thing neither the board nor the search committee has spoken plainly about is whether, search process and all, they could end up offering Goar the permanent position.”
It looks like that question has been answered. After a lot of flailing about, the deeply divided (according to the Star-Tribune, not just us) board did attempt to offer Goar the position, but the board meeting was disrupted by furious community members, who had been darkly predicting some such outcome. A few days later, Goar, to his immense credit, withdrew himself from consideration. So to sum it up in the plainest of English, an entire year of search process, and all the attendant costs, has just been pissed away, and we are exactly where we were a year ago! Well, not exactly; sadder and wiser, perhaps.
In the course of getting from there to here, a lot happened. Most pertinent to the school system, there was the Reading Horizons fiasco, which we also covered. Here again, the board tried to salvage a half-hearted win from its own failure, only to be overridden by its ill-used public via a spontaneous disruption of its meeting, forcing its members to backtrack. When it came to light that a reading curriculum package contained books with blatantly racist content, the board thought it could placate parents and teachers yet keep the contract in place. Far from it, as it happened. The contract was annulled.
It was also the year that saw the police killing of Jamar Clark, which sparked a huge upsurge in local Black Lives Matter membership and activity, including a long street “occupation” outside the police station of the officers involved. This is relevant largely because high school students, both white and of color, were very politicized by this, and joined the protests in large numbers. Their parents were politicized, the local NAACP and its president Nekima Levy Pounds were involved. It was a unifying force for many close but not previously cooperating communities of activists. Levy Pounds was also an organizing force to some degree of the school board protests, although these were very grassroots, very much in the hands of parents and concerned people at large. The “community,” however it is comprised, is united in seeing the connection between problems in the school system and the larger picture, of the privatization and corporatization of everything public, of the school-to-prison pipeline, of the built-in inequality that cannot be changed if it is not admitted and understood and actively fought against.
The year was meant to culminate with the appointment of the new superintendent, or the confirmation of Goar as a permanent one. What happened was this: The announcement of a choice was made right on schedule, and Goar was not the first choice. That was Sergio Paez, formerly an interim superintendent in Holyoke, Mass. Goar was the second choice.  Within days, a story broke about an abuse scandal at schools for special needs students in Paez’s old district, and uncertainty about how much he knew, should have known, covered up or dropped the ball. At the January 2016 board meeting, the board announced that it was terminating contract negotiations and rejecting Paez. They were poised to offer the position to Goar, and enter into negotiations with him, when a community protest brought the entire meeting to a halt. Here again, we must give credit where it is due. As in the Reading Horizons affair, the board did yield to community pressure, and there were other, more undemocratic, paths it could have taken, which would have been much worse for all of us.
There is much that is good, still, about the MPS, once the pride of Minneapolis. Despite gaps, a lot of students are getting a very good education here, and not only white students. At least as long as they are not forced by Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) programs to “compete” with one another, many different and creative approaches to education—open schools, Montessori, magnet schools—are allowed to flourish within our public system. The diversity of our student body is wondrous, and the relative maturity and involvement in public life of so many of them is something of which we can still be proud. And we have so many great teachers in our system.
Teachers, I have found, very often feel blamed in the public discourse about education, and small wonder. On the “right” side of the school reform debate, they are being steadily de-professionalized, tested to death, de-unionized. On the left side of the debate, there is a perception (wrong, in my opinion) that the teacher’s union, and especially its seniority rules, are an obstacle to educational equity. (I don’t have space to dive deeply into this, but basically seniority wouldn’t be an issue if schools with poorer students got lots more money and were able to incentivize the best teachers to teach there. And how is that the teachers’ or their union’s fault?) One teacher friend, David W, is also an accomplished songwriter; he wrote a song called “Blame It On the Teachers.” It’s funny, and it’s true. Another teacher, Pasha M, had this to say in the comments to an article I posted on Facebook: I sure wish we teachers could help children overcome the institutionalized racism that overwhelms their families from every side. But I have found that I just do not have that superpower. What I can do in my classroom for students (which is a lot) cannot undo the impact of past, current and future deeply embedded racist, classist systematic oppression. When I feel people in the community are laying this on my shoulders I feel deep despair and I want to give up.
The Minneapolis School Board has announced an entirely new search. We hope that the board is able to make good on its promise to have a more inclusive, attentive process to building the search profile. We hope it can make a better choice of a search firm than the previous one, Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates, with its deep connections to the aforementioned GERM and its focus on a narrow pool of candidates. Maybe this time next year, instead of covering school board chaos, we can report that we have a great new superintendent and that things are truly turning for the better.