Journal of a Black Teacher

  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...

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...