Light the lights!  Pop the popcorn! 

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 kids on fire. 

Or something.

Coleman:

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.

He is a stalking horse for a movement that wants to torch public schools. It has gotten frighteningly close to its goal.

Let’s use Coleman’s “arson” metaphor for a moment.  Indeed, let’s take it to its logical conclusion. 

Arsonists usually light fires for a reason.  Some, true, do it for the sheer jollies of watching something burn.  But much arson – especially the burning of things of value, has a more, er, pragmatic motive; insurance fraud, revenge, something, some reason for lighting that thing on fire.

Coleman 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.  Can he?

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?”

Officer, arrest those first-graders!

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. 

But if you take Samuels seriously, it is not just his language that is lousy. It is his policies.

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.

This paragraph is notable not just for what it has wrong, but for the questions it completely begs.  “Mostly conservative?”  You mean some liberals are breaking ranks?  “Mostly suburban?”  What, you mean urban people are starting to turn on their beloved schools?  (Stay tuned). 

And again, what possible motivation could there be for this “coordinated assault?”  The sheer joy of coordinating assaults?

Some 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.

Fortunately for Coleman, the State Constitution allows strawmen in arguments.  I, however, do not.  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.  Do any of those facts invalidated the rightness of  America, World War II or the Strib, in and of themselves?

Again, Coleman fails to note these groups’ motivations (although he gets close, painfully close, without probably knowing it).  But he does revert to the “the law says so, and the law is always right” argument, which is the last refuge the the befuddled.

But we’re going to close in and deal with those motivations.  Oh, yes we are.

Nevertheless, the crusade is on. And Samuels is its hero.

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.

“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.”

The old “I know stuff” argument; an oldie but a goodie for Coleman. 

The simple fact is, this is one area where every  parent, every taxpayer, every citizen is an expert.  We all know what is best for our children.  We don’t need a school adminstrator, a superintendant, a teacher 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.

Pretty radical notion, huh?

Slowly but surely, we’re going to back into the motivation for this “arson” that Coleman keeps bargling about.  He won’t know it, but he’ll do it. 

Just watch.

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.

How much is too much?

How much water is too much? 

It depends, doesn’t it?  How thirsty are you?  How much do you have?  What is the rationale for any limits?

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”.  Charter schools – despite some well-publicized failures – have been a huge success in Minnesota.  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.  For many of them – myself included –  it’s been a Godsend. 

And why would the establishment care?

Well, that’d speak to that “motivation for arson” thing we were talking about above.

No, we’re not there yet.  But we will get there.

First, we have the boogymen:

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.

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?

Former GOP chairman Ron Eibensteiner and his wife are the founders of KidsFirst Scholarships, which award privately funded vouchers [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.

A “privately funded voucher” is the same as a “chaste pregnancy”.  Nick!  It’s called a scholarship, numbnuts!

But it’s OK – because in reporting Eibensteiner’s serial breakins around North Minneapolis to force families to accept their “private vouchers”, we are almost there – the motivation for these men’s attempt to torch “our” schools!

Critics 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.

Not to mention the teaching of evolutionary science.

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 his face.

Right?

Wrong:

The fire has been set. Public schools have lost thousands of students to charter schools and open enrollment

DING DING DING DING DING!

Public schools have lost thousands of students – enough to force the Minneapolis Public Schools to consider closing branches, enough to set the district into a frenzy of “reform”…

…well, no.  No reforms are in on the way.  No increased focus on reading, match, science and history.  No reassessment of an education model that is an untrammelled failure that can not 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).

No.  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.  They just want more money.  Oh, yeah – and to find a way to shut off the escape valve that so many parents are using.

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.

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.  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. 

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.

No.  They are reacting pragmatically.  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.

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.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 4:50 am and is filed under Education, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.