Just Asking . . . Chris Stewart

Minneapolis school board chairman Chris Stewart, 41, has been an unusual source of controversy since before he took office. As a supporter of Congressman Ellison, he was criticized for being involved in a campaign website that made fun of Ellison’s challenger Tammy Lee, basically for being white. Last year, he butted heads with part of his constituency after suspending a popular Minneapolis elementary school principal over a racially charged poster. On the job, Stewart perceives himself as the most “working class” member of the school board, but feels that some characterizations of his behavior have been unfair. “Some of what people feel is polite and isn’t polite . . . I guess I just feel a little less bourgie most of the time,” he explains. With another school year upon us (and a soon-to-be-departing superintendent) the spotlight is back on the challenges facing his district.

So I was doing some google research, and man, in South Minneapolis you’re about as popular as Tarvaris Jackson. 
(Laughs.) Well, that depends on who you listen to!

Well, first you had that Tammy Lee situation , and then you had that Burroughs situation.
See, I look at it differently. I don’t have those situations. They have those situations.

Well, you apologized for the Tammy Lee thing and said it was a “colossal moral failure for a Christian.” 
It’s like anything else you do in your day: you cut somebody off in traffic and you go, “My bad” and that’s it. You’re not characterized for the rest of your life as the guy who cut you off in traffic.

All I know about inner city schools I learned from the fourth season of The Wire. 
Ha! That’s what you watch and you feel good that we’re not Baltimore or Detroit…yet. We can go there.

Really? 
This is how you go there: we’re in the first phase of what could become there. You miseducate full generations of kids and those kids stay in the city. Eventually, you start collecting them and you have more adults who came out of that problem, and then you do become Baltimore. Luckily, what has happened here so far is that we’re not there…yet.

So are the challenges to our schools unique to Minneapolis?
Minneapolis has been on the cutting edge of offering everything from open and Montessori to fine art and magnets. It used to be the progressive thing to do. But with declining enrollment, it’s really changed. You can’t offer as much of that stuff and we continue to try to do so with fewer funds. We have a school district that’s built for 50,000 kids, and we have 32,000 kids. We have a school with 150 kids in it. We’ve got 12 buildings that are sitting empty from previous school closings. It’s like wearing a pair of pants that are just too big for you.

You sound like a conservative with all this stripping down.
I think I’m conservative in most ways.

As far as the ideological makeup of the board, is the Minneapolis liberal orthodoxy changing at all? 
I’m probably the most conservative member of the board. But I think there’s almost universal acceptance of the idea that we’ve been doing too much for too long and it’s not sustainable. This has come up in all of our planning—we have to pare things down. Pare down the busing options. Pare down the magnets. Pare down the programs that haven’t worked even if they’re popular.

So are these neighborhoods squawking because their pants aren’t properly tailored? 
Well people don’t want to lose something, and when they do, it changes the game for them. There’s also this sense of I bought my house specifically in this neighborhood so I could go to this school. So it’s kind of like a kit—it came with a school and a library.

Well, isn’t that an extension of voting with your feet? 
But these are public institutions. Because you live two blocks from the public library doesn’t mean you have any more access to that library than someone who lives across town and drove to that specific library.

But if these parents can leave, isn’t that something that you have to consider? 
I think that’s something they need to consider. I mean, every family has to make choices for their child about what’s best.

Don’t you want to make your schools competitive so families don’t leave your district? 
I just want those schools to be of high quality so they educate kids. But at the end of the day we can’t be held hostage by social threats by individuals who feel as though their ability to make choices should somehow put us on the hook to do something specific. This kind of retrogressive old world kind of threat—“I live in the proper zip code and I have the proper amount of money to be able to influence your decisions on things or else you will lose me.” I’m probably the wrong board member to respond to that. I really find it asinine. I believe deeply in family choice, and you are going to make that choice based on what’s best for your child—not because the system kicked out a decision that you wanted so badly that now you’re willing to upset the balance of your child’s education.

Your calling card is to walk into a school unannounced.
I can imagine the psychology of people who try to make so much out of certain things. Like interjecting that word “unannounced.” Like what am I, the King of England? I need to be announced? What does that exactly mean to your community? I’m an elected official in the city of Minneapolis who has responsibility over a 650 million dollar budget that controls most of the schools. Does “unannounced” mean that I’m overstepping my boundaries?

Kind of “uppity” behavior on your part?
I wonder about that, yeah. But instead of throwing up our little defenses about who’s racist and who’s not, I just want to know who cares. Can you look at the position of children of color in our school district and put your own child’s face on those kids? With everybody being so narcissistic and culturally self-centered on their little trip between their house and Byerly’s—that is really where progressivism in Minneapolis is lost. This is the type of thing that makes me a conservative. I get a little bit of a kick out of this framing of the story and the words they use.

You do a pretty good job at unpacking the language. 
But clearly these things all mean something different to the community that you’re speaking about.

I write primarily for upper-class and suburban white women. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! 
In this position you have to navigate a lot of different communities with different needs and different concerns and different levels of social power and political power and different understanding of how the system itself works. So you can’t get bogged down too much in how you’re perceived because really there’s too much work to be done. The work is really about policy and a lot about wonky stuff. So all this stuff about cult of personality and do you like this guy or don’t you like this guy, is he your favorite boardmember out of all the superfriends? You know, it’s all kind of theater. That part of the job is really kind of stupid.

5 Things You Didn’t Know About Chris: 

1. Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia is his favorite book. “She is my intellectual rock star.”
2. He arrived in Minneapolis in 1987 on a bus from Oakland, homeless with $300 dollars in his pocket.
3. He lives with his wife and their four children in East Nokomis.
4. He grew up attending Catholic school in New Orleans.
5. He’s transferring to Bethel this year to finish his BA in Youth Ministry.