Guest post by David Boehnke
On February 5, I spent five hours learning about the Minneapolis Public Schools’ new “Comprehensive District Design,” first at a community forum led by a group of MPS teachers at North Commons Park, and then at the district’s own “listening session” at Bethune Elementary School, a short walk away.
The meetings couldn’t have been more different.
The first, led by a pair of black teachers running for union office, was an open conversation. Different concerns, experiences, and opinions came together, people learned things and left more connected and informed, although many were still stressed by the district’s lack of authentic engagement with community members.
The MPS listening session at Bethune did involve listening, but it was the district doing the talking. After a lengthy presentation of technical administrative changes, audience questions were written on note cards. A few were then asked and answered by a diverse display of district higher ups.
The format generated skepticism and confusion. Why was so much work being done to prevent the hundreds there from giving real feedback or talking to each other?
As is often the case, the most interesting parts were side conversations in the hallway – and the picket outside. A group of Educational Support Professionals (ESPs) greeted us as we entered, asking if we would come to their next union contract negotiations.
Apparently there are over a hundred Davis Center people who make over 100,000 a year, while the ESPs, a unit far more diverse than teachers (although those on the picket line were mostly white) who also work directly with students, can’t afford to live on one job.
So why is there a need for the Comprehensive District Design plan and what does it do?
First, it’s been said that the district is financially unstable due to changing demographics and families leaving – 80% of whom are people of color. Second, there are legal concerns: with potential lawsuits if schools are more than 86% people of color – although this does not apply to white students. There are also difficulties involved with having so many schools where more than 80% of students qualify for free and reduced lunch.
These legal concerns of concentrated race and poverty are also identified by the district as the core causes of MPS’ intense racial inequities – and their primary solution, according to CDD documents, is to increase integration, along with some teacher training.
The district’s plan also prioritizes reducing transportation costs by making most schools attended by people who live by them “community schools,” while moving magnets to the center of the city, making 14,000 students change schools in the process.
MPS administrators say this will stop parents from leaving the district, allow more money to be invested in academics, and prevent school closings and other dire financial consequences.
Yet the materials and presentation hosted by the district at Bethune were confusing. The district speaks of “five plans” while really only having one, with minor variations. Parent surveys which assisted plan creation seem to have been creatively reinterpreted, with concerns for safety of students in schools rewritten as concerns about walking to school, for example.
And while it is admirable to try to find structural barriers to racist outcomes, to reduce transit times, and to shift the cost of integration from students of color to white students, it is questionable that this plan does that.
For example, according to MPS, 70% of the 14,000 students who will have to change schools are students of color, more than their percentage in the district as a whole. And that’s a tremendous number of students – and staff – to move around.
So, it seems we want the same things but it’s hard to trust MPS’ current approach.
In fact, what one comes to realize then, after wading through confusing language and barriers to conversation is that the District doesn’t know how to do the racial equity work it says it wants to do – and they don’t trust families, communities, or educators to make that happen, either. One worries that their urgency to make change fast is to cover over that fact, rather than create a real process with those whose lives will be impacted by their decisions.
This could explain why all their changes seem to be up in $100,000-a-year land, far from our students and communities.
If community schools were a magic bullet to solve enrollment and teacher diversity, we’d see that in such schools in our district now.
If families of color were treated with respect already, they probably wouldn’t be leaving.
If the district cared about having more teachers of color and culturally relevant curriculum, they would have more teachers of color after fifteen years of working on the problem, and they would have ethnic studies everywhere substantively, not symbolically.
If true engagement was the plan, MPS would have community conversations, not elaborate events to collect comment cards. They would empower the bottom-up knowledge of the thousands of families of color, in partnership with educators and white parents, to set school boundaries, determine curriculum, create community, maybe even create an “inclusion revolution.”
Because after all, there are people doing marvelous work in the district, but this plan doesn’t seem to protect them. In fact it seems like this is yet another cycle of the district systematically disrupting and pushing out people for doing the work they say they want done.
Some of this showed up in the meeting hosted by teachers at North Commons Park. A teacher talked about a Social Emotional Learning Conference they planned and how the District attended because they didn’t know how to do that work on their own.
Parents spoke of facing increasing roadblocks from both a Northside school and the district’s central office regarding safety concerns with their child . A staff person expressed frustration about daily racism in the Davis Center and in schools. Southside parents came wanting to hear thinking from other parts of the city as well as continuity for the diverse schools they love for their children.
Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) members expressed concerns with the union’s lack of a planned response to this District Design, as well as its “official inability” to address racist targeting by administration or other union members.
There were also discussions of why teachers of color leave schools and how to retain them, and of wanting to not have two internal hiring processes prior to external hires in order to hire new teachers of color before other districts do so.
This overlaps with concerns of many union people about attacks on seniority, which is something that many corporate-funded groups support. That said, in this context it was less about attacking the union and more about asking what it would actually take to get the type of staffing we need in our schools.
But the marvelous part of real conversation is that it generates new ideas and opens options. It reveals similar desires from parents on the north and south side, families and staff. That all of us want to have more control over our schools and many of us truly want to combat racism. That our lived experiences – combined – show us that so much more is possible in our schools, even if it has to be against the top down, non-transparent ways of the district, and sadly often the union as well.
We do need a vision for schools worth fighting for. We need our schools to work for our communities. We need communities to be at the table, not as bodies to be counted but as people with local knowledge who are necessary to create good schools – and preferably as a mass movement that makes such involvement a requirement of any major change, like the one proposed in the CDD.
As we left I was reminded that North High School is open only because community forced the issue. And that the current superintendent is only there due to community pressure against a racist curriculum and corporate takeover. That these are our schools, and School Board members are supposed to represent us.
The world is run by those who show up and take strategic action. What does the future hold? What will the community do this time?
The district is going to reveal its finalized CDD plan at the March 24 school board meeting with a vote expected at the board’s April 14 meeting.
David Boehnke is a Northside teacher and resident currently focused on working with prisoners to change the prison system. He has been working for racial and social justice in schools since he was a teenager, and for a decade in MPS. Comments or critiques welcome at dboehnke@gmail.com.