“M” emailed me a couple days ago with a critique of the Duluth Schools and is anonyomous to me because he/she is paranoid in the new Trump reality and staying highly encrypted. Here is a portion of the reply email I sent him/her this morning.
M,
I have the luxury of only getting a little email to respond to. Our short email courtship therefore is welcome and you are asking all the right questions. I’ll give you my honest, if not necessarily accurate answers, based on my thirty-six-year history of being associated with the School District from substitute teacher, DFT member, PTA parent, perennial unsuccessful candidate for the Board, seven-time target of the DFT, rabble rousing spokesman against the Red Plan without a referendum vote, and finally, longest serving current School Board member with eleven years of service to date: Here’s your text with my thoughts embedded.
Are teachers actually being engaged about curriculum and assessment policy? (Yes at least to a degree. State and Federal mandates crimp our local control on this as does the aforementioned annual transfer of millions of dollars in general fund money to pay off Red Plan bonds.)
Or is that just handed down from on high? (No, not all of it. See answer above.)
The same for professional development opportunities. (Ditto)
Money for this keeps getting trimmed and has since I was first on the Board when in 2001 (I think) after the loss of an excess levy referendum the DFT agreed to sacrifice their Professional Development funding for other more “important” expenses.)
Who makes up the district’s achievement gap effective leadership team? I would be interested in hearing their ideas about how to fix this one problem. [We have some wonderful administrators doing their darnedest to address this but its still an honest-to-God disaster. We are doing very poorly. I think its partly culture. Our mostly white teachers have good intentions but like a lot of cops don’t know how to deal with minorities with legitimate and long-standing grievances. We have all the right rhetoric and policies but words on paper only go so far. We are making strides in ending massive school suspensions of minority (in fact all) students. But, we have a long time institutional ineptitude in hiring minority teachers and we have, especially in our secondary schools, class sizes that are too big for teachers to effectively monitor struggling students.]
What happens when Edison opens their high school? (We will lose a couple hundred high school students. They will leave our 9-12 schools and stay in Edison. I believe it will take four years for this to happen sixty or so kids each year until they add grades 9,10,11,12 year by year)
How low does Denfeld’s population need to go before it is unfeasible to keep that large of a school open? (I see this as mostly a “theoretical” possibility. It will lose students and we desperately need to find a counterweight. We could change the school boundaries but that would mean a civil war. We could “pilot” a seven-hour day at Denfeld. We could turn the two high schools into two campuses of a singular entity and let kids travel between them. We could reinstate Interactive Television classrooms. Or we could do bits and pieces of all these things. What we can’t do is keep to the status quo.)
I ask you because to the majority these questions are unwelcome (no kidding but those are the most important kind of questions) and to [the majority school board members] seem rhetorical. (I would say that the School Board members who haven’t gotten off the pot have simply been sedated with institutional platitudes and “positivity” that are not warranted)
I hate to cast aspersions upon democrats, but [they’re] not acting in the best interests of their historical base. These four are mere quislings. For supposed progressives, they seem inordinately afraid of change.
(Treating your allies like quislings is not only unfair its counter productive. By this reckoning it was the quislings that voted Donald Trump into the Oval Office. Desperate times drive people – particularly those mired in too much misery to research – to do desperate things like vote for the guy who threatens to take away your health insurance.)
Harry
