Over the weekend, the New York Times published a long article about Minneapolis Public Schools district redesign plan, focusing on white students in south Minneapolis being zoned to attend North High. The article looks at issues of segregation, gentrification and school choice in Minnesota. One stat from the story: as a result of the changes, North High went from 98 percent students of color to 93.
President Joe Biden is visiting Rosemount on Tuesday to tout the recently passed infrastructure bill.
Approximately 30% of fully vaccinated Minnesota adults have gotten booster shots. A study of long-haul COVID at Mayo Clinic identified more women experiencing the disease than men.
The Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder has another of its Q&As with newly elected and re-elected Minneapolis City Council members. This one’s with Ward 6’s Jamal Osman.
Parents in Hastings attacked a school board member for having a trans child, CNN reports. She was not re-elected and her family is leaving town.
An Austin man was killed in Ethiopia while caring for his father there.
A school bus driver pleaded guilty to killing a woman in Brooklyn Center after hitting her with his bus last year. A woman who was shot in Brooklyn Center on November 11 was identified as Gabrielle Agnes, a 23-year-old from Duluth.
Paddlefish and sturgeon were returning to Minnesota rivers following the removal of dams.
Racket took a look at national restaurant chains that have only one Minnesota outpost.
Are there any other school districts in the country that bus white kids out of their neighborhoods to more integrated neighborhoods? This is crazy, to bus kids out of their neighborhoods. Just make the schools better, which of course you will never be able to do because of the teachers unions. All the good teachers with tenure would rather not teach in in a neighborhood filled with gangs and violence. So those schools are stuck with young teachers with little experience.
NOBODY will admit this, nobody.
And one last item, many of the kids in the tough neighborhoods have little adult supervision, which is why they come to school so unprepared. The schools can’t fix this. My best friend teaches at the toughest school in St Paul. She’s been hit, spit on, had her car broken into, and much more. She loves her students but said she’s getting close to moving on to the suburbs because of safety issues.
You raise some important issues, Betsy, even if your larger take on this complicated situation is simplistic. Unions are not evil institutions. Unions are a godsend for providing protection to teachers against abusive principals. They need to be improved but we dare not throw the baby out with the bath water.
But many of us have long wished for a remedy for the situation you describe, the situation inner city teachers like me see every day. We propose that the hardest schools are sent the most capable teachers and those teachers would be paid accordingly, which is to say top dollar. These effective teachers would bring their innovative ideas, their successful experiences, their effective instruction, and their deep teacher-student intuition to the hardest schools. This is a blind side of the teachers’ union and they need to make improvements here.
Your friend’s experiences in St. Paul teaching at a hard school and getting abuse – these are not uncommon experiences, unfortunately. Most of my colleagues and I have seen some form of this, and most of us put up with it because they have supportive staff that come together to help.
But the way our society is set up, the aberrant behavior shows up in the public schools where, unlike charter or private schools, the kids cannot be turned away. The kids are not “bad” kids, but they are desperately needy, and they have no words to express it. It is a societal problem and it falls on the public schools to deal with it.
So, when teachers and schools are crying out for more funding and more support, it isn’t because we want to get rich. It’s because we need more bodies in the building. One teacher, no matter how talented and dedicated, cannot provide the needs for 25 of the neediest kids that enter their door. And we need to pay for it, or we keep kicking the can down the road.