Monthly Archives: August 2017

Want Equity in Schools? How About We Start With Equity in Electing Leaders

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White Unions Have Dominated School Board Elections for Decades. It’s Time For Power to Shift to People of Color.    

Did you happen to catch the sad little Facebook dust-up in which a handful of white liberals attempted to explain to mayoral candidate Nekima Levy-Pounds why her stance on K-12 education was not what black people should believe?

It was the height of whitesplaining. Lots of use of the word “neo-liberal.” Lots of attempts to convince Levy-Pounds – possibly the Twin Cities most visible civil rights attorney of the moment – that schools that got money from philanthropists could not possibly serve her kids.

There was zero listening. No interest in her family’s experience–and minus zero if it was a good experience outside the traditional system. No interest in the discussion of equity she – a mother who has had children in traditional public, public charter and private schools – attempted to advance. Just political camps organized around tired conspiracy theories holding the status quo out to be the best thing since sliced bread.

It would have been funny if it weren’t such a deafening display of privilege. Adult and white.

Are you ready for something different? Good. Continue reading →

Of Zip-Strips, Xenophobia and College Move-In Day

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A confession: I am dealing with my anxiety about my ever-loving, blue-eyed firstborn’s departure for college by making frequent visits to the parents’ Facebook page set up for his university class.

All my mixed feelings, all my joy at watching him spread his wings, my anguish over not being able to buffer the world’s harsh shoals for him and my sadness at not having him plop his fanny down on the couch to show me something side-splitting on his phone—I’m channeling all of it into a blizzard of judgyness directed at strangers.

These poor kids—they think they’re striking out on their own!

My favorite is the mother who wants us all to buy zip-strips because she (mistakenly) believes they are the same thing as surge protectors and somehow thus safer than extension cords. She almost got away with making it out to be college policy.

Then there’s the parent whose student got a flat while riding their bike on campus. From halfway across the country, she wanted to know if anyone knew whether the school provides pumps.

There’s the mother who wants assistance shipping her macaroni-based “special salad”—which contains TWO JARS OF MAYO–to her son. And the mother “with food-handling training” who had some thoughts about the gambit. Continue reading →

It’s Time to Ban “Pray Away the Gay” Therapy

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Our Kids Are #BornPerfect — Let’s Stop Telling Them Otherwise

 

Do you remember Justin Aaberg, the 15-year-old Anoka-Hennepin student who, after enduring ceaseless taunting about his sexual orientation, hung himself? Aaberg’s was the most prominent of a wave of suicides that resulted in the district, Minnesota’s second-largest, coming under a court order to protect its LGBT kids.

Justin was out to his perfectly affirming mother, Tammy, who speaks passionately on why the embrace of a supportive family doesn’t always fend off the hate. Imagine showing up to school to find your classmates decked out in matching “Be Happy, Not Gay” T-shirts. Imagine those classmates can reach past your mother into the cocoon of your bedroom and into your pocket, via the digital conduits for harassment.

Hearing Tammy Aaberg’s story devastated me while I was covering the suicide contagion for MinnPost. But thinking about the Aabergs halts my breath in a whole new way now that I am the gay parent of a 15-year-old who has been bullied. His school is a haven for queer kids and educators, but then there’s the world, you know?

The seventh anniversary of Aaberg’s death just passed. It’s time for Minnesota to join the 11 places–10 states and the District of Colombia—that have outlawed conversion therapy for minors. It’s time for private and public schools to stop insisting that if fragile young people can’t “pray away the gay” they are fundamentally “disordered.” Continue reading →

Opt-Out So White Redux: White Minnesota “Progressives” Address School Disparities by Choking Off the Data Identifying Them

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The other day my older son told me a revealing story about his final days as a student in Minneapolis Public Schools. One day last spring one of his teachers informed the class that if they wanted to take the state science exams they were welcome to go down to the office and schedule a time.

This was the International Baccalaureate section of a hard science course, a dozen kids who presumably would make Southwest High School and its teachers look shiny and successful. And who were all, at the time, prepping for a solid month of IB testing—something the school brags about in its marketing efforts.

As he talked I looked up the recently released results of the assessments. At his school 43 kids, or a little more than a 10th of the class, took the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments in math. Sixty-one 10th graders took the reading test. Resulting involving fewer than 10 students are not reported publicly for privacy reasons; too few 11th graders to count took the math test.

So like 104 of about 1,400 kids who were supposed to take the test did. And what have we heard about it from the higher-ups? Zip.

This is the third year running district and state leaders have done nothing when confronted with abundant evidence that teachers are putting up roadblocks to the collection of data. I mean, for fewer than 10 kids to take the math test how many people had to turn a blind eye–or collude–all the way up to the highest levels of the education system? Continue reading →

Minnesota’s Grand Plan to Collect a River of Data—And Then Bury It

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Confidential to the Denizens of Lake Wobegon: You know that whole Garrison Keillor shtick about all the kids being above average actually makes fun of our collective tendency to engage in magical thinking, right?

What’s that? You get that the shtick is a shtick—but your kid really is one of the above average ones? You willing to bank their future on that?

For the second year in a row, the parent resource hub Learning Heroes reports that Americans dramatically overestimate their kids’ academic achievement. Ninety percent of us believe our kids are on track in school, while in fact an apples-to-apples test administered to a cross-section of U.S. students every four years puts the number at one in three.

It astounds me that increasingly the reaction to news such as this—particularly among affluent white parents and at least here in the Twin Cities many of the educators who staff their schools—is to attempt to get rid of the flow of data. Or failing that, to bury the numbers.

I mean, we’re talking about the very same class of people for whom worrying about the kids’ economic and social advantages is a competitive sport. And yet here we are, in perfect Minnesota form, responding to a federal law requiring an overhaul of the way we track schools’ performance by creating a new system that will collect terrific data but minimize its practical uses—to help children in poverty and with disabilities. Continue reading →