Three Key Items for Action in Achieving Excellence in K-12 Education

Noting that people often refer to “excellent education” without having any clear notion of the constituent elements of an excellent education, I have offered a definition as follows:

>>>>> An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a strong liberal arts curriculum to all students. <<<<<

If we are to overhaul the current system of K-12 education in Minneapolis, in Minnesota, and in the United States so as to achieve excellence in public education, we must have three key items high on our agenda for action. With regard to maximizing the likelihood of finding an excellent teacher presiding when we walk into any given classroom, we must do one of two things. We must completely disassemble departments, schools, and colleges of education as they currently exist, replacing them with teacher preparation programs in the mode of those that produce doctors and lawyers. I have detailed a program whereby all prospective teachers study through to a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree, at both levels training not in education but in solid disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, history, economics, political science, literature, or the fine arts; the prospective teacher would then serve a full-year internship under the guidance of a master teacher and emerge with a clear idea that she or he can take on the demanding role of K-12 teacher. Under this system, certified K-12 teachers would have superior professional training, and they would have demonstrated keen intellectual mettle in rigorous degree programs, thus gaining position to demand correspondingly high remuneration.

Replacing current programs of teacher preparation will be opposed by education professors and many others with vested interests in the wretched system that now prevails. Until we generate enough activist will and muscle to achieve this herculean task, we must pressure superintendents and other school district actors to launch independent programs for retraining the motley specimens graduating from current teacher preparation programs. This will include providing subject area specialists across the liberal arts curriculum who can impart advanced knowledge from the legitimate disciplines to teachers who have arrived with glaring deficiencies in their mental file of academic content.

This is to say, we must believe that knowledge is at the core of an excellent education. We must move away from any notion that “learning how to learn” is enough, toward a conviction that what one learns at the K-12 level is most important. When a student studies hard and masters strong content in the natural sciences, mathematics, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts, that student will have learned how to learn material that really matters, subject area facts and themes that will enrich her or his life as a citizen and maximize that student’s chances of success in postsecondary study and occupational endeavors.

So, with well-trained teachers and a well-defined liberal arts curriculum, we will be poised to achieve my definition of an excellent education as “a matter of excellent teachers imparting a strong liberal arts curriculum to all students.” But, in addition to the provision of highly adroit teachers and the impartation of a rich body of knowledge, activist initiative for achieving democracy in the sphere of K-12 education (and therefore in the national community) will necessitate placement of one additional key item on the agenda for overhauling public education. School personnel should take all necessary steps for achieving near-100% rates of attendance and retention. All of our precious young people should have the benefits of excellent teachers imparting a strong liberal arts curriculum. They can do this only if they are in school every day and maintain firm continuity in their academic pursuits from year to year. To create such a situation, we must train many additional professionals, finding many of these among the legions of underused and unneeded central district staff, for roles directly affecting student learning and relationships with families of students. We need to greatly increase the quantity and quality of teacher aides. We need to enhance our efforts, with sensitive and skilled personnel, to reach out to families right where they live, learning in full their daily challenges, building familial relationships, so as to gain near-perfect rates of attendance and retention.

We cannot afford to be distracted by issues and activities that are tangential to the provision of an excellent education for all of our K-12 students, who will evidence varying economic statuses and differing levels of familial functionality. We must focus like a laser on teacher excellence and curricular richness, together with initiatives to maximize attendance and retention. Were we to do this, we would soon live in a nation that would be the fully realized democracy that at present can exist only in our imaginations.

Skill and Knowledge Deficits Apparent in Students of the Minneapolis Public Schools

Because the commitment that I make to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative is permanent, the program has now been in existence for eight years, and the retention rate is nearly 100%, I have to be very careful about taking on new students. But when I know that there is a dramatic need, I have a hard time turning young people and their families away, so that so far I have found space for those students for whom the reasons for enrollment seem especially compelling.

My first few sessions with a student are inevitably exercises in frustration.  I am not perturbed with the students and their families, but rather with the Minneapolis Public Schools. The skill and knowledge deficits that students bring to me are stark. Students of at any level third grade and above rarely know all of their multiplication tables. Their knowledge of decimals, fractions, and percentages is nowhere close to sufficient. Middle school students who are now being asked to perform numerous algebraic operations on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) regularly show at best near-ignorance of such rudiments as raising a number to a power, solving elementary equations for a variable, identifying slope and y-intercept, and demonstrating anything else that generally constitutes pre-algebra and algebra skills. Students at all levels are severely handicapped for not having skill and knowledge sets that should have been acquired along the way in mathematics, which calls for highly sequential skill acquisition and practice through application in tasks of increasing difficulty or sophistication. Students facing the Grade 11 Math MCA are totally clueless as to how to go about solving problems on at least 75% of that test.

Verbal skills languish just as dramatically. Vocabulary is underdeveloped, hindering reading comprehension. Content knowledge is spare, which means that students don’t know, for example, that the 19th century means the 1800s; that the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution ushered in modernity with an important chronological sequence of events; that Copernicus, Galieo, Johann Kepler, and Isaac Newton fundamentally transformed the way that we look at the universe and see ourselves in it; that the Songhai and the Song were roughly contemporary societies within which enormous learning flourished in West Africa and China respectively during a time coincidental to the European Middle Ages; what debt, deficit, recession, depression, Dow Jones, Nasdaq, Standard and Poor’s, entitlement spending, discretionary spending, and the Federal Reserve mean as economic forces and institutions that affect their lives. Such things come up in journalistic sources, on ACT exams, and in many places where sophisticated reading comprehension demands a solid knowledge base.

Students of the Minneapolis Public Schools have not as a rule learned enough about such matters as to understand that which they read, and even for those articles for which their rudimentary level of knowledge is sufficient, they have not been questioned closely in class discussions, asked to identify key ideas in paragraphs, and they have not been asked critically to evaluate two articles of varying viewpoints or give a well-defended opinion of their own. The impact of all of this is that I must teach my students most of what they need to know in math, literature, science, economics, history, and the fine arts. They just do not come to me with sufficient skill and knowledge sets to acquire an education that can prepare them beyond the high school years to be successful citizens and professionals. They have been to school, but they have not been educated. I therefore feel an elevated responsibility to convey to my students my own excitement about the world of knowledge and how engagement in that world can give them a fuller, more joyful, and happier life.

I just meet with my students for two hours each, once a week. They learn more with me than they learn in a whole week of school. Our students do not need more time in school. They need teachers who can transmit vital skill and knowledge sets to them during the now-wasted hours that these intelligent and eager learners endure in school. We must provide all of our precious young people with excellent teachers, strong skills, and abundant knowledge as a national duty. If we genuinely aspire to achieve democracy, we must know that we cannot authentically claim to dwell within a society of that description until we overhaul the system of K-12 education in Minneapolis, in Minnesota, in the United States.

Considering K-12 Education as a Necessity for the Human Family

Some commentators on K-12 education say that before we can have an effective public education system, we must have better functioning families. Many specify that every family must have a present and participatory mother and father. But the reality is, if we wait to overhaul K-12 education until all families function according to the prescriptions of these commentators, we might as well wait until Sisyphus gets that pesky boulder up the eternally daunting hill.

If all families do not function according to our ideals, then we must consider every family our own. Every family is a part of the human family, so if any family needs assistance, it is our obligation as human beings to render the necessary help. This means that every child in every family belongs to each one of us and deserves any opportunity for a happy life that we would wish for and work toward in behalf of the children in the natal and conjugal families over which we preside. We should think this way, and act accordingly, because it is the right thing to do. Striving for the common good is central to the ethos of each of the world’s great religions, with human beings conceptualized as brothers and sisters, children of a loving God; and working in the best interests of all people is also germane to humanist morality. Hence, if any of us takes seriously that religion or philosophy that we are likely to hold central to the way we move and act in the world, we will at all times consider our responsibility to all of our brothers and sisters in the human family.

I work seven days a week with families and their children in North Minneapolis. I arrive at their homes, engage them in conversation, find out the nature of their most recent challenges, and am able to consider all of what I hear in the context of an ongoing relationship. For I have drawn so close to the students and families associated with the New Salem Educational Initiative that I have become essentially another family member. These wonderful people, all of them economically poor, many residing in household units giving evidence of familial dysfunction, nevertheless continue to strive for the betterment of those whom they love with a ferocity that matches the parental love of those so quick to cast judgment upon them.

Less than perfect families and children facing life challenges truly daunting for their young years are human realities. These conditions define the circumstances that many students bring to school with them. This represents a challenge that we have a responsibility to face, not to use as an excuse for the glaring deficiencies of our system of public K-12 education. Political conservatives most often cite one-parent households and unorthodox familial structures as excuses for our failure properly to educate all of our children. But political liberals also often sound a similar note, echoing the chant of the education establishment that public education inherits problems born of family and community that must be solved by family and community.

But all of us are part of the human family and therefore members of the same community. As an educator, I consider it my most important duty to educate those who come from the most challenged households. The program that I run features academic sessions held during non-school hours, during late afternoons and evenings and on weekends. Much of what I do could be extrapolated and taken as a model by the Minneapolis Public Schools. I provide transportation to all of my students to each and every session, virtually assuring near-perfect attendance, interacting as I do with the families at the time of pickup and return: Minneapolis public school officials could retrain and reassign underworked bureaucrats to serve as family liaisons who know the life circumstances of each of the most challenged families in the school district. In the academic sessions that I run, I focus like a laser on math, reading, and engaging materials from across the liberal arts; I am no-nonsense about the use of our time for educational purposes, while at the same time bantering relentlessly in a way that captures the attention and brings smiles to those human treasures under my tutelage: Minneapolis Public Schools personnel should take notes on the matters of a rich math, reading, and liberal arts curriculum; and on matters of pedagogy.

If family outreach is strong, if curriculum is rich, and if teaching is proficient, all children in the K-12 public schools can be properly educated. We owe such an education to all students, because equal opportunity is central to a democracy. And we must love all children as our own, because they are ours in the family surnamed Humanity.

The Speciousness of Claims Concerning the Brevity of Time in Class

Among the many games that the K-12 public school establishment will run on you is the claim that there is just not enough student time spent in class in order to achieve various favorable outcomes. We have the claim by many school district officials that the school calendar should find students in class before Labor Day, so that they have enough time to prepare for a set schedule of standardized tests. We have the assertion by administrators of the Minneapolis Public Schools that there is no longer time enough to teach cursive handwriting. And we have the postulate in numerous quarters that more days should be added to the school year so that our students are not denied the amount of time in class prevalent in some European and many East Asian school systems.

All of this is a lot of malarkey. With regard to the need for an earlier start so as to properly prepare students for standardized tests, please understand that students are not being prepared for these tests anyway. I run a program of total academic support mainly for students living in North Minneapolis. My initial effort is to get students up to grade level, then with that achieved I make a permanent commitment to my students along a track leading toward and into colleges and universities. Most of the time, I have to teach may students everything that they need to know to fully meet Minnesota state academic standards, including skill and knowledge sets necessary to solve problems posed on item samplers given on the Minnesota Department of Education website. I am forever asking my students if certain skills that they will need to demonstrate grade level performance on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) have been covered in class, finding that as many as 80% of the relevant skills have not been covered. And the reason is time improperly used: time wasted with substitutes, on unfocused field trips, in assemblies, weeks when little math or reading is emphasized at all.

With so much time wasted, is there really no temporal space to teach cursive? There is plenty of time to teach cursive handwriting, a third grade skill that my first and second graders start eagerly anticipating during those early grades. It is the single most popular item on a generally vacuous Minneapolis Public Schools curriculum for young students, a skill to which students look forward to mastering in a display that they are growing up, that they are doing something that older siblings and friends can do. For years, teachers have been giving short-shrift to cursive handwriting, so that various adaptations of printing (often lacking aesthetic appeal and even legibility) are used. So this is yet another skill that I end up teaching my students that should have been learned in class.

And should we add class days in order to match the ambitions of educators in some of Europe and much of East Asia? We would do better first to aspire to the quality of education in South Korea and Taiwan before we worry very much about the quantity. The scholarly study of Taiwan is my specialty. I deeply admire many aspects of Taiwanese education, most especially the emphasis on math, science, and history. Students in Taiwan have skill and knowledge sets that put students in the United States to shame. But the reason lies in quality, not quantity. Class time is well-focused and effective in Taiwan. Class time in the schools of Minneapolis specifically and the United States generally is largely squandered.

So don’t let the public school establishment run yet another game on you. Keep those starts after Labor Day if you want to. By all means, go ahead and teach cursive. Don’t worry about lengthening the school year. But do get into those school board meetings, principals’ offices, and classrooms to demand that our precious children receive quality instruction, so that we need not fear the current level of ignorance that undermines their potential for citizenship and employment when, after 13 years spent in our wretched schools, they walk across the stage to claim a largely worthless piece of paper.

Black History Month and the Overhaul of K-12 Education as the Second Stage of the Civil Rights Movement

If we are serious about celebrating Black History Month, we will understand that the second stage of the Civil Rights Movement will unfold with an overhaul of K-12 Education. Then we will understand that almost no one is articulating very well what must be done to wage the revolution in K-12 education. But in Minnesota and across the United States an overhaul of K-12 education is imperative if we are to realize a society of full-fledged democracy.

No one in either of the two major political parties is even close to formulating the basic precepts that must undergird the revolution. Republicans are mainly emphasizing parental choice through the exercise of charter school options, utilizing market mechanisms and private initiative via a voucher system, and strengthening local control. But this approach is deeply flawed. Most charter schools are worse than the regular public schools. There are not enough good private schools to accommodate the masses of K-12 students, and there is not enough surety in the success of the voucher approach to justify the use of public money for students to attend private institutions. And local control is an illusion; school boards and education bureaucracies function similarly from one school district to another. Those boards and bureaucracies are themselves largely responsible for our wretched public schools; further, the administrator and teacher candidates who come to them are produced by very similar teacher preparation programs that constitute the greatest single culprit in putting inadequate teachers in the classrooms of our precious children.

My fellow Democrats tend to be even worse on education issues than are Republicans. They are beholden to the teachers unions, which do what good unions do: lobby for better wages and benefits for their members; in no way, though, are teachers unions advocates for the best educational interests of our young people. Teachers unions continue to cling to a system in which excellent teachers and terrible teachers are treated largely the same, keeping their jobs year after year and gaining increase in pay only through a step and lane system that rewards years of service and continuing education of very questionable quality.

Virtually every word that comes out of the mouths of Governor Mark Dayton and Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius relating to education is rubbish. The value of universal pre-K education is vastly oversold to direct attention away from the disaster that constitutes our public schools. Thirty years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, we should not allow ourselves to be fooled yet again by the education establishment and politicians who serve as its lackeys. The importance of a child’s brain development during the years from birth to age 5 is critical, but that development will languish if we inflict the present K-12 system upon that potentially bountiful brain.

We are forever creating diversions from the key tenets necessary for waging the necessary revolution in K-12 education. That is because the requisite overhaul will require courage and persistence that has heretofore been lacking in every quarter. Here’s what we really need to do. We need to completely disassemble education departments, colleges, and schools of education in their current form, replacing them with teacher preparation programs that train teachers as professionals in the mode of doctors and lawyers. We need to implement a rich liberal arts curriculum, specified in year by year sequence, in schools replete with teachers possessing broad and deep content area knowledge. We need to redirect dollars currently being spent to maintain central school district bureaucracies, toward positions that directly affect student learning: many more and better qualified teacher’s aides; outreach workers who know the families of students from challenged circumstances.

The next time Governor Dayton and the inept public education establishment that helped get him elected speak gibberish, consider the speciousness that invests every word. When they tell you that teaching to the test is the problem, consider that the real problem is not teaching much of anything. When they tell you that too much emphasis on math and reading narrows the curriculum, tell them that those skills are the vital portal through which all knowledge flows, and in any case there is not much of a curriculum (especially at the K-5 level) to narrow. When they try to tell you that critical thinking supersedes content area knowledge, tell them that no critical thinking occurs in the absence of a solid knowledge base. And when they tell you that public investment in early childhood education is the key to closing the achievement gap, tell them that readiness for the K-12 experience will mean nothing if that experience is as empty and frequently damaging as it is now.

I have been educating inner city youth consistently for more than 40 years. For over 20 years, I have been working with the youth of North Minneapolis. For eight years I have done what I do now: provide transportation, teach academic sessions, and interact with the families of students right where they live in North Minneapolis. I have seen and abetted the enormous potential of these students, whose peers deserve the same kind of love and enduring commitment. They deserve a public school system that really provides that which can be properly called education. And for that to happen, we must overhaul K-12 education along the lines suggested herein. Black History Month should serve as a springboard for the kind of courageous action needed in the next stage of the Civil Rights Movement.