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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Burn Baby Burn
Wednesday 28 February @ 15:32:04 |
 BY DWIGHT HOBBES
Every once in a blue moon, even here in the Twin Cities, where it's taboo to tell the unvarnished truth about anything, some public figure has a PC-lapse and is actually candid. Accordingly, Minneapolis City Council Member Don Samuels shot straight from the hip in, ironically enough, the traditionally controversy-free Mpls/St. Paul magazine. "My children will not darken the door of a Minneapolis public school in this city at this time under these conditions," he flatly stated. "I've said burn North High School [in Samuels' 5th Ward] down! I can't be paying for the education of my neighbors and 72 percent of them are failing--meaning black boys. Something worse than vouchers could come along. If it works, if it sacrifices the entire school system, fine! Get rid of the damn thing! It hadn't worked!"
 From the ensuing fallout, you'd've thought Samuels had said to burn the building down with the kids still in it. The usual knee-jerk, instant Mau-Maus came raging out of the peanut gallery in a hail of self-righteous rhetoric, predictably demanding the asininely absurd--that he step down from his job. Samuels' detractors should be the first ones grabbing a can of gasoline. There was no way they couldn't know he didn't mean anything negative against the students; he obviously didn't mean that he didn't want them to have any place to attend school. It was a case of spotlight-grabbing mouth-almighties indulging in the height of willful ignorance.
Sadly enough, so much hell was raised that the man wound up apologizing for what was nothing worse than refreshing candor. "I found it necessary to apologize," Samuels told Pulse of the Twin Cities, "because, some children and some parents were very disturbed. And, I think, they might've been helped down that path. I did not want at all to distract from the message. I thought it was important to get misunderstandings out of the way completely and return very quickly to the message, which is that things are intolerable and they must be fundamentally and drastically changed. If there is a way to say that that is dramatic enough to get people to listen, but inoffensive [enough] to [have them] not be distracted, that's what I'm after."
He added, "By the way, a couple of those guys that were against me had their children in private schools." So much for a valiant, clarion call to oust the alleged race traitor. The plain fact of the matter is, any black parent who gives a tinker's damn about his or her children's educational well-being will empathize with Samuels' sentiment. The only real problem is that he forgot to tack on exactly what should be done to raise from the ashes a system of operations that gives a damn about black kids instead of warehousing them as the next generation of minimum-wage workers at McBurger Thing.
Hell, when I lucked up on a private school that offered my child almost a full academic scholarship, I yanked her out of her Minneapolis public school so fast that there was barely enough to time to buy the uniform for her first day of classes. If I hadn't, someone should've called the county on me for neglect. After all, we're talking about an institution where just over a decade ago, white-flight put the handwriting on the wall. Frankly, I'd sleep peacefully if my daughter never set eyes on a white person again, much less sat next to one in class. But, it's a fact of life: When white kids leave a public school, the quality of education is next to follow.
Mr. Magoo could've seen the ensuing deterioration that was on its way. Sure enough, it eventually got to the point where the lack of white students spelled a lack of money. Former superintendent Carol Johnson voluntarily took a pay cut to help things financially (though no one on the Board of Education offered to sacrifice a thin dime). In 2003, when she realized the rowboat was taking on so much water that bailing just didn't work, Johnson quite sensibly jumped ship and went to Memphis, Tenn. Some 230 teachers and administrators who worked in Minneapolis during the 2003-04 school year secured employment elsewhere in 2004--a full two-thirds shifting to suburban districts. Then, the board--that great guiding light--let Executive Director of Facilities Dan Hambrock get away with hiring an architectural firm, instead of an education-oriented organization, to consult on school closings. And, of course, those sites targeted for closing principally serve--if you can say "serve" with a straight face--kids of color. Pop quiz: How many members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education do you think had their children enrolled in schools that were on the chopping block?
We have academic apartheid. Schools educating white kids have the resources to do just that--educate them. Places where the other kids go are out of luck: overcrowded and bright, shining practitioners of social promotion, i.e. getting them the hell out, whether they pass muster or not, to make room for the next cattle call. I hope and pray that incoming superintendent Bill Green can turn this mess around. In the meantime, however, the abysmal state of affairs is enough to make each and every truly concerned parent echo Don Samuels' statement. Indeed, as '60s radical H. Rap Brown once said, "Burn, baby, burn." ||
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