THE LAST WAR IS AGAINST THE CIVIL SERVICE:

Pension gap divides public and private workers (Dennis Cauchon, 2/21/07, USA TODAY)

Johnnie Nichols, a civilian Defense Department employee, contributes to a federal pension that will let him retire at age 56, after 32 years of service.

His wife, Kimberly, a math teacher at a private business college, has no pension after two decades of teaching and running a horse farm. Their marriage reflects the new world of retirement: government employees who have secure benefits and private workers who increasingly are on their own.

"If we were both in her shoes, we'd be in a world of hurt," says Nichols, 45, an information technology manager in Middletown, Ind. "We wouldn't be able to retire until age 67."

The notion that retiring only twenty years before you die is "a world of hurt" is insane.

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Mission: Impossible: A radically retooled Minneapolis School Board tries to stop the bleeding and start over (Beth Hawkins, 2/20/07, citypages.com)

''What we've inherited is a big ball of ugly," says Chris Stewart. "No matter where you touch it, pull on it, it's ugly."

The topic is the Minneapolis Public Schools, and Stewart is so engrossed he's been trying to get the same tidy, precise rectangle of chicken enchilada to his mouth for 15 minutes, without success. He picks the fork up, gets it halfway to his lips, and gets derailed by another thought. The fork hovers for a moment, and then slowly sinks back to the plate.

Stewart has served on Minneapolis's Board of Education for a scant six weeks, during which time it's become clear that there will be no honeymoon. The backlog of business left undone by the last board is too big, the weeks ahead hold little but unpleasant decisions: Some 13 schools and programs will probably need to be closed, contract negotiations with the teachers' union haven't begun but are already threatening to turn nasty, and over the next three years a $50 million budget shortfall is forecast.

And those are just the fires that need to be put out immediately. In the medium term, someone has to figure out how to stanch the exodus of kids leaving the district--25 percent in the last six years, with projected continuing losses of 4 to 5 percent a year.

"No one respects the board," Stewart says. "No one expects it to make things happen."

Even though most people would agree, this isn't the kind of talk people are used to hearing from politicians. Stewart doesn't seem to care. For starters, in a city where DFL endorsees are school board shoo-ins, he's a conservative African American evangelical--not the kind of guy who typically makes it through the party caucus. [...]

In the coming weeks, the MPS board will consider a number of tough topics. The debate over school closings is guaranteed to be emotional and divisive, especially if Stewart is right that budget realities mean the board needs to look at cutting even popular and successful programs. (At press time, a preliminary discussion about facilities was scheduled to take place at the board's regular meeting on February 20, a list of facilities and programs staff recommend closing was to be released March 6, and the board was tentatively committed to making a decision March 13.)

But the battle over closings is likely to pale in comparison to the issues expected to be on the table in the upcoming contract negotiations between the district and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.

The thorniest is the way teachers are placed in schools. Currently, when there's an opening, teachers bid for it and the applicant with the most seniority wins. Consequently, the teachers with the most experience tend to be clustered in the most desirable schools, which also happen to be the programs with the most children from middle- and upper-income families and the fewest children with Individual Education Plans--code for special ed.

High teacher turnover and burnout rates have long frustrated African American families, but it's become particularly acute in the last five years, as cuts in state funding have meant massive layoffs. The cuts have reached so deep into the union's seniority list that most MPS teachers either have 10 or more years of experience, or virtually none.

New teachers on probationary status tend to land in a handful of schools, some of which have had more than 200 percent turnover in the last three years. "When each new round of layoffs comes, those probationary teachers who've made it through a year with those high-poverty kids are gone," laments Carla Bates, an education activist with three kids in MPS.

She points to district statistics that show that from 2000 to 2003, five of the district's elementary schools had turnover of more than 200 percent: Jordan Park's core staff turned over by 443 percent during that time; Lincoln Elementary's by 330 percent; Green Central Park, 333; Cityview, 258; and Anderson Open, 222. All are large schools with high numbers of English-language learners (accounting for half of enrollment at Green, Jordan Park, and Anderson), large contingents of special ed students, and, most telling, student bodies filled with kids living in poverty.

Stewart and the other board members interviewed for this article say the district can't make headway on the achievement gap between minorities and white students, the political third rail running under so many of the crises of the last few years, without a major change. [...]

TWENTY YEARS AGO, AT THE AGE of 19, Stewart set out to make his fortune in California. It was supposed to be the land of opportunity, but even after four interviews with McDonald's he couldn't land a job. He'd even ditched his New Orleans drawl--"I was acutely aware how much smarter I got when I lost my accent." But after a few months Stewart was sleeping in a park.

He got on a bus headed east. Everywhere the bus stopped Stewart would get off, find a newspaper, and look at the want ads to see what the job market was like. "Salt Lake City, Omaha, Des Moines"--he shivers at the last--"the economy had tanked."

He got off the bus in Minneapolis. The next day he had two jobs, one in the young men's department of the Donaldson's at Southdale, and another across the hall in a nut shop. He was thrilled, but even before he got out of the mall he realized he'd never be able to put together first and last month's rent.

He was still pondering this when he met a girl whose mother rented rooms in her house in St. Louis Park. She called home, and her mom said Stewart could stay if he promised to hand over $60 from his first paycheck and another $60 every week thereafter.

To Stewart, this particular yarn is about social capital. To get to the moral, fast-forward 13 years. Stewart was working for a staffing company, one that wasn't particularly interested in the kind of temp workers who couldn't get permanent jobs on their own.

"We didn't even want 'those people' in the lobby," he says. "But [the company] did like the commission it got when I placed someone on a job." His bosses dubbed his caseload "the huddled masses," but otherwise they let him be.

One day, someone from a social service agency appeared in the office, wanting to see the guy who could place anyone. She sent him a test case, and when Stewart found the person a job, the woman called him and said she was moving out of town. Did Stewart want her job?

"It was one of the few times in life when God spoke to me. I really believe that," he says. "From that moment on, I was happy. In fact, I was self-righteous."

In his new post, Stewart revisited the subject of social capital daily as he helped welfare recipients find work. But he always felt like he was years too late. After five years, he went to work for the state Department of Employment and Economic Development, where his job now is to work with Minneapolis schools and colleges to make sure they provide the training the state's businesses want future workers to have. Again, he found himself feeling that whatever he might accomplish, it was coming years too late in the lives of his clients.

It had to start in school, he reckoned. But he couldn't get the district's attention to do anything about it, partly because of the administrative staff's notoriously insular culture and partly because the school board and its superintendent were in the process of melting down. Thandiwe Peebles's dramatic flameout in January 2006 was followed by the news that four of the school board's seven members would not seek re-election. Stewart immediately grasped the importance of the moment.

"With four people leaving, there would be this ability to inspire change," he says. And the field of potential replacements didn't do much for him. "One of the things that compelled me to run was the fear that the candidates would be the usual suspects. I did not see a diverse selection of black candidates. There was no one who could challenge the black leadership. There was no conservative.

"Win or lose, I decided to run an as outsider candidate who was going to say what I saw, whether it was palatable or not."

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 21, 2007 9:12 AM