Don Samuels has apologized for his words, but not his views. And he isn’t likely to. For the Fifth Ward City Council member from Minneapolis who suggested burning down North High School is not just one man with an opinion.<\/p>\n
He is a stalking horse for a movement that wants to torch public schools. It has gotten frighteningly close to its goal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Let’s use Coleman’s “arson” metaphor for a moment.\u00a0 Indeed, let’s take it to its logical conclusion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Arsonists usually light fires for a reason.\u00a0 Some, true, do it for the sheer jollies of watching something burn.\u00a0 But much arson – especially the burning of things of\u00a0value, has a more, er, pragmatic motive; insurance fraud, revenge, something, <\/em>some reason<\/em> for lighting that thing on fire.<\/p>\nColeman can’t possibly assume that Samuels, and the movement of big, bad, cigar-chomping whiteys for whom he is a “stalking horse”, want to “torch” the school just for kicks.\u00a0 Can he?<\/p>\n
The Center of the American Experiment, a local conservative think tank, is renewing the push for school vouchers, and it tapped Samuels to endorse its position paper. In his foreword to the recent publication, Samuels again displays a flair for the dramatic, writing that he wonders “how many future murderers are in the first grade classes of the four elementary schools within a mile of my home?”<\/p>\n
Officer, arrest those first-graders!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
All well and good for Coleman – a child of immense power and privilege, who lives in St. Paul’s tony, Wellstone-worshipping Mac-Groveland enclave, the son of a powerful poltician, brother of St. Paul’s mayor, stepson of a high-power newspaper publisher – to yip at the observation of Samuels, a man who lives in the neighborhood and sees firsthand the failure of the public school system, not just to prevent those first graders about whom Coleman giggles from murdering, but indeed to teach them anything of value at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But if you take Samuels seriously, it is not just his language that is lousy. It is his policies.<\/p>\n
Samuels has become the darling of a coalition of mostly conservative, mostly suburban groups involved in a coordinated assault on “government monopoly schools.” These groups are pushing hard in Minnesota for expanded tax-credit or tuition vouchers to allow public dollars to be spent on private schools. It isn’t just people in the North High neighborhood who should worry about that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This paragraph is notable not just for what it has wrong, but for the questions it completely begs.\u00a0 “Mostly conservative?”\u00a0 You mean some liberals are breaking ranks?\u00a0 “Mostly suburban?”\u00a0 What, you mean urban people are starting to turn on their beloved schools?\u00a0 (Stay tuned).\u00a0<\/p>\n
And again, what possible <\/em>motivation could there be for this “coordinated assault?”\u00a0 The sheer joy of coordinating assaults?<\/p>\nSome groups pushing for vouchers have fought to outlaw gay marriage or to keep children from receiving sex education or learning about evolution. They have a right to send their kids to religious schools. They don’t have a right — Article XIII of the State Constitution bars public funding for “sectarian” schools — to subsidize such schools with tax dollars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Fortunately for Coleman, the State Constitution allows strawmen in arguments.\u00a0 I, however, do not.\u00a0 It matters not an iota if “some” groups don’t believe in evolution or gay marriage or sex education; “some” groups that fought in the American Revolution owned slaves; “some” groups that defeated the Nazis were murderous Communists; “some” groups that buy the Strib are Republicans.\u00a0 Do any of those facts invalidated the rightness of\u00a0 America, World War II or the Strib, in and of themselves?<\/p>\n
Again, Coleman fails to note these groups’ motivations (although he gets close, painfully close, without probably knowing it).\u00a0\u00a0But he does <\/em>revert to the “the law says so, and the law is always right” argument, which is the last refuge the the befuddled.<\/p>\nBut we’re going to close in and deal with those motivations.\u00a0 Oh, yes we are.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the crusade is on. And Samuels is its hero.<\/p>\n
Other black leaders are being lobbied to convert to the vouchers cause. One, NAACP President Duane Reed, says he recently refused requests to testify on behalf of a vouchers\/tax credit bill in the Legislature. He says the request came from a group affiliated with the Libertarian Party, whose platform praises tax credits and charter schools as “interim measures” that will help kill the public schools.<\/p>\n
“This is not about Don Samuels,” Reed said at Thursday night’s public meeting at North High with Samuels. “This is about … tax credits. Which is just a code word for vouchers. This is just teeing up a sensational issue.”How many black leaders support vouchers?” he said to me later, proceeding to tick off a long list of black groups, starting with the NAACP, that oppose them. “Now Don Samuels all of a sudden is an expert, and he is going to speak for us? I don’t think so.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The old “I know stuff” argument; an oldie but a goodie for Coleman.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The simple fact is, this is one area where every<\/em>\u00a0 parent, every <\/em>taxpayer, every <\/em>citizen is <\/em>an expert.\u00a0 We all <\/em>know what is best for our children.\u00a0 We don’t need a school adminstrator, a superintendant, a teacher <\/em>to tell us, much less a “community leader” who is more beholden to parties and special interests than to you and I, whatever our race.<\/p>\nPretty radical notion, huh?<\/p>\n
Slowly but surely, we’re going to back into the motivation for this “arson” that Coleman keeps bargling about.\u00a0 He won’t know it, but he’ll do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just watch.<\/p>\n
Charter schools, funded with public funds, were supposed to help produce new teaching methodologies and education strategies. Other states limit their number. New York has a limit of 100. Iowa has a limit of 10. Minnesota has no limit. Today, we have 131 charter schools, with 23,600 students. At least 19 more charter schools are on the way.<\/p>\n
How much is too much?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
How much water is too much?\u00a0<\/p>\n
It depends, doesn’t it?\u00a0 How thirsty are you?\u00a0 How much do you have?\u00a0 What is the rationale for any limits?<\/p>\n
Because in New York and Iowa, the “rationale” for the limits has nothing to do with education, but is rather that “the establishment wants them”.\u00a0 Charter schools – despite some well-publicized failures\u00a0– have been a huge success in Minnesota.\u00a0 They have been the first step, for many poor parents (the ones that can’t afford the private schools that Coleman grew up in), in getting control of their kids’ education, getting the respect that the public system denies parents.\u00a0 For many of them – myself included –\u00a0 it’s been a Godsend.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And why would the establishment care?<\/p>\n
Well, that’d speak to that “motivation for arson” thing we were talking about above.<\/p>\n
No, we’re not there yet.\u00a0 But we will get there.<\/p>\n
First, we have the boogymen:<\/p>\n
The largest sponsor of charter schools, Friends of Ascension, has ties to former state Republican chairman Bill Cooper, who has served on the group’s board of directors. Friends of Ascension has 16 schools with 2,800 students (12 percent of charter school enrollment). Nor is Cooper the only former Republican Party chair to have found a keen interest in the inner city.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Cooper has “found a keen interest” in the inner city, which presumably is manifested in him driving vans around North Minneapolis, kidnapping kids, and enrolling them in the FOA schools?<\/p>\n
Former GOP chairman Ron Eibensteiner and his wife are the founders of KidsFirst Scholarships, which award privately funded vouchers<\/em><\/font> [emphasis mine] to children (650 this year) to attend private schools. Those scholarships are funded by grants from right-wing billionaires such as Ted Forstmann and the late John Walton of the Walton Family Foundation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nA\u00a0“privately funded voucher” is\u00a0the same as a “chaste pregnancy”.\u00a0 Nick!\u00a0 It’s called a scholarship<\/em>, numbnuts!<\/p>\nBut it’s OK – because in reporting Eibensteiner’s serial breakins around North Minneapolis to force <\/em>families to accept their “private vouchers”, we are almost there – the motivation for these men’s attempt to torch “our” schools<\/em>!<\/p>\nCritics such as the liberal People for the American Way point out an obvious motivation: By handing out private vouchers in the inner city, conservatives hope to create political momentum for state vouchers that will damage public schools.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Not to mention the teaching of evolutionary science.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But those inner-city parents, beholden to the DFL as they are (because Minneapolis, especially the North Side, are DFL territory like no other place in the state), and committed to their childrens’ education, are resisting Big Bad Bill Cooper’s entreaties, and tearing up Ron Eibensteiner’s checks and throwing them in\u00a0his face.<\/p>\n
Right?<\/p>\n
Wrong:<\/p>\n
The fire has been set. Public schools have lost thousands of students to charter schools and open enrollment<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
DING DING DING DING DING!<\/p>\n
Public schools have lost thousands <\/em>of students – enough to force the Minneapolis Public Schools to consider closing branches, enough to set the district into a frenzy of “reform”…<\/p>\n…well, no.\u00a0 No reforms are in on the way.\u00a0 No increased focus on reading, match, science and history.\u00a0 No reassessment of an education model that is an untrammelled failure that can not<\/em> be solved with more money, any more than money can slow your fall from an airplane, of a system that devalues parents, assaults their values (and not just about gay marriage, evolution and sex ed, although public education’s attack on families’ faith is real and constant), marginalizes them at every turn (lip service aside).<\/p>\nNo.\u00a0 They don’t want to deal with “root causes” – a failed model, a sclerotic system, a dysfunctional bureaucracy that starts in each and every school and extends to Washington.\u00a0 They just want more money.\u00a0 Oh, yeah – and to find a way to shut off the escape valve that so many parents are using.<\/p>\n
This is not just an intramural squabble in the black community. All supporters of public education should be worried. It is not just North High that is under assault; it is the very idea of public education.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Public education has only itself to blame for the “assault” – the only “assault” in history, by the way, entirely effected by retreat, and carried out by people fleeing the fight.\u00a0 The system is huge, arrogant, and does something that is utterly incongruous with human nature; tries to pound every shape of peg into a square, institutional, one-size-fits-all hole.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As an inner-city politician with friends in high places, Samuels didn’t set the schools ablaze. He just fanned the flames. But his friends are dancing around the bonfire.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
No.\u00a0 They are reacting pragmatically.\u00a0 And inner city parents are taking them up on it, in droves – political alignments not only aside, but rendered irrelevant by a higher cause, the children themselves.<\/p>\n
And if Nick Coleman, sitting in his snug, smug Mac-Groveland house things those inner-city parents are “dancing” rather than coldly pragmatic and acting in their childrens’ interest (and preservation), then it doesn’t take a high school graduate – literate or not – to see who the vacuous patrician is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Light the lights!\u00a0 Pop the popcorn!\u00a0 Nick Coleman is writing dreck again! Last Saturday’s column attacks Minneapolis Fifth Ward alderman Don Samuels for his remarks – they should “Burn North High School Down”, says Don – and tries to connect Samuels with a big, bad, Republican (natch) movement that is trying, apparently, to light our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481","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=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}