Mark Dayton’s School Daze

Sheila Corbett Kihne from the excellent Minnesota poltiical blog “Activist Next Door” did something nobody else in the Twin Cities media seems to feel the need to do; she started asking questions about Mark Dayton’s biography:

Mark Dayton’s current website biography reads:

After college, I taught 9th grade general science for two years in a New York City public school. It was the toughest job I’ve ever had!

Sheila thought she’d do a little simple fact-checking, and sent a “Freedom of Information Act” request to the New York Public Schools:

This was my request (in addition to standard template language for a FOI request)

Please email the following records:

confirmation of employment of:

Mark B. Dayton (birthdate 1/26/47) by the New York City Dept of Education/NYC Public Schools

dates of employment (believe them to be approximately July 1969-July 1971)

job title at the time of employment

school of employment

home address during the period of employment

The NYC Dept. of Education came back zilch; Sheila has scanned the NYCDOE’s response.  Follow the link and check it out.

Now, it’s quite possible that Mr. Dayton never took a salary while teaching, however there would still be some record of his employment. Why doesn’t the NYC public schools have any record of Mark Dayton working there when he says he did?

With an insanely left-leaning Minneapolis media establishment– with long-standing ties to the Dayton family– it’s unlikely that any will bother to ask Mark Dayton about it nor likely that this post will make any news.

I’m certain it’s just a bureaucratic snafu.  Perhaps an NYC Public Schools employee misspelled Dayton’s name; maybe the records aren’t on the computer, or are on files that got lost.  We do know that candidate Dayton has released a teaching license for the period he says he taught in the NYC Public Schools.

So it should be no great shakes to release something – a school, a principal, whatever – to validate that that rather key bit of his bio, the only non-government and/or non-plutocrat job he’s every held.

Perhaps the Dayton campaign could release some sort of documentary evidence to put this to rest?  So we can move on to the real campaign?

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

Trackbacks/Pings

Trackback URL

Comments