Travel back with me to 2009, when Minneapolis Public Schools was in the process of trying to quell an insurrection of wealthy white parents. With the exception of the crunchy-granola set, which has long maintained an enrollment stronghold at South High School and doesn’t have enough money to count as wealthy anyhow, the chattering classes wanted to send their children to Southwest High.

But even with a future expansion under discussion Southwest could only hold so many teenage bodies. Kids literally were sitting in window wells in some classes. Lunch was often eaten in the hall. On the floor in shifts.

You remember this, right? The battle of the entitled reached its apex with a raging debate about higher-level math. Southwest, parents actually howled at the board, had all the special math teachers and Washburn had none. Seriously, families knew the names of individual math teachers. It was like fantasy football, but with licensure status instead of career stats.

Parents who couldn’t so much as do long division held forth at parties: Who was the district kidding insisting students at both schools would get a world-class education? Continue reading →

Photo: Groven, in suit and tie, calls BS on Sen. Warren Limmer.

Pity poor Warren Limmer, Republican of Maple Grove and a former corrections officer, who was handed his potooty this week by a group of students led by Josh Groven, a senior at the School of Environmental Sciences in Eagan. It’s safe to bet the former corrections officer never saw it coming.

Because how many of Limmer’s constituents know enough parliamentary process to understand how the will of the people gets subverted in the people’s house? Or put another way, how a cynic kills a bill that has the enthusiastic support of the public but not so much the lobbyists. Groven knows: Bills that don’t get committee hearings don’t advance to a vote. Limmer has refused to take testimony on gun control.

Energized though he was by this month’s youth-organized gun control marches and the sight of the Parkland shooting survivors in the national spotlight, Groven fears that the Limmers of the world won’t change until forced into close proximity with the young people trying to throw the impact of gun violence into stark relief.

To that end, earlier this week Groven, 17, and two dozen of his fellow students of American government staged a sit in in Limmer’s Capitol office in St. Paul, punctuated by an impromptu turn at the testifiers’ table during a Senate hearing on another issue. Limmer? He gaveled Groven out of order, cut his mic and had him escorted out. Continue reading →

You know that old saw about much ado?

After months of name calling, ugly memes and board room protests, the proposed contract between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Minneapolis Public Schools has been circulated. By my read it’s mostly a win for district leaders.

Well. Except for all of the posturing and base-energizing on the part of the union. And the very real harm done to a number of MPS employees who became collateral damage after they were pilloried for their “associations” with organizations – including a district funder – demonized by the MFT.

It’s not at all what I had expected. The district has no pennies to squeeze, so I had imagined it would give on all of the non-monetary demands on the table, which ranged from a provision that would have allowed teachers to exclude students with disciplinary histories from their classrooms to provisions guaranteeing access to potential union members should the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision in Janus vs. AFSCME deal labor the expected blow. Continue reading →

In the Name of Patriotism, the Edina School District Just Taught Students a Very Un-American Lesson

When I was in grad school at the University of Arizona, I took several courses at the law school from a man who wore, without fail, shiny leather pants and a shiny leather vest to every class. Not even chaps. Zero-vent cowhide. In Tucson. In triple-digit weather.

I think his name was Bob, but a lot of ephemera has been engraved on the hard drive since then so I can’t swear to it. He made me feel very rubber-neck-y, in a gross way.

The most salient media law precedents of the day involved Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt who, questionable taste in everything notwithstanding, was a free speech crusader. Naturally, I remember all three terms as if they were yesterday.

I remember in particular the precedent set in the then-recent Hustler magazine vs. Falwell, in which the court held that a jury of reasonable men would know that a feature declaiming Jerry Falwell’s deflowering in an outhouse by his mother was satire. It was an important precedent in terms of the bounds of political speech, and unless one of you wants to step forward to correct me I believe it still stands.

Leatherman’s classes taught me a couple of things. One, if you are going to skewer a living figure, make sure your parody eventually becomes so over the top no one can mistake it for news. And two, absolutely free as it must remain, speech has consequences.

I wonder if the Edina School District did the best thing recently when it agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the Edina High School Young Conservatives Club. I know enough school administrators to imagine that their fervent desire was to put a cork in the controversy that sparked the lawsuit. Continue reading →

Do you remember that ugly meme that went around a few weeks back? The one that attempted to smear several Minneapolis Public Schools administrators for their “associations” with KIPP schools, Teach for America, Minnesota Comeback and my own kid’s scrappy little standalone school?

There was one administrator one there who for good reason is embroiled in scandal: The district’s enrollment chief, who runs a side consultancy that steers families – presumably wealthy ones – to private schools and equips them to justify this decision to critics. He didn’t “associate” with the rest, but you’d never know it from the lines and arrows and conspiratorial language on the meme.

(It’s tempting to veer off on a rant questioning whether we remember other dark eras of U.S. history when we fired people – and worse – because of “associations.” But I am working up to a point and I am determined to make it.)

One of the people eviscerated by the meme was MPS Human Resources Chief, Maggie Sullivan, whose “association” is her service on the leadership council of the education advocacy group Minnesota Comeback. Among other things, Comeback has funded nine district initiatives, several of them in Sullivan’s sphere.

And a couple of them touted as victories by, or funded at the behest of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers – which drew up and circulated the meme: The “Grow Your Own” program that’s one of the most promising mechanisms for diversifying the ranks of the district’s teachers; a pilot studying the retention of teachers of color and the last referendum campaign.

So why hate on Sullivan – particularly if she’s bringing home the bacon? She’s not even a veteran of any of the education reform efforts the meme associated its other targets with. Before MPS, she worked for Pittsburgh Public Schools and before that for the Boys and Girls Club.

On Tuesday, Sullivan presented the Minneapolis School Board with the results of an equity and diversity impact assessment of HR policies and practices that affect recruitment, hiring and retention. No surprise, the presentation led with the yawning disconnect between the racial composition of the student body and the teacher corps. Continue reading →