Dirty national money contaminates school elections

National Right wing billionaires are funneling their money into the City to make a play for control of the Minneapolis school board.

Lots of money.

More money than all of the school board candidates combined have raised for their own campaigns.

All of it is going to promote two DFL school board candidates.

Some of the money is coming from decent citizens concerned about our schools and kids. But a good deal of it is flooding into town from super-rich archconservatives who have raided Minnesota with a hidden agenda that transcends our schools and our state. Their demonstrated ideology includes killing unions and doing away with collective bargaining as they are doing in Wisconsin and other states.

Some of the surprising checks were written by Minnesotans, such as a leader of the Photo-ID Amendment (meant to suppress voter participation) that voters in Minnesota struck down; also by a leading supporter of Michelle Bachmann and an anti-union attorney who raised money for Mitt Romney. One significant check to the DFL'ers came from the former Chair of the Minnesota Republican Party.

All of them have squarely targeted their public education bugaboo:

The national anti-teacher movement has always scapegoated teachers and organized labor as the cause of academic failure. It is part of the hackneyed narrative of the Right. Teacher laziness. Teacher unions. Teacher ineptitude. These are the trumpeted causes of poor student performance.

Not crumbling neighborhoods. Not cultural disenfranchisement. Not the billions stripped from public schools by the Right. Or poverty's four horses of the student apocalypse—drugs, (including alcohol), abuse, neglect and discrimination.

The truth is most of the problems in our urban schools have to do with what happens before the students even get there.

About 10% of all kids in the Minneapolis school system are homeless or pick up and move multiple times within the District during a school year. Thousands of other city students are in alternative schools or students sent to our schools from other Districts to recover class credits for failed classes elsewhere, adding to our dismal statistics.

Are these same national contributors taking action against those social dilemmas that contribute most of the school problems?

They are instead working in state legislatures and Congress trying to kill the very funding intended to bring safety, stability and support to families, children and neighborhoods. Positive activism on that turf would immeasurably improve school performance.

These public school teacher-haters possess the cynicism of a diamond appraiser—something precious is in front of them but all they choose to see are flaws.

The moguls make sure their money is carefully parsed and hidden behind the skirts of benignly named organizations, even if the lifeblood donors have other fish to fry.

That's what makes all of this so difficult to sort out.

Most reasonable folks agree there are major problems in our schools. Most of us agree the teachers have to shoulder responsibility and be at the table to hammer out reforms that go directly to the bottom line of student performance and preparation.

But reform groups--and candidates--seeking truly meaningful education reforms commit a grave error by accepting dirty money from proven ideologues who corrupt their bank accounts, image and motives with multiple agendas that extend far beyond public schools.