Twin Cities Charter Schools and School Choice will Save Our Black Children
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...