Preparing to Pick a Fight with Steve Perry at the First RESET Talk

I’m planning to pick a fight with Steve Perry. He told me to, if it means striving for excellence in education. Perry will deliver a message, over which I am planning to pick the fight, on April 22 as the first of three speakers invited by the Minneapolis Foundation in its RESET campaign to improve K-12 education.

Understand this, and be deciding what you think: Perry’s fundamental argument is that the public school systems of the United States are beyond repair. He would replace school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools with independently run public charter schools and private schools funded through vouchers. Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and others in central school district offices would be relegated to roles monitoring the progress of charter and private schools in doing what they are designed to do.

As we anticipate this fundamental message that Steve Perry is likely to deliver, you should consider my reason for picking this fight: Perry’s ideas as expressed to date (especially in his book, Push Has Come to Shove: Getting Our  Kids the Education They Deserve- Even If It Means Picking a Fight) are incisive as pertaining to the failings of the education establishment, but they are misguided as relating to the replacement of the current K-12 system.

Steve Perry is the principal of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut. As a magnet school, Capital Preparatory is a public school. Perry incisively identifies public school bureaucracy impediments to firing incompetent teachers. He correctly censures teachers unions, school boards, and central district bureaucrats for opposing innovations such as alternative teacher certification, thoroughgoing teacher evaluation, and merit pay. Perry also argues persuasively that many suburban schools will stellar reputations are mediocre at best by the highest international standards.

Perry and his staff at Capital Preparatory Magnet School have had substantial success, with 100% of graduating seniors enrolling in four-year colleges. But the school’s primarily African American and Latino student body is small (now about 540 students with the addition of a “lower [elementary] school” but through most of its existence rising to only 360 students or so, with a graduating class generally of about 25 students). And in most years, at least 40% of the school’s students have not come from families economically poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price lunch. The status of the institution as a model for systems dealing with thousands of young people from impoverished or dysfunctional families is very much open for investigation.

More importantly, Perry’s vision for a revamped K-12 education system is errant. His great faith in a market-oriented approach of charter schools and voucher support for private school attendance contravenes his expressed admiration for the school systems of Finland and South Korea, wherein students thrive on the basis of well-conceived national curricula and centralized governmental control over educational processes pertaining to the pre-K through high school years.

Rather than give up on the notion of centralized school districts, we need to revolutionize the approaches of those school districts in order to realize the ideal of a shared and coherent educational experience for all children. In Minneapolis, we should with great persistence and clarity urge Bernadeia Johnson to recognize the following principles:

1) An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum to all students.

2) An excellent teacher is that professional who possesses deep and broad subject area knowledge and the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.

To fulfill the requirements for excellent education and excellent teachers, we should persistently press Superintendent Johnson to do four things:

1) Define a strong liberal arts curriculum to be mastered by all students, logically conceived for impartation in grade-by-grade sequence from kindergarten through grade 12.

2) Retrain teachers so that they have the knowledge base and classroom presence to impart this knowledge-heavy curriculum. (Note: This is the expedient for the long-range goal of completely revamping university teacher training programs.)

3) Train highly skilled teacher’s aides in sufficient quantity to assist teachers in meeting the needs of every student.

4) Establish and properly train a skilled and sensitive contingent of outreach workers to connect with students and their families right where they live.

This is what we need to do as we overhaul our system of K-12 public education and achieve excellence. The “education our children deserve” is of a type very different from that touted by Steve Perry, so I’ll be “picking a fight” with him at that first RESET talk. But, more to his liking, I’ll also continue to pick a fight with the education establishment in order to overcome the vested interests that maintain the current wretched system. And I’ll be encouraging more of you to do the same.