Journal of a Black Teacher

I asked the question : Why are we sending almost 100 8th graders to a secondary school where only 15 of the 750+ students showed up on the MCAs?  (Data from Minnesota School Report Card) By Don Allen (Journal of A Black Teacher) 2025 Twin Cities, MN...One of my original dissertation titles was blunt, maybe even provocative: Do School Children in Minnesota Need to Be at the Bottom of Every List? I kept it just beneath my official title, like a private protest, a reminder of the question I was asking behind the academic language. Because the data doesn’t lie: Black Minnesotans are often last, last in educational outcomes, last in wealth-building opportunities, last in housing equity, and last in entrepreneurial advancement. We are, in many ways, systematically positioned at the margins. Yet, we still hear lofty promises about equity, as if it were a product ready for delivery instead of a long, brutal journey that most of us are still undertaking. The gap between equity and reality i...

By Don Allen - Journal of A Black Teacher  Let’s be honest : starting a new charter school in the Twin Cities should not be a Herculean task, especially when the public schools are doing most of the recruitment work for you. Want 1,000 students in your brand-new charter school? Here’s your blueprint: serve children, teach them to read, show up with structure, and maybe, just maybe, don’t treat families like they're lucky just to be in the building. The truth is, public schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul have stumbled into a crisis of confidence, and it's not just about underfunding or teacher burnout. It's about the chronic inability to meet the basic academic needs of Black, Brown, and low-income students. Parents aren’t blind. They see the chaos. They feel the disrespect. They notice that Johnny is still reading at a second-grade level in seventh grade. And when public schools send home grade reports that look like participation trophies, families know what time it is: i...

Written by Don Allen as an exemplar for 7th grade English and the unit: The Marvel and DC Universe through the Lens of Postmodernism. Students took the following steps to complete their superhero origin stories. Beginning (Describe how your character started as a normal person.) Before he ever picked up a pen, Wolfgang Allen was a quiet boy growing up in a small flat above a bookstore in London. He loved words but didn’t realize they could be powerful. He read everything, from comics to cookbooks, because reading made the world feel less confusing. Teachers noticed he was a thinker, but his writing was always rushed and full of errors. He often asked himself, “Why does writing matter?” Then one day, something changed. Middle (Describe the event that changed them.) On a rainy afternoon, while cleaning out the bookstore’s attic, Wolfgang found an old journal that belonged to his grandfather, a teacher and writer during World War II. Inside was a message scribbled in ink: “If you can writ...

“It is unabashedly ambitious, and yet completely accessible to those willing to put in the time and effort.” Course Evaluation by Don Allen, Ed.S., M.A.Ed., MAT.  Hamline University's "Academic Writing for Graduate Students" (GED 8005-1), taught by Professor Julia Reimer in the Summer of 2025, provided me with a foundational experience, helping me to develop my scholarly voice and enhance my graduate-level writing skills, including experimenting with journal and book writing in tandem with authoring a critical dissertation. As a doctoral student who has been a Piper for 15 years (10-years in graduate school), I took this course seriously and with enthusiasm, I can attest with certainty that GED 8005-1 is more than a support course, it is a required academic rite of passage that needs to be permanently integrated into the Ed.D. program for all subsequent cohorts. I was a little nervous at first because I didn’t want what I thought was a random course to deconstruct my GPA....

A vote of No Confidence with resignations is the next step.  By Don Allen, Ed.S., M.A.Ed., MAT Maybe it’s not politically correct to say this, but when is change actually change, and not just a cosmetic illusion designed to pacify people living in struggle? For the past two weeks, I’ve been driving 30 minutes south of the Twin Cities, past Hastings, Red Wing, and into the fringes of rural-urban comfort. The deeper I drive into the suburbs, the clearer things become—literally and metaphorically. McDonald’s restaurants are immaculate. Gas stations are well-lit and clean. Digital marquees actually spell words correctly. The young people working in these places reflect the communities in which they live. And yes, there are big houses, massive yards, dogs running free, and even cornfields stretching toward the sky like everything around them has room to grow. But when I turn back toward Minneapolis or St. Paul, the mood shifts. It’s not just aesthetics, it’s infrastructure, spirit, and ...