Blood From An Expensive Turnip

The Strib editorial board, writing about the Saint Paul School Board’s perennial search for the flavor of the month in Superintendants:

Given the challenges faced by the district, the schools need a collaborative, inspirational CEO who has had success in improving student achievement. The district needs a strategic thinker who can build relationships, heal morale problems and be a strong, respected advocate for schools within various constituencies.

Er, no.

:Advocating for constituencies” is what got the Saint Paul Public Schools into the mess it’s in now.

The SPPS is paralyzed by “constituency” politics; watching a School Board meeting is like watching film of 1960’s Comintern meetings, with endless streams of apparatchiks solemnly declaiming their district would meet its quota of desk chairs or eggs or iron ingots in support of the glorious Five Year Plan.  Only instead of eggs or desk chairs or ingots, or even students, the apparatchiks principals and program directors and staff members would solemnly swear that they were meeting their goals for “diversity”.

And yet the SPPS’ achievement gap is the worst of any major city.  The schools’ budget is bigger than that of the City of Saint Paul, but the graduation rate is south of 50% and falling. Over an eighth of Saint Paul’s parents have hit the lifeboats (myself included), bailing out for charter, private and parochial schools, or schools in the ‘burbs, or homeschooling (and that was as of two years ago; the numbers have no doubt accelerated).  And for all that – with increasing budgets and declining enrollments – the SPPS threatens to cut teachers, programs and schools every budget cycle (although never laying a finger on the grotesque bureaucracy at 360 Colborne).

What the Saint Paul Public Schools needs is someone with experience in arresting failure.  The district needs the educational equivalent of Red Adair.

What the district will get, with its current all-DFL, mostly-Teachers-union-member board, is what it’s had for the past twenty years; a principal who is adept at being politically correct; one who carefully massages the various constituencies (and I’m not just talking ethnic groups, here) on the one hand and plays them against each other on the other hand.  One who will sit quietly aside while the School Board, as concentrated a bloc of far-far-far left DFL ideology as you will find in this state, babbles on about diversity and barring recruiters from schools and abolising JROTC and handing out condoms and supporting constituency support programs that happen to employ their non-profit cronies…

And beyond those qualifications, the district’s next leader must be committed to staying on the job long enough to make meaningful change.

And given the dynamics in the “market” for big-city superintendents – with an endless parade of school boards bidding up salaries and benefits ever-higher in an endless game of institutional musical chairs that essentially ensures the power of the radical left in big-city education – that “committed” leader will ride in on a pink unicorn.

The market for superintendents – paid for with an ever-rising pool of taxpayer money – is a scam designed to jack up the power of “elected”, invariably liberal school boards.  It turns the Superintendant into basically a temp employee.

Or a well-tended lapdog who isn’t too bummed about having to spend half of his/her term looking for the next, higher-paying job, for a position that will pay better and be of even less consequence.

6 thoughts on “Blood From An Expensive Turnip

  1. It’s too bad you can’t submit this fisk/rebuttal as a letter to the editor. Like they’d publish it anyway, but still, it would be nice to throw an opposing opinion in their faces.

  2. Mitch knows as well as anyone that government schools are my #1 hot button issue, and that SPPS stands as my gold standard of how bad things can get. All of the disgust I harbor for the left stems from what they have done to our schools.

    That being said, I have concluded that since most people in St. Paul don’t give a rip about what is happening in their schools, those that actually do care enough to vote have the system they want. Their choices make my stomach turn, but the majority rules.

    That leaves funding as the only tool remaining to those of us that wish to return the schools to the mission for which they were created; namely to provide a source of academic enrichment to our kids.

    That is why it is so important to pay attention to referendums. If every penny is not tied directly to an activity you agree with, and you need to be careful because these greedy bastards are the masters of obfuscation, then you must vote NO every time.

  3. What a great job for Eva, somebody with genuine executive experience at turning around a failed institution, while she waits for the next mayoral election.

    .

  4. Problem is the education buracracy has defined the terms in which any school district can hire. Witness the current flap about the interim Superintendent. A highly capable person who has worked her way up because she has skillz cannot run the district even as a temp. because she is not a licensed superintendent. No claims that she is unable to handle the job, just that she does not have the paper they require.

    No matter how good a canidate is they must conform to the failed policies of the establishment. So outsiders or free thinkers are not welcome.

    Thankfully this is one case where the board has rightly stood their ground.

  5. So vote with your feet. If you have kids, get ’em out of the public skulz, and if you don’t, don’t have any until you are in a position to not have to put them in the public skulz in the first place. To quote the late John Simon: “How many spoonfuls of rotten stew do I have to eat before I’m allowed to puke?”

  6. Many of us have pulled our children from the public system. For me only a few more payments until the final graduation. The problem is we must continue to pay extensive taxes (about 50% of all taxes in teh state) to support schools that fail to graduate 50% of the students. Students of color have an even higher failure rate. The St. Pual district has the WORST achievement gap between white students and students of color in the WHOLE COUNTRY. The whole education establishment is designed not to educate but to line the teachers union coffers and the executives bank accounts.

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