Monthly Archives: May 2017

Woodward Avenue

The Other Detroit Comeback Story

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A Cross-Section of Education Advocates Set Aside Their Differences to Create a Blueprint for Reshaping the City’s Education Landscape. It Almost Happened.

 

The morning John Rakolta Jr. rode the bus to school with Mrs. Robinson and her two kids it was 7 degrees in Detroit. The four stepped outside the Robinsons’ apartment building exactly at 6:15 a.m. Rakolta’s bodyguard and driver trailed at a discreet distance.

Kids bundled against a wind chill that made the trek even more frigid, they walked to the bus stop and waited. And waited. What time was the bus expected to arrive, Rakolta asked, shivering. 6:50. So why get to the stop half an hour early? Because buses are few and schedules erratic; if the 6:50 came early and they missed it there wouldn’t be another for two hours.

The panoramic windows in Rakolta’s downtown Detroit office look out over the city’s main thoroughfare. Buses go up and down Woodward Avenue, but the reality of relying on them was a rude surprise to him.

The CEO of a privately held company that builds auto assembly plants all over the world, Rakolta’s sideline avocation is race relations. He’d been part of two decades of purposeful efforts to understand his own white privilege and to build relationships between black and white Detroiters. He’s both a conservative and a booster of a black, Democratic city.

John Rakolta Jr.

John Rakolta Jr.

A major fundraiser for the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2012 and Marco Rubio in 2015, Rakolta was riding the bus with the Robinsons because a few months earlier a friend had asked him to join an effort to create some stability in the city’s crumbling school system, often described as the worst in the nation. Continue reading →

VPK, WTF?

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When Mark Dayton first ran for governor, I wrote a wonky little story about a new kind of assessment. When a Minneapolis principal I’d interviewed called after it appeared I flinched a little before picking up. Had I double-checked my notes? Had I gotten something wrong?

Nope. Turned out Dayton, who was running in a crowded field of DFLers who all had remarkably similar—and shallow—things to say about K-12 education, had called the principal and asked if he could stop by.

It can’t have been the only impromptu cold-call. Unlike his challengers, Dayton’s stump remarks on education were peppered with real-life examples of needs his policies would address. His vignettes were rich with the kind of detail that suggested he did more listening than flesh-pressing.

With the Legislature headed toward adjournment and a hailstorm of vetoes coming out of the governor’s office, I wonder where that man went. Particularly since his re-election, on education policy Dayton seems increasingly like a guy who is listening to one set of voices: Education Minnesota.

Thursday Dayton vetoed a bill to overhaul the way Minnesota teachers are licensed that had broad, bipartisan support. And he appears willing to go to the mat over his much less popular universal school-based pre-kindergarten plan known in Capitol shorthand as VPK—voluntary Pre-K. Continue reading →

The Toothpaste Isn’t Going Back in the Tube

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I realize there are some major, major things going wrong in the world right now, but I am on Cloud Nine. A young woman I wrote about last year is being featured on Sheryl Sandberg’s website on resilience. Niante Ricks ended up homeless after coming out to her family, but found an amazing school in New Orleans, where she lives, that took her in and got her to college. Her teachers sent my story to Sandberg, who loved it.
 
The photo on this post is of Niante and a classmate giving their presentation a year and a half ago. Click on the new story to see a new portrait that’s 150 percent poise and confidence.
 
Cute backstory: In New Orleans an unexpected treasure found on the quest for something else is called Lagniappe. Niante wasn’t even the reason I was at Collegiate Academies. I went to write about the schools’ groundbreaking work on discipline and in special ed services for older students. My host, the most excellent Zoey Reed, had arranged for me to see some student presentations, including one advocating overturning a law that says Louisiana teachers may not say anything affirming to students about gays and lesbians.

Continue reading →

Minneapolis’ School Board: Hoisted with its Own Petard?

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Why I think the New School Board Will Address the Little-i Inequities But Stop at Trying to Solve the Big Ones

 

Ah, how quickly the bloom goes off the rose.

A Minneapolis School Board with a new political majority has been feeling its oats since the first of the year. It didn’t take long for things to get rocky.

In the new board’s most dramatic chapter yet, a couple of weeks ago about 150 community members organized by a faction of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers showed up to protest what they said were the forced resignations of seven district employees who are people of color. With just Don Samuels voting no, the board supermajority could not move swiftly enough to reverse the decisions.

And so the next week it was forced to convene a special meeting to hear from principals and others who deplored the board’s intercession, insisting that there were more clear-headed ways to make personnel decisions and noting that the board overruled school leaders without so much as requesting information about the cases at hand.

The board insisted it was acting out of a concern for equity. And indeed a pattern of forcing people of color out of jobs in schools, where they are desperately needed, would be a very bad—and sadly not surprising–thing.

But let’s pause, because in short order the universe has served the board an opportunity to address equity on a much larger and more impactful scale. Dollars to doughnuts the new board walks—nay, sprints—away from this one. Continue reading →