There’s a reason so many “progressives” are so very very upset that Katherine Kersten remains at the Strib writing columns.

It’s because while the likes of Lori Sturdevant and Jon Tevlin can be counted on, after all the “hard-boiled reporter” BS subsides, to pretty much say “Yep, Mr. Emperor, in the opinion of this ol’-fashioned gum-shoe reporter who really really knows stuff, that suit looks marvelous – and when Arne Carlson ran the GOP, they’d agree”.  Kersten doesn’t.

I’m trying to imagine any of the Strib‘s bullpen of legacy columnists even noticing the story of the Harvest Preparatory School, much less writing about it:

A north Minneapolis school at Olson Memorial Hwy. and Humboldt Avenue has demographics that seem a sure predictor of our state’s most intractable education problem. The student population there is 99 percent black and 91 percent poor, and about 70 percent of the children come from single-parent families.

Such “racial isolation” is widely considered a formula for defeat — a hallmark of the cavernous “achievement gap” that separates poor, minority students from their more affluent white peers. In recent decades, Minnesota has spent billions of dollars attempting to narrow the gap but has little to show for it.

That’s why the achievements of the school I just described should be shouted from the rooftops.

You’d think.

I’m guessing the Strib and the “hard-boiled journalists” in its columnists bullpen haven’t gotten permission from MN2020 to write about schools not approved by the Minnesota Federation of Teachers.

In this year’s state math tests in grades three through eight, this school outperformed every metro-area school district, including Edina and Wayzata. Its students outperformed all state students in reading proficiency (77 percent to 75 percent), and state white students in math proficiency (82 percent to 65 percent).

The complaint I hear most about Kersten – other than the fact that she’s unclean a conservative  – is that she doesn’t have a “background as a reporter”.

But all that “background” doesn’t seem to have taught any of the Strib’s stable of reliable DFL criers to dig behind the party line when it comes to education.  Kersten does:

Black males are among our state’s lowest-performing groups of students, but at Best Academy, 100 percent of eighth-grade boys scored proficient in reading. “Best Academy has the highest proportion of African-American boys of any institution in Minnesota,” says founder and director Eric Mahmoud. “The only institution that competes with us is the prison system.”

How have Mahmoud and his team worked this magic? Mahmoud is an electrical engineer by training. “At the factory I used to run, if we had a failure rate of 0.5 percent, we’d shut down the line until we figured out the problem,” he says. “In our education system, we’re failing with 40, 50, 60 percent of our African-American children, but we keep the system that turns out the same product, year after year.”

Wait – someone has actually addressed the “achievement gap” that seems to have so vexed the Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Anoka-Hennepin, Duluth and other school boards, the Minnesota Department of Education, the waves of superstar superintendents who ride into and back out of town on waves of money and perks, the DFL Caucus in the Legislature, and Tom Dooher and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, who seem to have been too busy filming commercials to have looked into the issue themselves?

Why, it’s almost like a journalist is actually covering the issue!

Read the whole editorial for the Harvest Prep story – which must drive the relentlessly-feminist “educational academy” nuts, since it entirely confirms Christina Hoff-Summers’ research about how one goes about reaching in particular boys that the system has forgotten.

And ask yourself why it is that in a metro with three school megadistricts that are simultaneously academic and financial sinkholes, with achievement gaps (especially in Saint Paul) that trail even the rest of the nation’s shameful record, and that graduate a shamefully low share of minority students, and that is starving for some good news on education but is fed a constant diet of puffed-up faintly-painted teachers union spin on charter schools, that Kersten’s column is the only coverage that this, and other, charter school success stories have gotten in the Twin Cities news or opinion media?