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.