An Overview of the Successful Approach of the New Salem Educational Initiative

In previous series on "The Importance of No Child Left Behind" and "Teaching the Child from a Poor and Dysfunctional Family" I have emphasized the importance of public education in a democracy, systemic failings of our current public education system upon which No Child Left Behind has shone a bright light, and important tenets for teaching children whom we need to reach if we are to transform education into the agent for genuine democracy that it should be.

In this article, as I resume posts of greater regularity (if not quite the torrid pace that I was setting for awhile), I offer in brief form the key features of the New Salem Educational Initiative that make it an agent for highly effective education and democratic transformation. I will in the course of time (although not necessarily immediately following upon this article) discuss all of these features more fully.

The New Salem Educational Initiative proceeds on the basis of tenets that I have previously emphasized as defining an "excellent education":

1) an excellent teacher;

2) a strong liberal arts curriculum.

The great bulk of students enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative participate in the small-group format for which I am the only teacher. I cordially invite anyone reading this article to come and see me in action as I teach my students in groups of one to five at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church at 2519 Lyndale Avenue North in Minneapolis. I have 17 groups whom I serve after school and on weekends, seven days a week. The students range from Grade K students to Grade
12. The emphasis is on getting students who have been functioning well below level of school enrollment up to grade level in math and reading as quickly as possible. When this is accomplished, I put my students on a college preparatory track in which they engage with challenging material from across the liberal arts curriculum with vocabulary pertinent to a variety of content areas, including fiction and poetry; history; economics; natural science; and the fine arts.

In the course of a 40-year career I have developed highly effective approaches to teaching the mathematical sequence of the K-8 years, including basic operations, fractions, decimals, percents, proportions, probability, ratios; and the Algebra I-Geometry-Algebra II-Trigonometry-Calculus sequence of the 9-12 years. Explicit vocabulary acquisition and close critical questioning regarding content undergird my approach to teaching students to be effective readers across a breadth of subject area material.

I love my students and they know it. I love teaching and they observe it in every session. I know exactly what I want my students to accomplish each and every session, and this is manifested in the logically sequenced progress that my students can see from week to week. We approach what we do with joy. We embrace education as the stuff of life. We spend virtually all of our time in straight-ahead approaches that waste no time. The fun that we have comes from the joy of acquiring new knowledge and skill sets, and from the happy and jocular manner that I bring to the task at hand, not from time-wasting and trivial games.

Willie Mays once said, "I am the best baseball player that I have ever seen."

And I would say, "I am the best teacher that I have ever seen."

There is no substitute for effective pedagogy. There is no surrogate for academic training to the level of a Ph.D. I am thinking all the time, every day, about how to impart the skill and knowledge that I bring to the art of teaching so that the model that I have developed can be generally implemented.

In the delivery of an excellent education, an excellent teacher and a strong liberal arts curriculum are paramount.

More briefly on this particular day, the New Salem Educational Initiative also thrives on the following programmatic features:

>>> transportation that I provide personally, going wherever I need to go, even for those students whose residences shift often and may include a multiplicity of possiblities (stayng variously with mom, dad, grandma, grandpa or close family friends on any given week);

>>> detailed knowledge of family situations and very close relationships that I develop with family members in every one of my students' households.

>>> genuine concern for the students and their families, with offers to connect them with resources needed by families of the inner city as they strive to meet the many challenges of their lives.


These are the major features through which students in the New Salem Educational Initiative rise to grade level performance and embark on a college preparatory track. The first features of excellent teacher and strong liberal arts curriculum are necessary for an excellent education. The other programmatic features--- flexible transportation; knowledge of family situations and close human relationships with the members of those families; and genuine concern combined with effective action in helping people meet their life challenges--- are those that recognize the additional responsibility of any educational system that seeks to meet the needs of all of its students and thus advance education as the agent of democratic transformation that it should be.