The previous post begins by mentioning my state of mind in 1992 when I challenged a Republican nominee for the first time in 1992. As the 1980 Reagan years rolled on it became painfully obvious that I could not win as a Republican in the deeply Democratic west end of Duluth. By that time I’d also lost several teaching jobs. For reasons it would take a book chapter to summarize I set my sights on the attainable elected office of School Board although my trail of lost jobs might be hard to explain away. In the 30 years since my forth School Board defeat I’ve served on the Duluth School Board for a cumulative 12 years surrounding a couple years where I led a titanic battle against the Board for denying Duluth voters the right to vote in a referendum on a massive school building plan. The building plan was called the “Red Plan” and it has been mentioned in a phenomenal 1,925 posts in this blog.
I will mention one more thing on my mind in the early 1990’s. I had started reading a book by Johnathan Kozol called Savage Inequalities. He had become a mentor to several inner city kids with godawful schools and I was so angered reading the book I had to keep putting it down. I never managed to finish it. I just found this copy at a local book store going out of business and will try my hand at finish it.
This is one paragraph in the middle of my speech that was not controversial for a Republican audience. It was about the Duluth Schools. After I released a press release about a massive undercount of dropouts who were kept on the rolls in order to collect undeserved state dollars the administrator in charge of the misreporting went on a sudden vacation to avoid defending it. This is the passage from that speech.
“Last year when I ran for the school Board, I discovered a dirty little secret. I discovered that twenty percent of Duluth’s children drop out of school. If you walk into one of our elementary classrooms, look hard. One in five of the children you see, will not graduate. This is a public relations nightmare for our School Administration which insists that we have a mere six percent dropout rate. But this claim is purely self delusion. It is a delusion which is self destructive. It is a delusion that is symbolic of an America we would rather not acknowledge. We are a nation wearing blinders. Ignorance, is our narcotic, and it is a powerful narcotic.”
Savage Inequalities still make my blood boil and today a column in the New York Times kicked my fury in again. I emailed this quote from the column under the subject heading “Trump Killing Education”.
Opinion:
“What makes the latest guidance from the department so pernicious is that it specifically targets Title I funding, which goes to schools that tend to have higher percentages of students of color.
The willingness of the administration to target schools serving low-income students for noncompliance with its interpretation of federal civil rights law illustrates its commitment to returning American education to a time before the Civil Rights Act, when the nation’s most vulnerable students were largely unprotected.”
Read the entire column here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/opinion/trump-k-12-education.html
There is more to be said about out bastard President. I’ll save it for the next column as I praise Jimmy Carter who is mentioned in the Times opinion piece.