Osler's Razor

I always vote. This week, I literally ran to the polls-- I combined a little run with my voting. The only thing on the ballot was a school board election, but those can be pretty important in a town like Edina, which cares a lot about its public schools.

There were three slots open for the school board. Three conservatives-- Sarah Patzloff, LInda Friede, and Lou Nanne-- ran as a bloc, sending out flyers together and grouping their signs. Patzloff was an incumbent. Running against them were three others (plus one guy who didn't seem to realize he had entered the race): Janie Shaw, Julie Greene and Leny Wallen-Friedman. I'll call the first group Bloc 1 and the second group Bloc 2.

Bloc 1 seemed led by Patzloff, who admirably committed to not attacking her opponents, and lived up to that pledge. I was troubled by her platform, though, which seemed to lean heavily on fears that the quality of the schools were being undermined by liberals who were too focused on serving minorities and poorer kids. I disagree with that on several levels, but one problem is that there isn't much evidence that the quality of the schools is going down even as they make appropriate efforts to better serve all of the kids. Patzloff received support from an entity here called the "Center of the American Experiment," which presents itself pretty typically in this article about an earlier dispute involving Patzloff. I suspect that Patzloff herself-- and certainly the other two candidates in Bloc 1-- are more concerned about kids and less about ideology that the people at the Center of the American Experiment.

In the end, Bloc 2 won all three seats. I don't think a larger lesson should be taken from this, other than that what Bloc 1 stood on to support their views didn't appeal to enough people.