ONLINE ONLY: The Real Chris Stewart

What people don't know is that my trouble in Minneapolis started before this Tammy Lee thing. My real trouble started a couple of months ago when there was that incident at the Inter-district downtown school where parents were having trouble with that "Heather has two mommies" curriculum. I was at a forum in north Minneapolis, and a young black family came and said to us as school board candidates that they were supposed to be able to opt out of that, but the school said they couldn't opt out, and if they didn't like it they could leave the district. My response to that was that schools are doing a really lousy job right now with core curriculum—with math, science, reading, social studies—and the governor has passed some very aggressive standards. Minneapolis is doing lousy with those things, and they're doing particularly lousy with minority kids, who now happen to be the majority of the district. So we need, in my opinion, to strip down a lot of that stuff in the schools. A lot of the DARE programs, the patriotism programs, the Boy Scout-type programs, and this to me was just another example of that. But what I said was not well-received in the gay community.

There's just a lot of extra stuff built into curricula. We've got kids who have maybe an hour and a half in their school schedule of actual core subjects. And those are exactly the things we get judged on by the government. We don't get judged on this other fluff we put in. None of our high schools made adequate yearly progress last year. Not a single high school in Minneapolis. To me, that means we need a longer school day, a longer school year, or more time spent on the actual subjects we're being judged by. If the kids aren't doing really well in core curricula, we lose money. And we're going to lose schools, see them shut down or see them privatized.

This gets to be a matter of nuance. I'm saying "core curriculum" because we have to sharpen up in these areas, especially with minority students. People see that as, you're trying to take away the thing that liberalizes public education. But this liberalizing of public education is what's losing us money in the long run. African-American kids, specifically, need more time reading. If they read 45 minutes more each day, their test scores would go up dramatically. And they're not getting that at home in a lot of cases. School's the only place and time we have with them to get them up to speed.

So my real trouble started with that comment about curriculum. It's called the MAZE curriculum, and it's got more than one function. It's got religion, sociology, socioeconomic status, gay families, and maybe a couple of more units. It's like a total diversity curriculum. By no means was I pushing the idea that we don't need diversity, or that our kids don't need to learn about it. I was pushing the idea that you have to have a laser-like focus on what's important when you're losing so badly. That was my whole notion as I was getting into the race—the schools are just so scattered and unfocused, and we're getting bad test results, and people see them and say, see? There they go again. They can't teach math, they can't teach reading.

Black families are now the ones that are leaving the system fastest. It was white flight before. But nowadays our Latino population is exploding, and our African-American population is starting to shrink. What's happening there is that African-Americans who become middle class are abandoning Minneapolis public schools. And one of the reasons is, they want the same things for their kids that white people want for theirs. So they think they'll put their kids into a sharper school.

When I said what I said in that forum, it made it into Insight News and the phone started ringing instantly. A couple of people called and said they were pulling my signs out of their yards. A couple of members of the City Council and a member of the library board started trading phone calls around town, and I became persona non grata to a lot of people right then. That part of the story's been missing in what's been written about me.

CP: What was it that bugged you and your friends at AHS enough about the Tammy Lee candidacy that it was worth going to the trouble of building this spoof page?

Stewart: Let me give the John Kerry answer: I was for Tammy Lee before I was against Tammy Lee. I liked Tammy Lee. I was a former Independence Party candidate, I was very supportive of Peter Hutchinson every time I saw him—he was the first person I talked to when I decided to run for Minneapolis school board. And then I had a sit-down with people from the Independence Party. And every time I'd see Tammy Lee, I'd thank her, because she was running a really clean campaign and it was something I was glad to see. I was a Keith Ellison supporter, but I really appreciated what she was doing.