Katie Simon-Datych wrote:
>Blast me for these thoughts! Somehow education it is a
>different issue for me than city council, or mayor
>(nonpartisan seats). Never should school board
>elections be complicated by party endorsement.
>What do other readers think?
I think we should quit pretending that any race at
the city/county level is nonpartisan and grow up. Any time
you have a difference of opinion as to ends and means, you
are going to find political parties lining up on either side
of the question. This is why school board candidates, city
council candidates, library board candidates, etc., etc. all
can be found filling out questionnaires and showing up for
screening interviews with various political groups that have
an ax to grind, whether those groups are the teachers unions,
the Teamsters, the Republican and DFL and Green parties,
or the Monster Raving Loony Party.
It is not an inexpensive proposition to run for political
office, especially if you are running for a city office where
no public financing is available. This drives candidates into
the arms of the unions and political parties, who can bring
money and manpower to bear on behalf of the candidate. By the
same token, the parties all have different views on the
matters at hand before the candidates. In the case of school
boards, the DFL will expect candidates to not upset their
union allies by proposing radical notions such as teacher
competency testing, merit pay, and vouchers, while the RPM
will expect exactly the opposite (in most cases). The Greens,
given their bias toward local governance of schools, will have
different views from the other two parties. No party will
cross-endorse another party's candidates. In fact, most party
screening committees will ask candidates seeking endorsement
whether they'll abide by the endorsement decision of the party
and not go off the reservation and look for some other party
to endorse them.
Most voters want some idea of where their candidates
stand, but it's a rare voter (in my experience) who will
actually take the trouble to sit down and read what the various candidates have to say
for themselves in the Star
Tribune, much less look at the literature produced by the
various campaigns. They would rather know if the candidate
in question has the DFL/Labor endorsement. No kidding, in my
occasional bouts of service as an election judge, I have had
voters come up and ask me for a copy of the DFL/Labor sample
ballot and be somewhat put out when I told them no, partisan
political materials weren't allowed in the polling places.
No, endorsements do not actually advance the cause of
education one bit. All they do is serve as shorthand to let
you know in a very general way what the candidate stands for.
This is all that they are meant to do, and expecting them to
do more is just plain silly. In the same light, continuing
to pretend that the elected officials we send to City Hall or
West Broadway are doing our business in a nonpartisan manner
is equally silly. There are indeed differences between the
way DFLers plow the streets and the way RPMers get it done,
and the same is true of education. Let's quit pretending
otherwise and get on with it.
---
Kevin Trainor
RPM Candidate HD 61A
East Phillips
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