Journal of a Black Teacher

Minnesota’s competitive grant procedures are supposed to follow clear, statute-driven policies designed to protect public funds before, during, and after they’re awarded. Under Minnesota law and the Office of Grants Management (OGM) policies, all executive branch agencies, including the Department of Education, are required to conduct fair, evidence-based, competitive reviews; assess applicant capacity to perform; document reviewer decisions; avoid conflicts of interest; and monitor performance once funds are disbursed. By Don Allen, Journal Of A Black Teacher (2025) - Editorial Opinion St. Paul, MN…Here’s the plain truth: what happened in Minnesota wasn’t a “Somali problem.” It was a systems problem; a leadership problem, created and sustained inside Minnesota’s own state agencies. When billions of public dollars slide out the door with barely a question asked, the issue isn’t the people who noticed the open vault. The issue is the people who left it unlocked. Patrick Lencioni, in...

Minnesota governor Tim Walz stands at a crossroads. The headlines surrounding fraud, mismanagement, and oversight failures have eroded public trust, not because voters expect perfection, but because they expect candor, ownership, and competence. Press conferences built around talking points won’t repair that damage. Crisis communication will. The shift means acknowledging failure without defensiveness, getting ahead of investigations instead of reacting to them, and pairing transparency with real accountability that Minnesotans can verify. It means elevating auditors, whistleblowers, and independent experts rather than partisan surrogates. Most importantly, it reframes criticism as data, not attack. If Walz wants to compete, and win in 2026, he must demonstrate a governor who learns, corrects, and leads through truth. The comeback pathway isn’t political theater; it’s disciplined crisis leadership that shows taxpayers their government is capable of cleaning its own house. By Don All...

I’ve taught for 15 years. I know what a classroom should feel like: welcoming, with whiteboard markers, curiosity, a little chaos, and a whole lot of learning. What it should not feel like is a pulpit. Yet that’s precisely where Minnesota seems to be steering our schools with its new ethnic-studies mandate . By Don Allen, Ed.S., M.A.Ed., MAT (ABD) Abstract The new requirements for Ethnic Studies in Minnesota , which are slated to go live during the 2026-27 school year, come with a liberationist pedigree that all too often reads like empty pedagogy that substitutes slogans for scholarship. This is a call to “disrupt,” “dismantle,” and “challenge systems,” but it never answers the most fundamental question every teacher must pose to every lesson plan: does this help kids read, write, compute, reason, and flourish? As Frantz Fanon cautioned, “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” This mandate forces politicized ideas into a scho...

By Don Allen - Journal Of A Black Teacher (2025) Minnesota’s newest export isn’t innovation or justice, it’s exclusion. And not just the old Jim Crow kind, but a slick, bureaucratic variety wrapped in buzzwords like “ equity ” and “ accountability .” Let’s call it what it is: the new racism , state-sanctioned exclusion of Black Minnesotans from economic opportunity, masked as progressive policy. Take the multi-billion-dollar Feeding Our Future scandal . According to reports, over half of the $1.8 billion billed through state programs was tied to fraud, waste, or abuse, source: KSTP News . Where was Minnesota’s Department of Education ( MDE ) during this free-for-all? Asleep? Willfully blind? Busy scrutinizing the wrong people? While fake meal sites raked in millions, actual Black-led churches across the state were feeding congregations daily with no help from the state. These churches, often run by Black Minnesotans born, raised, and educated right here, were left out of the fundin...

 google.com, pub-9652347518196927, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

The lawsuit between Minneapolis Public Schools and the U.S. Department of Justice could be fixed overnight, if only someone dared to say the obvious: the district is too big to succeed. That’s right, shrink it. Fewer layers, fewer “executive directors of innovation equity leadership,” and more actual teachers who know their students' names. Instead of bloated bureaucracy and selective “diversity” programs that only help insiders, a smaller, leaner system might actually... function. Imagine that. The DOJ wouldn’t need to sue if we stopped outsourcing equity to policies that protect the privileged few. Cut the district, trim the egos, and maybe, just maybe, Black and Native male educators would be hired for their qualifications, not their connections. Wild idea, right? Common sense. Too dangerous for policy. Read the filing here PDF. By Don Allen (Editorial Opinion) Journal of A Black Teacher (2025) The lawsuit that the United States Department of Justice filed against the Minneapol...

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become.” — No Name in the Street (1972) The idea was to layer in financial literacy education from kindergarten onward. The lesson plan could have been as easy as having a piggy bank for every kindergartener to save a quarter (.25 cents) each week over the 10-month school year. I can't be upset Maryland's BlackFem; it's local decision-makers who continue to show malfeasance in decision-making.  By Don Allen (Journal of A Black Teacher - 2025) - Editorial Opinion I get the frustration. It's like watching someone skip the obvious local talent pool to roll the dice on an out-of-towner, only for it to blow up in a $900K lawsuit. I break this down step by step based on the details from the Star Tribune piece , and I'll weave in some context on why it might've gone sideways (and yeah, why ignoring the Twin Cities' deep bench of financial literacy pros feels like a head-scratche...

Meanwhile, anyone bold enough to ask why the results never change is treated like a disruptive guest at a dinner party, tolerated, but only if they promise not to mention the burnt turkey. Welcome to the team no one actually wants to be on. By Don Allen - Journal Of A Black Teacher I know what loss feels like. I’ve carried it, survived it, and learned from it. Nothing teaches you the anatomy of disappointment like seeing systems fail the very children they claim to uplift. Since the beginning of 2025, while working on my dissertation and digging through mountains of Minnesota education data , I’ve come face-to-face with a truth that is impossible to ignore: we are losing, and far too many people seem strangely comfortable with it. When you look at the numbers coming out of the Twin Cities , reading proficiency , math proficiency , chronic absenteeism , and behavior incidents , you don’t see hope. You see patterns. You see neglect disguised as progress. You see the same “solutions” rec...

Oh, STEM and STEAM …the magic buzzwords that every underserved school district has been chanting like a spell for the last twenty years. Walk into any school brochure, PowerPoint, or grant application, and you’d think kids in underfunded communities are basically building Mars rovers between lunch and sixth period. Administrators proudly point to a donated 3D printer gathering dust in the corner, or a “ STEM Day ” that happens once a year, right between standardized testing and whatever crisis comes next. Yet after two full decades of promises, slogans, and colorful STEAM posters taped to cracked walls, what do we really have? Students who can’t take home a functioning laptop. Classrooms with broken microscopes. Robotics teams that never got off the ground because the coach quit after the second week. Teachers who get “training” that amounts to a YouTube video and a prayer. If this is STEM, then no wonder Black America isn’t preparing for orbit; we’re still trying to get working Wi...

By Don Allen, JOABT Every Fall, Minnesota parents, teachers, and policymakers await the release of the MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments) results. And every year, the story remains depressingly consistent: public and charter schools in the Twin Cities have campuses that have never once broken the 70% proficiency barrier in reading, math, or science. Disclaimer : In some schools that sit on the fringes of districts where the dominant culture is the majority, those schools have seen good numbers. The further you move into the Twin Cities, the lower the numbers dip. Let’s be blunt, this is not the fault of the children. This is a direct indictment of site leadership, district leadership, and charter management organizations that continue to run schools without accountability, vision, or urgency. For too long, we’ve accepted the easy narrative that blames “the kids” or “their families”  for not being 'academic.' We hear the same tired talking points: poverty, trauma, abse...

Fanon (Franz) would argue that the struggle extends beyond mere access to another's system of meaning; it encompasses the pursuit of entirely new systems. In this light, the absence of Black bodies at No Kings Day is not merely a void; it serves as a silent manifesto. By Don Allen for Journal of A Black Teacher (2025) When we explore these photos from the so-called "No Kings Day" festival, lit with parades, costume wear, and street festivals, what becomes noteworthy is not only the massive number of white participants, but also that this spectacle contrives to reinforce a sense of monarchy and nobility aesthetic that was historically denied to black people. It is therefore no surprise that to many black people on these shores, this festival feels peripheral, even alienating. Fanon declares that "the colonial world is a world cut in two" - an exclusion that moves well beyond the material, to the structural and psychic levels. In other words, African people in Ame...

In the Twin Cities and across the nation, public education has been plagued by what can only be described as passionate incompetence. This phrase captures the disconnect between good intentions and ineffective outcomes. Over the past five years, administrators have rolled out initiative after initiative, promising transformation: new literacy models, equity frameworks, technology rollouts, social-emotional curricula, and testing reforms. Each was championed with passion, urgency, and rhetoric about “student-centered change.” Yet, despite the energy and resources poured into these programs, the results are precise: proficiency rates remain stagnant, achievement gaps persist, and families, teachers, and communities continue to feel the weight of systems that do not deliver. Passion without competence is no solution, and the failures of these past half-decade reforms demonstrate that schools cannot afford more recycled promises dressed up as innovation. What is required now is competence,...