Toward an Overhaul of K-12 Education

My ultimate aim is to overhaul K-12 education in Minneapolis, the State of Minnesota, and the United States. I go about this in two different ways. The first is to follow through on the day to day implementation of a model for how K-12 education should be done, for students in general and for impoverished urban students in particular.

I. The Permanent Application of Love and Elbow Grease

Thus, the transformation of individual lives is my most important mission. I am a great believer, as you know, in “elbow grease”--- not just talking or planning or theorizing--- so as to get the job done. So much of what passes for discussion about K-12 education is just so much flapping of gums: It must make education professors and public policy wonks feel so very smart, but it doesn’t do a lick of good. Despite all the talk for lo these many decades of the crisis in the public schools, there isn’t much to indicate progress.

So my most important day to day endeavor is to follow through on those programmatic features that have made the New Salem Educational Initiative so successful as a model for how to educate the children of the very poor: identify, and by word of mouth accept, children from the poorest families, frequently of serous dysfunction; provide transportation and engage in lively banter that gets the kids to highly focused academic sessions while conveying a sense of caring, in all of this keeping attendance and retention high; move these students through a logical progression of assignments that lifts them from far below grade level achievement to status as the highest performers in their classes; put them on a college preparatory track with challenging materials and the highest level of instruction; convey and prove in action that the relationships forged are permanent and that students enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative will never lose the support that they have come to expect and treasure; and thus, in the most hands-on way imaginable, keep young people off the streets, away from drugs, and out of prison--- replacing these oft-expected outcomes with matriculation at first-rate colleges and universities.

II. Addressing the Systemic Impediments to Achieving High-Quality K-12 Public Education in the United States

There are three major impediments to the achievement of high-quality education in the United States:

1)  Colleges and universities do not train high-quality teachers.

Schools and colleges of education feature academically flimsy coursework that do not give teachers the knowledge base that they need to transmit an authentic liberal arts curriculum to students. Very few teachers get master’s degrees in solid subject areas in math, science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts; instead, they get a watered down curriculum for “masters of teaching” degrees that earn a lot of money for institutions of putative higher learning and allow teachers to move up in the “step and ladder” system of teacher remuneration. The latter fails utterly to reward excellence in teaching.

2) Curriculum is weak.

Schools at the K-5 level do not in most cases have curriculum in anything other than math and reading. Well-defined, grade-by-grade, logically sequenced curriculum that should include high-quality literature, science, history, economics, and the fine arts is missing. Our children get to middle school (generally Grades 6 through 8 these days), where the emphasis tends to be on developmental issues rather than academics, ill- prepared for subject area learning; because of the emphasis on socialization and personal development in middle schools, students leave 8th grade with not all that much more knowledge than when they entered middle school.

This leaves high school, just four years to cram in all of those things that should have been learned sequentially along the way. But getting a good high school teacher is hit or miss, entirely a matter of the dedication, intelligence, and self-acquired knowledge base of the individual teacher. Too often, teachers have never overcome the effects of their training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.

Thus does the typical student walk across the stage at graduation time to take a diploma that means far less than it should. Many of these students will need to take remedial classes before proceeding to credit-earning coursework toward a bachelor’s degree. Due to their poor knowledge base, young people are not trained for further education, for work, or for citizenship as they should be.

3)  Central school district bureaucracies are ineffective.

School district personnel act to protect administrator and teacher wage and benefit interests, rather than articulating and implementing a program for properly educating K-12 students. Superintendents typically are overpaid and depart after two or three years. There is a surfeit of personnel doing unnecessary and duplicative tasks. School building principals tend to stay barricaded behind office walls and offer little genuine academic leadership. Young teachers tend to leave the profession within five years. Unions and education associations protect bad teachers. The few truly excellent teachers stay because they are unusually dedicated, self-motivated, and self-trained--- not because anything in the system rewards them for properly educating their students.


Hence, my friends, over the course of the next few months and years, in addition to my daily application of “elbow grease” in the high-quality academic training of my own students, I intend to engage in activities meant to pressure the K-12 public education system to be as effective as it should be.  For this is the next stage of the Civil Rights Movement. We will not have a full democracy that offers the genuine opportunity for citizenship to all of our precious children until we have K-12 schools that properly educate every student, no matter what her or his descriptors of life circumstance.

And toward advancing the next stage of the Civil Rights Movement, please strive to understand the full range of activities to which I am dedicated and the importance of what you can do by reading these pages and taking action consistent with the principles articulated. I will to the end of my life be doing everything that I can to set a model for educating K-12 students, especially those from impoverished urban circumstances; and to work toward an overhaul of the system of public education that must educate students across the nation with that effectiveness that describes the New Salem Educational Initiative.

My hope is that by making you aware of the transformative power of education and thus the need to overhaul the K-12 system, you will take to heart the achievements of the remarkable students whose stories are revealed on these pages. By reading these pages and contemplating your own role, you advance a mission that lies right at core of an effort to bring full democracy to these United States.