With one, soon two kids in the Minneapolis Public Schools, I've been taking a greater and greater interest in school governance and operations, and I watched this year's school board elections closely. It is rare in the People's Republic Of Minneapolis for an outsider to break through, and this year was no exception. The three DFL-endorsed candidates won.

How powerful is that DFL endorsement? Sharon Henry-Blythe, a board incumbent and former DFL endorsee, endorsed by the Star Tribune, trailed third-place winner Carla Bates by 15,000 votes in an election where the leading vote-getter (Lydia Lee) got only 61,000 votes.

The Strib endorsed two of the eventual winners, Bates (widely believed to be the savviest vote on this year's ballot) and Jill Davis, but went thumbs down on current board chairwoman Lee, who, insiders insist, is not up to the task of applying the kind of forceful leadership to counteract years of inertia and deep-set problems within the District and its urban milieu.

There is no evidence that after years of failed board leadership that the DFL Central Committee has any clue what it takes to fix the public schools; they have just lucked into some better candidates in recent years. The Dems' national patron, the teachers' unions, have often worn the black hat in Minneapolis, stifling progress and accruing unseemly levels of power and influence under the board's watch.

That's come to an end in recent years, but only under a board whose new members, Pam Costain, Tom Madden, and Chris Stewart felt empowered to take on the union after decades of failure and growing choruses of parent pressure.

This year's election was a step forward and a step back. But that's less important than the obvious conclusion that the majority of voters who care enough to vote on school board issues seem incapable of deviating from the DFL's hand-picked candidates. The party sometimes picks good people, but its track record is weak and its current endorsements were a mish-mash of talent and dross.

These are not partisan elections, but you wonder how the outcome might change if the parties were forbidden from endorsing? Would we end up with worse candidates, better ones, or just folks named Peterson and Anderson?

One party rule is unhealthy. There's no better example of that than the last three decades at the Minneapolis Public Schools. Progress will remain slow at best, no thanks to our process of electing a school board.