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The Brain Gold Standard: A Private-Sector Blueprint to Retire the Federal Debt and Restore American Civility

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By Don Allen We live in a nation frozen in a cycle of deep denial. As our national debt rapidly marches toward $39 trillion, and annual interest payments surpass the staggering $1 trillion threshold, the traditional political class offers no viable solutions [406, 815]. Instead, we are presented with a false choice: raise taxes on a struggling middle class or print more fiat money, diluting the purchasing power of the very citizens we claim to protect [1, 139]. Meanwhile, the social fabric of our communities continues to fray [424]. Disparities in educational readiness and long-term opportunity widen by zip code [577], and government bureaucratic programs consistently fail to deliver the high-quality early childhood outcomes necessary to break the cycle of generational poverty [424, 650]. As Strauss and Howe warned in The Fourth Turning, we are in a decisive era of upheaval where the old civic order must be replaced with a fresh lens of Western civilization values [134]. To break this...
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Somewhere Between Home and School: What's Happening to Our Children?

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  By Don Allen  Saturday night left me thinking about a question that educators, parents, and community leaders should all be asking: What is happening to our children? As I looked outside my home, I noticed five teenagers running from house to house in my neighborhood. They eventually entered an apartment building before making their way into my neighbor's backyard. Concerned about what I was seeing, I walked outside and asked, "Hey, you guys, what are you doing back there? What's going on?" One of the teenagers replied, "We're hiding. Someone's trying to kill us." I responded by telling them they couldn't be hiding in someone else's backyard because it was private property. I asked whether they wanted me to call the police. Instead of hearing respect or even an explanation, one of the teenagers responded by cursing at me. That encounter lasted less than a minute, but it represented something much larger than five young people trespassing...
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Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA
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When the Political Process Eats Its Own

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  I wasn’t there, nor would I be. My research  found   no verified evidence   that “Black delegates” as a group ignored Sheriff Dawanna Witt. What is confirmed: Witt received about   58% , below the   60% endorsement threshold , withdrew after multiple ballots, and the fight centered on law enforcement, ICE/protest response, and DFL factional politics. ( Star Tribune ) By Don Allen What happened at the Hennepin County DFL convention should bother anyone who still believes political endorsement processes are supposed to reflect judgment, fairness, and coalition-building. Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt, the sitting sheriff, the first Black person and first woman to hold the office, failed to secure the DFL endorsement after receiving roughly 58 percent of delegate support. The threshold was 60 percent. After several rounds, she withdrew. Let that sink in. A sitting Democratic sheriff, apparently the only Democrat in the race, came within two points of e...
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Location: Hennepin County, MN, USA
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Black People Have Nothing to Fear from Artificial Intelligence (AI)

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  The future will not be determined by whether artificial intelligence becomes more powerful. It will be determined by whether Black people remain capable of recognizing one another in a world increasingly filled with digital noise. By Don Allen I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, a state that seems determined to find itself in the national headlines every week for one reason or another. Every day brings another controversy, another scandal, another public embarrassment, or another issue that many people simply do not want to discuss honestly. Take government accountability. When billions of taxpayer dollars disappear through fraud or mismanagement, my concern is not merely with the individuals who exploited the system. My concern is with the people sitting behind government desks who approved the funding, failed to monitor it, and ignored the warning signs. Accountability does not begin with the thief. It begins with the gatekeeper. But that is a discussion for another day. What c...
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Location: Minnesota, USA
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Why the NAACP’s “Out of Bounds” Campaign Misses the Point

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By Don Allen, Ed.S., M. A. Ed., MAT (ABD) The NAACP’s “Out of Bounds” campaign may be one of the most politically theatrical - and intellectually incomplete activist campaigns launched in recent years. Not because voting rights are unimportant. They are critically important. Not because racial gerrymandering is fake. It is real. But because the NAACP decided to weaponize Black college athletes as symbolic political leverage while conveniently skipping over every adult inside the educational ecosystem who actually understands how these institutions function. Where were the teachers? Where were the professors? Where were the assistant coaches? Where were the academic advisors? Where were the trainers, tutors, custodians, support staff, and campus employees? Where were the Black faculty unions? Where were the Black studies departments? Where were the longtime HBCU scholars? Where were the actual educational practitioners? Instead, the NAACP appears to have built ...
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Location: Minnesota, USA
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Twin Cities Charter Schools and School Choice will Save Our Black Children

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  By Don Allen, Ed.S., M.A.Ed., MAT Something has gone terribly wrong in Minneapolis Public Schools, and we can no longer afford to keep pretending that everything is fine. For decades, the Minneapolis Public School (MPS) system has been in a state of institutional collapse, a crisis unfolding in plain sight. Despite countless initiatives and promises of reform, the achievement gaps for Black children continue to widen, and a significant majority are not acquiring basic literacy and numeracy skills. This is not merely a systemic failure; it is, as I have argued, the operation of a "social cabal" that actively harms learning, prioritizing bureaucratic self-preservation and political expediency over the educational well-being of our most vulnerable students. The current state of affairs is masked by a veneer of public-relations spin and superficial metrics such as graduation rates, which conveniently obscure the deeper reality of student disengagement and inadequate learning ou...
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Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA
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Click, Swipe, Believe: The Feed is Winning

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By Don Allen, Journal Of A Black Teacher (2026) Let me say it plainly: people aren’t reading anymore. They’re reacting. They’re scrolling. They’re believing whatever shows up between a swipe and a double-tap. And the feed, cold, calculated, algorithmically precise, is winning. I was going to say, "Knowledge is power." But in the past decade or so, we’ve learned to rely more on visibility to convey power. The perceived authenticity of information is sometimes as important as its actual veracity, and indeed, its mere publication. Ultimately, if something is seen, it becomes more credible than if it hasn’t been revealed at all. And in today’s information era, an imaginative graphic or creative clip is all you need to give that information the visibility it deserves to be seen and believed. As a Black American man, I see this trend having particularly pernicious effects in the Black Community. It’s not that Black People are unintelligent or uninterested in reading. The problem is...
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Location: Minnesota, USA
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