Damnation with Faint Self-Parody

The word for the day is "Arromediojeering".

Bear with me.

Doug Grow is a perfectly capable writer - in terms of actual writing talent, he puts Nick Coleman to fully unrequited shame.

And the Star-Tribune has many editors who are masters of their craft.

So one wonders how this column ever got printed. It swerves so far into self-parody, one wonders if the Strib's computer got hacked by the Fraters.

It's when you realize the answer is "no" that this article gets funny.

Grow begins:

Where's the outrage? Where are the political leaders? Where are the Minnesotans who used to believe so passionately in public education?

The Minneapolis school board went about the business of again cutting the budget of the state's largest school district and laying off ever more teachers at its Tuesday afternoon meeting/wake.

These awful actions were greeted by apathy, mixed only with a little despair.

And why would that be?

More on that in a bit.

Sharon Henry-Blythe, president of the board in what may be the most desperate time in the district's history, said she went home with an empty feeling in her stomach.

"I keep waiting for some groundswell of anger," she said. "I keep waiting for people in the suburbs to join the people of Minneapolis in saying, 'Enough is enough. This is not what we're about.' "

But maybe it is what we're about. Maybe Minnesotans, once proud of the state's education system, have become comfortable with the idea that public education can take cuts, year after year.

Or maybe the endless...Hm. I'm looking for a word that combines "endless institutional arrogance", "enforced mediocrity", "hijacked priorities" and "misguided social engineering". I feel I need to find a way to sum up these concepts in one word, because the left has a hard time with concepts that take more than one word to summarize. For now, let's try "Arromediojeering". Let's start over.

Maybe Minnesotans got tired of the Minneapolis Schools' endless Arromediojeering. They tired of the institutional arrogance of the teachers' unions and the educational-industrial complex which resulted in ever-less learning for ever-more money, the enforced, one-size-fits-all mediocrity that public education has come to represent, the hijacked agenda that has the schools teaching values that many parents find repellent, and the social engineering that underlay the decline of the cities as well as the schools . At the same time, the system used the cities as a warehouse for the poor and using the schools to promote a culture of victimhood that makes the poor regard poverty as a virtue and victim status as an asset.

Y'know - the sort of thing that led the parents to flee to the 'burbs that Ms. Henry-Blythe so laments.

Bonnie Rosenfield, who for four years was a health teacher at Roosevelt High, was at home Tuesday night when she got her call from a teacher's union official.

"You're left feeling numb," she said.

In the hours since that call, a million thoughts have gone through Rosenfield's mind.

There were sweet thoughts: "I got a wedding invitation from one of my recent students," she said. "Something like that makes you know you must matter."

Thoughts of anger: She talked about legislative mandates from the feds that go unfunded and said there's little legislative support for urban schools in the Minnesota Legislature.

Assuming Doug Grow isn't projecting thoughts into "Bonnie Rosenfeld"'s head, let's ask; if that's true, why?

Because the schools, perhaps, have tried to set themselves up as a separate but equal level of government, perhaps?

Thoughts of futility: "It seems like there's very little appreciation for people in our society who work with kids. I just keep wondering: When is it that teachers became the bad guys?"

They didn't. Their union, and the trite, trend-surfing, politicized administration they both work for and (often) support without question, however, are often perceived as the problem.

Doug Grow provides no reason not to.

And what-next thoughts. Rosenfield, 55, worked a dozen different jobs before following her longtime dream of teaching. She was a substitute teacher. Worked in a variety of capacities at Camp Snoopy at the Mall of America. Coached kids in gymnastics. Waited tables. Then the job at Roosevelt. Perhaps, she'll get called back, but at present there seems to be almost nothing to break the downward spiral in Minneapolis schools.

This round of budget cuts was pushed by another drop in enrollment, this time an anticipated drop of 4,600 students. But Rosenfield rightly wonders if more cuts won't beget more enrollment decline.

Of course, this is misleading.

The funding per student keeps rising. The number of students will drop, for inevitable demographic reasons. And, Grow's bloviations about the smon-pure motivations of the teachers and their bosses notwithstanding, the schools are a problem, and it's a problem that a lot of parents choose to avoid by leaving.

I say this as a conservative who was never much of a public school critic until very recently. We've been through this before.

It's the arromediojeering.

Here's where the self-parody shifts into high gear:

There were no silver linings to be found Wednesday at the Minneapolis teachers' union headquarters.

"Some are in tears when they call, some are frightened that they'll lose their home, some are wondering if there's a shot [at getting recalled]," said Louise Sundin. "We have to be honest. It's not like in the past where there was a good chance you would get recalled."

Most of the older teachers, Sundin said, have retired. Now 92 percent of the district's teachers have fewer than 20 years of experience; 80 percent have 15 years or less.

On the other hand, Sundin said, the downward enrollment trend hasn't hit bottom yet. Immigration, responsible for growth in the 1990s, has virtually stopped since 9/11. The NAACP lawsuit of four years ago resulted in the district losing about 500 students a year to suburban schools. The constant political pounding on the "failures" of public education has effectively undermined trust in public ed. Much of the new housing in the city is designed for older couples without children. Federal and state political leadership seem disinclined to do much but offer bromides.

So in other words, the system is:

• clogged with teachers who joined the system when the coming demographic bust was well-known - sort of like learning COBOL programming in 2000
• reacting to an ill-advised and transient immigration boom, exacerbated by the social-welfare system's tendency to warehouse the poor and immigrants in major cities, and the poor themselves moving to major cities with more generous benefits
• in complete denial that the welfare and union systems themselves are beyind so many of the problems

Arromediogeering, I tells ya.

"It's all very disheartening," Sundin said.

I'd imagine.

Henry-Blythe knows the board is taking some heat for delaying school closures, a money-saving option that could have been taken last winter. But the political realities at the time -- people involved in schools slated for closing were outraged -- dictated that the board needed to move slowly in closing school doors, she said.

Remember that? The professional public consciences - remember this? - felt the symbolic gesture of keeping unneeded but sentimentalized school buildings open was more important than mere money.

So - how many teachers' jobs could have been saved had Ms. Henry-Blythe and the rest of the bright lights of the Minneapols School Board had the guts to stick to their guns?

School doors still will need to be closed. But, "demoralized" as she feels, Henry-Blythe still believes that old Minnesota, a place where people cared about public ed, will rally.

"It has to happen," she said.I think they are rallying. But they're rallying for the good of their children; they're moving to districts that aren't failing experiments in social engineering, where mediocrity and victimhood aren't considered birthrights, where the union as the good common sense not to try to govern, where administrations aren't arrogant in their assumption of entitlement; 'burbs, private schools, charter schools, anyplace but the great sacred cow of the Public School.

Places with less arromediogeering.

Posted by Mitch at July 2, 2004 05:35 AM