Opinion: Are We Trapped? Minneapolis Public Schools and Darth Vader Leadership

Closure itself is not an educational strategy. What happens to children afterward determines whether restructuring creates opportunity or merely relocates disruption. Seeing the current conversation unfold is sad because I believe there is a big, mean, abusive, maternal monster inside MPS. I use maternal deliberately. Public school systems routinely use the vocabulary of care: our children, our families, our schools, our community. They present themselves as protectors and nurturers of children. But an institution cannot simply announce that it cares​; it’s like that equity piece. Nobody can define.

Whenever I think about Minneapolis Public Schools and what I believe has become generational harm to teachers, students, families, and communities, I hear music playing somewhere in the back of my head. You know the music: the slow, ominous Imperial March announcing Darth Vader’s entrance. It is an admittedly dramatic metaphor, but perhaps Minneapolis has reached the point where polite metaphors are no longer sufficient. After years of declining enrollment, recurring budget crises, organizational restructuring, racial disparities, floor-level customer service, staff frustration, and now another conversation about “transformation,” Minneapolis residents have earned the right to ask a fundamental question: Are we trapped?

I am not suggesting that Minneapolis Public Schools is populated by villains, nor is “Darth Vader leadership” an accusation against any particular superintendent, administrator, teacher, or School Board member. It is a metaphor for an organizational condition. Darth Vader leadership occurs when an institution becomes so consumed with preserving its authority, bureaucracy, traditions, and internal assumptions that creative ideas are suffocated before they can breathe. Dissent becomes uncomfortable. Innovation becomes threatening. People learn which questions they should not ask. Eventually, maintaining the institution becomes confused with accomplishing the institution’s mission.

That distinction matters because Minneapolis Public Schools is talking about transformation again. MPS says the School Board began its current transformation process in December 2023, and in June 2026 directed the superintendent to develop three options for program changes for consideration in September 2026 (Minneapolis Public Schools, “Previous Engagement”); (MPSchools). But before Minneapolis rearranges another organizational chart, relocates another program, redraws another attendance boundary, or closes another school, we should establish something that ought to be obvious: transformation implies growth.

First things first. Minneapolis needs a New Deal for Urban Moms, and for fathers, grandparents, caregivers, teachers, students, and neighborhoods. That New Deal begins with positive expectations. Expect children to read. Expect children to write. Expect Black children, Indigenous children, multilingual learners, children receiving special education services, and children experiencing poverty to achieve at extraordinarily high levels. Expect teachers to function as intellectual professionals rather than interchangeable pieces on an organizational chart. Expect administrators to solve problems. Expect the superintendent’s office to produce measurable improvement. Expect the School Board to ask difficult questions. Most importantly, expect the institution to change when evidence demonstrates that what it has been doing is not producing acceptable results.

The problem with large bureaucracies is that they can become extraordinarily skilled at explaining failure. There is always another strategic plan, consultant, task force, listening session, reorganization, acronym, presentation, initiative, or transformation. Eventually, however, explanations become insufficient. Minneapolis must ask a simpler question: Where are the results?

Seeing the current conversation unfold is sad because I believe there is a big, mean, abusive, maternal monster inside MPS. I use maternal deliberately. Public school systems routinely use the vocabulary of care: our children, our families, our schools, our community. They present themselves as protectors and nurturers of children. But an institution cannot simply announce that it cares. Institutional care must eventually be evident in outcomes. Children learning is care. Teachers wanting to remain in the district are cared for. Families trusting their neighborhood schools is care. Responsible financial stewardship is care. Listening to communities before, not after, major decisions are made is an act of care.

The monster I describe is held together by pride, governed by ego, and protected by layers of bureaucracy. It operates too frequently at what I call floor-level leadership when Minneapolis desperately needs ceiling-level leadership. Floor-level leadership manages today’s crisis; ceiling-level leadership asks why the crisis keeps returning. Floor-level leadership asks which buildings should close; ceiling-level leadership asks why families stopped choosing those schools. Floor-level leadership redistributes scarcity; ceiling-level leadership creates value. Floor-level leadership produces another presentation explaining the decline in enrollment; ceiling-level leadership develops a strategy to reverse it.

Organizational scholars have warned about precisely this distinction. Peter Senge argues in The Fifth Discipline that effective organizations must become “learning organizations”—institutions capable of continually examining assumptions, learning from feedback, and changing their behavior rather than merely reacting to problems (Senge). Michael Fullan similarly argues that lasting educational change depends on building organizational capacity rather than cycling endlessly through disconnected reforms (Fullan). Their work matters to Minneapolis because changing buildings, programs, boundaries, or personnel without changing the organizational culture responsible for decision-making can simply reproduce old problems in new configurations.

That is the danger of Darth Vader leadership. It chokes out ideas before determining whether they might work. It interprets dissent as disloyalty and uncomfortable questions as attacks. Creative teachers become frustrated. Families lose confidence. Community members disengage. Talented employees leave. Eventually, everyone learns the unwritten rules: don’t challenge too much, don’t embarrass leadership, don’t question sacred assumptions, and certainly don’t ask whether decades of initiatives have produced results proportional to the money, personnel, time, and community trust invested in them.

But beneath personalities and politics sits a more consequential issue: structural ethics. Structural ethics asks whether the architecture of an institution, its policies, incentives, budgets, leadership structures, accountability systems, resource allocations, and distribution of power—is designed to produce outcomes consistent with the institution’s stated moral purpose. That is fundamentally different from asking whether the people running MPS are good people. They might be exceptional human beings. That is not the question. The ethical question is whether the system consistently works for the people it exists to serve.

When dysfunction becomes predictable, repeated, and normalized, responsibility cannot continually be assigned to whichever superintendent happens to occupy the chair. At some point, we have to examine the chair. We have to examine the room. We have to examine the structure that keeps reproducing similar problems regardless of who occupies leadership positions. Harvard researchers Anthony Bryk and colleagues make a related argument in Learning to Improve: educational organizations improve when they stop treating recurring failures as isolated events and instead study the systems and processes generating those outcomes (Bryk et al.). That is exactly the analysis Minneapolis needs. Stop asking only who made the latest mistake and start asking what organizational conditions make certain mistakes predictable.

The financial challenge is real. MPS reports that it entered the first year of its multiyear financial sustainability process facing a historic $110 million budget gap. The district says it has subsequently reduced central-office positions, adopted priority-based budgeting, reduced reliance on fund balance, and sought to make reductions farther from classrooms (Minneapolis Public Schools, “2026–27 Budget Process”). (MPSchools) Those actions deserve to be acknowledged. Structural criticism loses credibility when it refuses to recognize legitimate attempts at improvement.

School closures, however, require considerably more caution than the public conversation sometimes suggests. Research does not support the simplistic proposition that closing schools automatically improves student outcomes. Ben Kirshner, Matthew Gaertner, and Kristen Pozzoboni studied students displaced by a high school closure and found declines in academic performance following the transition, while their qualitative findings documented additional stress associated with the disruption (Kirshner, Gaertner, and Pozzoboni). (Sage Journals)

Other research complicates the picture further. Studies have found that closure can produce better outcomes under certain conditions, particularly when displaced students gain access to meaningfully higher-performing schools. Research on closures in a shrinking urban district found potential adverse effects on achievement and attendance, but those effects could be mitigated when students transferred to stronger schools. (ScienceDirect) In other words, the research does not tell Minneapolis, “Never close a school.” It tells Minneapolis something more demanding: closure itself is not an educational strategy. What happens to children afterward determines whether restructuring creates opportunity or merely relocates disruption.

That distinction is especially important because closures do not fall equally across communities. A review of a large multistate analysis involving 1,522 low-performing schools found that schools serving higher proportions of low-income and minority students were more likely to be closed even after accounting for academic performance. The review also noted poorer outcomes for displaced students who transferred to schools with equivalent or lower prior performance (Gaertner and Kirshner). (National Education Policy Center) Structural ethics therefore demands that Minneapolis ask not merely whether closing a school saves money, but who absorbs the disruption, where students will go, whether the receiving school is demonstrably better, and what happens to the social infrastructure surrounding the school.

A school is not simply square footage. It is relationships, history, transportation patterns, friendships, neighborhood identity, teachers, coaches, grandparents, community organizations, playgrounds, kitchens, libraries, and memories. Economists can calculate building utilization. Accountants can calculate operating costs. Those calculations matter. But neither spreadsheet fully captures what is lost when a community institution disappears.

This brings me to the number 16. Remember it because 16 could become a magical number.

If MPS ultimately closes a significant number of schools, district leadership should understand that empty school buildings are not merely liabilities. They are educational infrastructure. They contain classrooms, libraries, gymnasiums, kitchens, auditoriums, laboratories, offices, playgrounds, and community spaces. If enough buildings become available, Minneapolis Public Schools could inadvertently hand “us”—parents, educators, neighborhood leaders, universities, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, businesses, and community members who still give a hoot about children—the physical building blocks for something entirely different.

That does not mean community members can simply declare a new public school district. Minnesota law governs the creation and organization of public districts and charter schools. The point is larger: abandoned educational infrastructure invites us to imagine alternatives. Sixteen buildings—or anything approaching that scale—could stimulate conversations about innovative schools, community learning organizations, new charter models, university partnerships, teacher-led schools, career academies, or future legislative proposals for different governance structures. When established institutions retreat from physical infrastructure, somebody eventually asks what else that infrastructure could become.

Perhaps that is what Minneapolis needs most: not another conversation about managing decline, but a conversation about competition, creation, and growth. If families leave MPS, find out why. If they return, find out why. If one school has strong demand while another has hundreds of empty seats, study the difference between them. If Black boys thrive academically in a particular program, study the adults, curriculum, expectations, relationships, instructional methods, and leadership responsible for those results. If teachers remain at one building for fifteen years but routinely leave another after two, stop treating turnover exclusively as a human-resources statistic. Study the leadership.

Even school-choice research reminds us that changing enrollment mechanisms alone is not a panacea. Research by Lauren Sartain, Riley Lewers, and Lisa Barrow on Chicago’s universal enrollment system found that simplifying applications improved aspects of the enrollment process but did not, by itself, substantially alter students’ access to higher-performing schools (Sartain, Lewers, and Barrow). (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago) The lesson for Minneapolis is straightforward: families need more than easier access to schools. They need schools worth choosing.

That is why MPS needs a public transformation scoreboard. Not another hundred-page report that ordinary families will never read. Publish a small set of metrics every year: enrollment, literacy, mathematics, attendance, graduation, teacher retention, administrator retention, family satisfaction, student satisfaction, central-office expenditures, outside contracts, school-level investment, and the percentage of Minneapolis families choosing MPS. Establish three-year and five-year targets and let the public see whether transformation is actually occurring.

No spin. No Death Star-sized PowerPoint presentation. Just results.

The tragedy would be concluding that Minneapolis children need less because the system has struggled to give them more. They do not. They need adults willing to establish radical positive expectations. A fourth-grader struggling to read does not need adults explaining why the system is complicated. That child needs to read. A ninth-grader years behind in mathematics does not need another slogan. That student needs mathematics. A mother deciding where to enroll her kindergartner does not owe MPS loyalty simply because MPS is the traditional public school district. MPS has to earn her trust.

Every year. Every child. Every classroom. Every neighborhood.

That is the New Deal for Urban Moms.

Perhaps that is also how Minneapolis escapes Darth Vader leadership. Not by waiting for a heroic superintendent. Not by creating another strategic plan. Not by moving boxes around another organizational chart. And certainly not by confusing school closure with transformation. Break the organizational chokehold. Invite dissent. Reward innovation. Study failure without punishing truth-tellers. Treat teachers as intellectual professionals. Listen to families as people who have choices. Expect excellence from children, then build systems that deliver it.

Peter Senge’s concept of a learning organization provides the appropriate test. A learning organization does not merely survive its mistakes; it changes because of what those mistakes teach it. Minneapolis Public Schools now has years of enrollment, financial, and achievement data, employee experiences, community feedback, failed initiatives, successful classrooms, and institutional memory to learn from.

The question is whether MPS will actually learn.

Because if Minneapolis Public Schools cannot transform itself into a system families increasingly choose, educators want to join, teachers want to remain in, communities trust, and children demonstrably benefit from, the most consequential question facing Minneapolis may eventually stop being, “How do we save MPS?”

It may become something far more disruptive:

“What should Minneapolis build next?”

Works Cited

Bryk, Anthony S., et al. Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better. Harvard Education Press, 2015.

Fullan, Michael. The New Meaning of Educational Change. 5th ed., Teachers College Press, 2016.

Gaertner, Matthew, and Ben Kirshner. “Review of Lights Off: Practice and Impact of Closing Low-Performing Schools.” National Education Policy Center, 24 Oct. 2017.

Kirshner, Ben, Matthew Gaertner, and Kristen Pozzoboni. “Tracing Transitions: The Effect of High School Closure on Displaced Students.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol. 32, no. 3, 2010, pp. 407–429. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373710376823.

Minneapolis Public Schools. “2026–27 Budget Process.” Minneapolis Public Schools, 2026.

Minneapolis Public Schools. “Previous Engagement and Reports.” School Transformation, Minneapolis Public Schools, 2026.

Sartain, Lauren, Riley Lewers, and Lisa Barrow. “Universal Student Enrollment Systems: The More Policies Change, the More Enrollment Patterns Stay the Same.” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working Paper, no. 2022-25, 2022.

Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. Rev. ed., Currency Doubleday, 2006.