Achievement and awards

How does the St. Paul Public School Superintendent win Minnesota School Superintendent of the Year, much less become a finalist for national superintendent, without core subject competency or graduation rates (as reported in this paper) used as criteria for the awards?

Thirty years ago, these achievement levels we are now at would have resulted in the superintendent being fired. Today, they all win meaningless awards.

Pat McKenzie, Hastings

Medical decisions from judges?

I am wondering how many of our Supreme Court justices have medical degrees? Would any of them allow or take legal advice from their doctors?

Why not? Then why are we relying on judges to make medical decisions? Why are they allowed to make medical decisions that will affect women’s lives everywhere in this country?

LaVonne McCombie, Hudson

Why people are mad

I am a native Minnesotan. I grew up in a small farm community. All the support for Donald Trump is hard to believe. He never received my vote.

However, when one considers the overreach of government, which has occurred for several decades, it gets a little easier to understand why a lot of people are ticked off. It begins to make a little more sense.

Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

The MN state legislature had a surplus of $17 billion last year. Did our government return the money to those who overpaid? The answer is “no.” Our state believes that it is okay to play Robin Hood.
90% of our population disapproves of our federal government. It has been this way for many years. Think about that for a minute.
We have millions crossing the borders every year. We, taxpayers, will need to support the majority of these people for many years.
The elite have the power. Folks are tired of that.

Bill Wixon, Plymouth

Too many unanswered questions

Some time ago, the city of St Paul reported a somewhat rosy picture about its guaranteed income program for 150 St. Paul recipients.

We would all be better served if the city tracked a separate group of 150 could-be recipients that could have qualified, but didn’t. It would have been useful to measure the two groups against each other to see if one group really progressed when compared the other.

As the saying goes, a rising tide floats all boats. A rising improving economy also improves and benefits economic conditions for many citizens.

All of these alleged improvements happened for these 150 recipients happened during the peak of the Covid Pandemic. These recipients of the guaranteed income program also received stimulus checks that perhaps skewed the research, results and final report even more. There’s also the question of motivation of being under some kind of microscope and trying to be on our best behavior.

Narratives about statistics can be manipulated to sway our thinking and understanding. Omissions of statistics are telling sometimes.

For example, I read somewhere that nationally 51% of all marriages end up in divorce and we generally think that’s bad. Nothing has been said about the remaining 49% of marriages that end up dead. Which is the preferred outcome? There’s some humor here, but there are some people who would actually refuse to get married because they don’t want to die if someone had a narrative about it.

Did the program really work? There are too many unanswered questions and variables.

For St. Paul, Mayor Carter says that at least we have bettered the lives of a few citizens with this experiment. For the rest of the St. Paul citizenry, we are poorer for it in increased property taxes. We’d rather keep those dollars that we worked hard for in our pocket to spend on things that benefit us like food, housing, insurance, snow plowing, fixing potholes or a myriad of other things that are important in our daily lives. The state and county already have programs to help these folks and we have already paid taxes to support them. That seems to be duplication and a waste of time and money.

Barry Siebert, St. Paul

We have just one planet

The Pioneer-Press in-house cynic and “snark-master” Joe Soucheray is at again. He writes, “Facts tend to be important”, and uses the word fact two more times in his criticism of “green theologians” (his term) who believe that somehow human activity could be responsible for global warming. For “proof” he notes the record warmth of  “The Year Without Winter” (1877-78), and other past winters with above-average temperatures. A word missing from his diatribe, however is context.

Certainly “brown Christmases” have occurred in the past, even before industrialization. To evaluate climate change in a serious way, one must look at trends over decades, not just a few isolated examples. An article in Nature magazine (November 2021), using data from NASA and NOAA, states, “The magnitude and rate of warming over the last 150 years (i.e. the Industrial Age) far surpasses the magnitude and warming changes over the past 24,000 years.” Since 1880 the Earth’s overall temperature has risen 2 degrees Fahrenheit. That may not sound like much, but the results are serious, and worse is likely to come.

Multiple other examples of damaging climate change exist: shrinking ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, damage to coral reefs, more common and more serious hurricanes farther north than in the past, and many more.  Maybe Soucheray thinks we don’t have to worry about climate change because rising sea levels will never reach Minnesota, and he can gladly do without worrying about snow removal. True, but we just have one planet on which to live, and we’d best treat our Mother Earth well.

Lee Hartzheim, St. Paul

Flag says nothing

Let’s start with the new Minnesota Flag — IMO it has no class, says nothing to me and a lot of Minnesotans and is simple for the simple minded.

We keep hearing about how offensive the current flag is with the white settler and his rifle close at hand. At that time in Minnesota’s history there were two very good reasons for the rifle — food (there’s a four-letter word) as there were no Cubs or Rainbow grocery stores, and, second, the rifle was for protection from wild animals, especially the bear and the wolf (more four-letter words) that could attack humans.

I live in Lindstrom, the town decorated with Scandinavian Barn Door quilts.  The basic figure starts with an eight-pointed star. That’s what the star on the new flag reminds me of, an unfinished Barn Door quilt.

Gary Schraml, Lindstrom

Simple but soulless

Now that all of the new flag designs have been judged we are left with a pretty anemic design. It’s true it is uncluttered, simple and balanced, but it is also soulless. Though it may not offend anyone it does not evoke any emotional response in it’s simplicity. Minnesota has so much to offer surely there is an artist that could bring more to this design than the color blue and a white star.

Sharon Kauth, St. Paul

Why give a rotten team a chance? Why not?

Given the popularity of football, it’s amazing that the NFL still uses an outdated playoff policy that displeases half of the fans.

Teams eliminated from the playoffs leave fans with far less interest in playoff games. Why not give all fans and teams hope and fun? It would take a simple system: All teams make the playoffs. Roughly half the teams get a bye on the first week. The other teams with the lowest season wins fight it out to advance, and those that advance play the second-best teams first. It wouldn’t be hard to work it out, it would keep everyone’s hopes alive, and keep fan interest high in all playoff games. It’s a no-brainer for teams, fans, profit, and fun.

You may ask, Why give a rotten team a chance to win it all? The question really is, Why not? Who doesn’t like an underdog?

Geoffrey Saign, St. Paul

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