Minneapolis Public School District recently decided to implement a new agreement with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers that will go into affect in 2023, to lay off white staff members before members of a minority group. Since announcing the agreement, the school district has decided to double down on their commitment, claiming that this will ‘remedy the effects of past discrimination’ in hiring.
In an email, the district said the agreement aims, “To remedy the continuing effects of past discrimination, Minneapolis Public Schools and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) mutually agreed to contract language that aims to support the recruitment and retention of teachers from underrepresented groups as compared to the labor market and to the community served by the school district.”
The agreement will scrap the old ways of hiring, laying off, and transferring employees based on seniority. “The district shall deprioritize the more senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population, in order to recall a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers,” the agreement reads.
Senior trial counsel at the Upper Midwest Law Center in Minneapolis James Dickey explained the unconstitutionality of the agreement, and expressed his concern regarding the open discrimination against a group of people based on race in a statement to Alpha News, reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
“The [collective bargaining agreement] … openly discriminates against white teachers based only on the color of their skin, and not their seniority or merit,” Dickey said. “Minneapolis teachers and taxpayers who oppose government-sponsored racism like this should stand up against it.” Dickey said in his statement. “The school district and the union should be on notice that what they’ve done is illegal and is going to be struck down.”
This is absolutely reckless on behalf of the district, it is incoherent, and it needs to be called out for what it is: racist. The agreement is an outright violation of federal laws that directly outlaw discrimination based on race, and Civil Rights regulations.
Another concern, why is the school district focusing on the race of their employees rather than the success of the students? Minneapolis only just recently returned to in-person learning, but the damage was already done. Test scores in the state averaged a 14.2 percent decline since the beginning on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cristine Trooien, the Executive Director of the Minnesota Parents Alliance, said to Fox News Digital, “Academic performance in the Minneapolis school district is abysmal . . . Sadly for Minneapolis students, the only thing that will likely increase as a result of the agreement between MPS and the teacher’s union are the number of lawsuits that will be filed against the district for racist employment practices.”
Hopefully the agreement will be struck down entirely before it is implemented in 2023, considering the fact that lawyers are already gearing up for numerous lawsuits.
