The Minneapolis branch of the NAACP on Wednesday urged parents to consider pulling their children out of the Minneapolis School District in response to Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s recommendation to close North High School.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I understand – North is, to some people, a center and rallying point for that troubled community.<\/p>\n
The accusations were an affront to Johnson, who grew up in segregated Selma, Ala. “We have the responsibility of providing a high quality education to our students regardless of where they live,” Johnson wrote in a statement to the Star Tribune. “All of our students deserve educational opportunities that will prepare them to be global citizens. I am committed to providing them with those opportunities.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Parents – if someone, a salesman or a boss or a teacher, spoke that kind of empty gobbledygook to your face, you’d laugh at them and walk away, wouldn’t you?<\/p>\n
The woman said nothing<\/em>!<\/p>\nLook – closing North High should be a cause for celebration; North High, with its atrocious achievement and yawning achievement gap and by-the-numbers mediocrity that fully lived out what George W. Bush called “the racism of low expectations”, was just a cog in a machine that devalued your children <\/em>just as surely as any plantation owner ever would have 160 years ago; a symbol of an education establishment that exploits your children no less cynically than any drug kingpin. Oh, their intentions may be more benign than Simon LeGree’s and Plukey Duke’s, but when it comes to the education your children got at North – at any <\/em>Minneapolis Public School, or Saint Paul for that matter, look me in the eye and tell me that the intentions made a stitch of difference?<\/p>\n[Minneapolis NAACP President Booker] Hodges issued a statement calling for parents “who value their children’s education or future [to] seriously consider other options for educating their children.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And I – a cracker descended from North Woods rock farmers, myself – will stand up and yell “Amen”. \u00a0Hodges is right.<\/p>\n
Now is the time to free your children from the Minneapolis Schools’ racism of low, or no, expectations<\/strong>.<\/p>\nOf course, the Minneapolis School Board and the Minneapolis Public Schools are only the tip of the iceberg, just as they are in Saint Paul. \u00a0 The problem is that the cities’ school districts are controlled by people who owe their livelihoods and futures to the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, and the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party, first and foremost.<\/p>\n
Not to you.<\/p>\n
Not to your children.<\/p>\n
And they are counting on you – the African-American parents, the Latino families, the H’mong clans who votes for them by imposing margins in every election, year in and year out – to remain ignorant of the fact <\/em>that for all of the DFL’s yammering about education spending, it is the GOP that supports your right to choose where your kids go to school<\/strong>. \u00a0It is the GOP that supports initiatives like School Choice, Charter Schools and, in many states, Vouchers to give you, the motivated, dedicated parents that I see and know from my time as a charter school parent, the power and tools – to say nothing of economic freedom – to make those choices and make them stick.<\/p>\nYou can say “he’s just talking politics”. \u00a0And you’re right – this is <\/em>about politics. \u00a0But politics control your childrens’ education just as surely as their teachers’ qualifications do.<\/p>\nSo look at the record. \u00a0The DFL – the Democrats, the people you have been voting for since time immemorial – are actively supported by those who are harming your children<\/strong>.<\/p>\nYou want hope, for your children, for real? \u00a0It’s time for change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To: All Inner-City Parents with kids in the Minneapolis or St. Paul School Districts From: Mitch Berg, who’s been there, pretty much. Re: An Invitation All, I’m Mitch Berg. \u00a0I live in Saint Paul. \u00a0A few years back, I pulled my kids out of the St. Paul Schools, and went into the charter system. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,20,10,78],"tags":[249],"class_list":["post-14332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-democrats","category-education","category-school-choice","tag-open-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14332"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14335,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14332\/revisions\/14335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}