It doesn’t fit the narrative

The rise of iron equity in St. Paul public schools

(A BLM rally at the Saint Paul school board to fire me. Crowd photo credit to John Autey of the Pioneer Press, March 22, 2016)

Six years ago, I called BS on the school-to-prison pipeline. I told public school families on Facebook in St. Paul, Minnesota that kids used iPads for bullying, fights, drug deals, and paid sex — upsetting but true. That’s how to kiss a career and two master’s degrees goodbye in five minutes’ time.

In 2016, Googling “Theo Olson teacher” fetched a hundred hits. Now it’s an ancient sacrifice into the bubbling American wokecano, but then my blast-radius felt huge.

I snapped. After twenty years of teaching, ten of them protecting special education (SpEd) kids, building their pride and stopping them from dropping out, I blew up. I said, show me how I criminalize kids. If you can’t, then apologize.

Kids carried concealed guns at my Como Park High School, teachers were shoved around, blood puddled on cafeteria tables, riots of thirty to forty boiled in the parking lot, and police responded often, only because our principal called them. Nevertheless, Como Park was not a bad school. I liked it there. I loved my kids and colleagues. What happened? Why could we no longer do our job?

OLD SOLUTIONS FLOPPED

Initiatives arrived and added nothing: multicultural education, performance-based assessment, whole language reading (minus phonics). In the bad old nineties, HIV and AIDS worried St. Paul teachers way more than racism. We dealt with hunger, illiteracy, gay families, immigrants from Laos and East Africa; later, a big surge from Myanmar. American teachers do many things brilliantly. They nurture reading to kindergartners who have no books at home. They push disabled kids to graduate when no one in their family ever did. After 2001 and No Child Left Behind, homelessness and the racial achievement gap remained, grinding and reminding us of our inadequacy. Diversity awareness and anti-racism gained traction in all our professional development plans.

In 2009, St. Paul contracted with Glenn Singleton’s Pacific Educational Group (PEG), which was steeped in Critical Race Theory (CRT), and whose network of adoptees span the nation and government agencies. Later called “Courageous Conversation,” we purchased PEG to eliminate our “systemic racism.” At a cost of $1.2 million between 2010 and 2013, trainers insisted teachers stand up and preface comments with “Speaking as a white man.” We lined up around a conference room according to a privilege survey first developed by Peggy McIntosh in 1989. White men took steps forward, then white women, followed by a rainbow underclass of blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Natives, and second language English speaking immigrant staffers. As an “oppressor,” I was first in line. A native woman stood at the end.

Instead of beating our brains out trying to teach well on a shoestring budget, photocopying books for kids to read, troubleshooting testing to wipe out language bias, reducing suspensions and over-representation of black boys in special education, and underrepresentation of girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), teachers could lay all of it, one hundred percent, on systemic racism. Principals pushed: sign up for PEG. All Como’s teachers, white, black, Hispanic, Somali, Vietnamese, Hmong, Iranian, Native, and LGBT staff were told in session, if we did not focus on our identities, we too leveraged unconscious white privilege. Leaders told us that holding kids accountable for disruptive behavior was racist itself. I could not deny my racism (because denial is proof of racism), nor be cured of it. There was no redemption. White teachers were “allies” at best.

In 2011, we read smudged photocopies of Robin DiAngelo’s essay on white fragility. Soon, we read bits of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow about the pipeline; we read Obama’s 2014 Dear Colleague letter on discipline disparities by race, shaking our heads at how many black kids were suspended. Black kids topped our own school suspension list. Something had to be done. But when St. Paul leaders paid principals stipends not to suspend black kids, word got out. It was scuttled.

ST. PAUL SCHOOLS BROKE THE LAW

Piloted at Como Park in fall 2013, St. Paul SpEd mainstreamed kids with individual education plans (IEPs) in violation of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), leaving them helpless. Our SpEd administrator dubbed our disabled kids “scholars” lacking “real content teachers,” kicking us into roles as babysitters. Previously, my eighteen-year-old SpEd kids who read at first-grade level read articles carefully adjusted and aimed at their interests. Subjects included job skills, law, sports, and hip hop music. I told my colleagues, “You cannot violate IEPs. You can’t make a first-grade reader read ‘The Crucible.’” The administrator told me, if parents didn’t like it, they could write a letter. I helped one mom write a letter, forwarded it downtown — no answer — it sailed down a memory hole. We knew this was covert social engineering, but couldn’t do a damned thing to stop it. I challenged the reading classes for numerous kids, and my administrator threatened to remove me from Como Park. Another parent did more. She sued and settled for a paltry $12,500. My disabled readers picked up new schedules, came to me crying, refusing to attend class. Most did, but were ready to knock someone out.

BOOTS ON THE GROUND

In 2014, Como closed its in-school suspension room (ISS), a place for kids who repeatedly disrupted class. There, a tough-love lady had taken their phones and my lesson plans, sat kids apart in a spare, unadorned room, and made them work. Without ISS, these kids stayed in class full-time. Kids need breaks, especially SpEd kids, some of whom cope with trauma, and I don’t mean dirty-hungry-neglected trauma. I mean violent trauma. One student of mine watched her family shot in the head on the floor in front of her.

I reported that mainstreaming hurt my students. In probable retaliation in 2014, administrators observed me twenty-four times. They never told me why after leaving my room. Como was wild in 2014 and 2015.

Jack Highberger @JackHighberger

Student cell phone video of October macing incident at Como High. Asst. Principal was among the injured. @myfox9

We made news constantly.

In this cell phone video, I can be seen approaching from behind with my shiny bald head. I ended up substituting for the teacher beaten in this video.

The public saw mayhem. Our SpEd bosses blamed every ounce of it on our white supremacy, white privilege, and white fragility.

Then, from the district Rights and Responsibilities book, St. Paul schools cut out willful disobedience, minor behavior stuff.

Teacher tip: stop all minor stuff.

Every teacher on earth knows, if you don’t immediately stop boys’ slap fights, taekwondo kicks, or shadow boxing, someone will get hit in the face, it’s guaranteed, and they will hit back, and you’ll have a fight, and then the day is ruined, you’ve sent a child to the office, and onto the school-to-prison pipeline, because you’re a white supremacist teacher. Kids will flip your tables and tell you to fuck off if you have to let them.

Who can prove that signs like, “No Running” at a swimming pool prevent head injuries, or “No Throwing Food” prevent food fights? As they say, “We don’t know, but we know.”

Outside school, Twin Cities’ tensions were heated. At the August, 2015 Minnesota State Fair, Black Lives Matter blocked an entrance, blaring their bullhorn at cops, “Piggies in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.”

St. Paul cop who posted on social media, “Just run [protesters] over,” was fired. In December, Minneapolis cops killed black Jamar Clark who was jostling with paramedics while they gave first aid to a woman after she called the cops on him. He had allegedly cracked her foot in a door, split her lip, and slammed her head against the floor.

My teachers union, with whom I lobbied on SpEd issues, moved to strike. I told the union executive board, it better be for safety. “Yes. Safety,” they answered. But they caved. They dropped the strike, and settled on “restorative practices” like circle talks to welcome back miscreants so they could hear feedback from their classmates.

That broke me. We did circle talks. Teachers scramble every day to be effective, to keep our kids safe, fed, and clothed, just like any other kid in need. We make a thousand decisions a day and we don’t have time to circle up after every incident. Most of my kids, maybe fifty percent, were in gangs. Police took a gun from a kid. Another gun escaped seizure, likely in our cafeteria. Girls had knives in backpacks. We foiled a suicide attempt. We could hear a word, smell a fight, and defuse it five minutes before it happened. I asked my classes, what is one behavior at Como Park that you cannot get away with? Silence. After five seconds, a boy said, “I guess you can’t kill somebody.”

Some amazing stuff. We talked about dads in prison, and cops being rough or racist with black kids. Eastside St. Paul cops would roll up on my black kids on Rice Street, and throw them on the hood. For what? I asked.

“For no damn reason!” they said.

I asked kids all day, “You been stopped and frisked?” Yes, many confirmed. “You drive without a license? No, stop it.” I knew where they slept last night, what they ate for breakfast, if they were pregnant, sold their own brand of clothing online — endless details. I had their backs.

At a SpEd meeting in December, 2015, I learned that the Como football team paid a white girl for a line-up of blowjobs on school property. My jaw fell off. I grabbed my chair. Memory flooded back of a shouting ruckus in class during football season, and I said, “That’s why a girl was yelling at her [running-back] boyfriend! She slapped him all up and down class.”

I distrusted the “school-to-prison pipeline” moniker for years by February, 2016. Infants, toddlers, and pre-schoolers don’t count? No dads, no moms, no babysitters, daycare, church, or rec centers, either? How come Grandma has to daycare her grand-baby’s baby born with no daddy to a mom who is fourteen? Where do they fit in the pipeline? I gnashed.

Michelle Alexander, get up in my school. Kimberlé Crenshaw, you ever done a home visit? Show me the pipeline that I plug every day that wasn’t already roaring through that child’s cradle, that baby (often) born to a baby who was (often) born to a baby? Get up here. Instead of seeing racism wherever disparities lie, we’ll talk about what to do with real kids, “diverse” white, black, and brown kids who glorify multiple sex partners without birth control, girls in gangs who rely on boys to defend honor with bullets.

The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry is projected to top $15 billion by 2026. Both Singleton and DiAngelo have commanded $15,000 per speaking engagement. These “scholars” make millions at dividing and conquering white teachers. Connect the dots instead. Connect the neighborhood to jobs, dads to moms, mental illness and fentanyl, to guns, to 911 calls, and cop encounters. The U.S. had sixty-one million police encounters in 2017. Glenn Singleton’s nonsense was like showing me how to put my pants on — my white pants.

Furious at equity moguls, and my district’s illegal flouting of kids’ IEPs, I let it rip on February 29, 2016.

I blew up the pipeline. I demanded proof of it or an apology. No teacher I had known in twenty years had spun a child on a rail to jail. See what’s happening: iPads were used to bully, video game, deal drugs, set up fights, and pull a “whoring train,” a lineup of paid blowjobs.

Within hours, Black Lives Matter called for my firing to the school board, union, and newspaper. BLM threatened to march and shut down Como Park if I were not fired. They shut down nothing. They met with Superintendent Valeria Silva, without me.

Silva (and BLM) suspended me. On March 7, as my principal walked me to meet HR in the office, we passed a hallway and saw two black boys punching a teacher. They had invaded his computer lab to collect on a drug deal. He sustained a concussion, went to the hospital, and I took over his class. Me, the guy in trouble for calling out drug deals — I subbed for a teacher hurt breaking up a drug deal. When computer lab ended, the school took my badge, keys, and laptop, and walked me out to the parking lot. That was my last day at Como Park.

My attorney reminded me not to speak to anyone or face firing. I waffled. I asked for help from FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the Minnesota ACLU, a Washington, D.C. firm, speech and labor lawyers, about 25 law firms. Silly me, no one except TV reporters wanted to talk. I just did what my union said, and I vanished.

I was long gone by the time academia witch-hunts began with Jordan Peterson in September, 2016, and Bret Weinstein in spring, 2017. Pundits talked of higher education. They ignored K12. No pundits spoke of the schools. Neither Peterson nor Weinstein, “Black Guys” Glenn Loury and John McWhorter spoke of K12. None of the hundreds of Twitter accounts I followed mentioned K12, and none of them strung together the letters C-R-T.

Once “disappeared,” my whole life was ransacked, my friendships, social media, and blog. My livelihood. A teacher buddy and I had prototyped some fiction sketches for a future book. I had composed over 40 flash-fiction bits. Sixty pages of it was printed and handed out to parents at a school board meeting intended to fire me. Some of it concerned characters using urban dialect.

AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH

From 2014 to 2017 I had blogged over 500 times. The fiction sketches used African American Vernacular English, legitimate dialect that I had subsumed by teaching for 20 years or 30,000 hours with urban kids. In integrated schools, let it be known that dialect is contagious and shared among all pigmentation. Confronting me for stories made up with dialect, my union attorney said, “Theo, I don’t think you’re a racist, but you gotta admit, you wrote some pretty racially inflammatory stuff.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Because of AAVE, African American Vernacular English.”

“Yeah, I know what it is,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.” She turned nonplussed.

“You don’t have the right to use AAVE. No white person does.”

I said, who says? that’s crap, and stood by like a dolt. How could I defy my own attorney accusing me of racism?

Speech is currency. Like a dollar, it does not care who speaks or spends it. My mom slapped the N word out of my mouth when I was seven. It’s not for me, it’s for others. It’s the magic hundred dollar bill. Twenty years I worked with urban kids, and the rest of their lexicon is mine. Kids of all skin tones use the N word, calling their friends, “My ni—az,” so take a pill and calm down.

Example: certain urban kids swap the order of “What am I?” with “What I am? which contracts to “What I’m? In a blog sketch, a teacher asks a very irritated girl what she is doing. She snaps on him: “What, ‘k what? What I’m ’posed to be doing?” instead of “What am I supposed to be doing?” It’s common urban dialect. It doesn’t belong to black, brown, or white kids. Certain kids of any color use it.

IT DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE

In 2016, a St. Paul reporter told my wife he had mined my deactivated blog and sent it to a school board member. Within hours, BLM had it. The reporter then covered their outrage. My wife told him, “You’re not reporting, you’re making news.” He denied it. She sent him a likable blog sketch of student interactions. He didn’t print it. She asked why not. He said, “I guess it doesn’t fit the narrative.” In 2019, the New York Times interviewed me for three and a half hours. None of it ran. Also in 2019, a Twin Cities NBC news affiliate, failed to interview a colleague who was fired after her quoting a black girl saying “fucking n——a” at her.

It’s hideous that journalists can make news, run narratives, or suppress news.

NOTHING IS SO BAD THAT IT CAN’T GET WORSE

After I had been hired and fired by three more school districts that probably didn’t want the hassle of employing me, the Minnesota board of teaching caught up and suspended my license for two years. My union lawyer implored me to compromise and settle. I said no, vowed to fight in court, and I won. They cleared my name, but I could not get a job. Victory tasted like a cheekful of dental gauze. I crawled through 2019 like an amputee, unemployed, thinking often about killing myself. I felt dead already, like John Proctor in The Crucible: “I’ve given you my soul. Leave me my name.”

So why not just be dead?

A therapist and my wife kept close watch over me. A peppy, indefatigable, displaced worker representative saved me. I’ll never forget her. I told her I’m like a murderer. She had found work for felons. But I’m like a pedophile. She said she had found work for a pedophile, too. She helped me talk, interview, and become a useful human again. Since then, I have transitioned into caregiving with seniors dying of dementia, and now children in inpatient psychiatric care. I’m paid far less than a teacher, but it’s pretty great.

Six years later, Saint Paul still “onboards” all new teachers in CRT. They have been sued at least twice because of anti-racism overreach. The illegal stripping of IEPs and English language learners’ rights cost Saint Paul taxpayers only $12,500. But a second lawsuit cost $525,000 to pay Aaron Benner, a Black teacher who endured harassment for speaking out against CRT. Teachers who once stood with me and fought Singleton’s propaganda have either left teaching, left the city, or succumbed to the mindset that they all harbor intractable white supremacy. Despite the invitation to speak one’s truth in “courageous conversations,” a McCarthyesque climate prevails, where opinion may not diverge from the script. Fighting the original sin of racism supersedes all other training. The leader of Twin Cities BLM, who once stalked me on social media, now sits on the Saint Paul Board of Education. A former Saint Paul schools operations worker and BLM activist now sits on the Minnesota State Legislature.

How does enforcing equity make black lives matter? How does it affect kids playing on the playground? Do they settle disputes better? I have never seen equity deployed by Courageous Conversation™ and its offshoot Beyond Diversity help a single child. They have zero data. It hurts kids, turns them helpless. Why should a black student try to achieve if she hears that tests and her teachers are racist, when they are not? Might as well fail. Why should black kids engage in racist homework for racist teachers, develop trust, or most importantly, achieve? It’s not racist homework. They aren’t racist teachers. It does nothing. The corporate equity industry that dominates America’s human resource departments from Facebook to the Pentagon is ruining black lives.

END OF THE ROAD

I landed my last teaching job, in 2017-2018, at the mouth of the Gunflint Trail in the frontier town of Grand Marais on Lake Superior’s north shore, 250 miles from home. I rented a bedroom, and left my wife and daughter in St. Paul. Half of my new caseload came from the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa. My sixth graders learned all-terrain vehicle driving, and gun safety from the DNR. It amazed me. St. Paul kids were searched for weapons. These kids were taught how to use them. Joyriders driving doughnuts hit a pole and knocked out power to the whole town. A wolf loped past my bedroom window.

Unfortunately, an equity group from Education Minnesota, our statewide teacher union, came to town and spoke. On a short break, the speaker pulled me aside and asked me where she had seen me before, and had we met. I told her no. But my face had been plastered all over TV and the internet.

We did not really have much racism. Sadly, an Ojibwa boy on my caseload slurred a black kid with the magic N word. Due to privacy, their identities were protected. The largely white liberal population of Cook County caught word, and protested about white supremacy. So get this: a native boy hurled the magic slur at a black kid, and white liberals came out of the woods hunting for white supremacists.

“Mr. Olson,” another native kid later told me, “If you can’t say a word, you’re just going to give more power to it.” I said, that was one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard a high school kid say.

I was terminated on March 7, 2018, despite six glowing job reviews.

My landlord asked me why I was fired. I said I didn’t know, they didn’t say, and they didn’t have to. He and I often talked around his kitchen center island. He happened to belong to the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa, too. He listened to me talk about the job all year. He said he bet that it’s all that racism-racism BS. He was not wrong, I don’t think.

I said, “Everything is racism. Now and forever.”

“Yah, but this is not racism,” he said. “This is bullshit. No one’s denying there’s regular racism. You’re not denying it, are you?”

“Hell no,” I said.

“Right, see? It’s real. It’s around. But it’s not everything.”