Article #5>>>>> My Analysis of the Minneapolis Public Schools Contract Proposals and of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers Response>>>>> Part Two: My Comments

Via the summary of General Interests and Proposed Contract Language, Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools are focusing with intensity on the very particular needs of students who are struggling below grade level in fundamental skills. These students are especially apparent at certain schools overwhelmingly dominated by students from low-income families.

Administrative authority to make needed changes and ongoing adjustments; the hiring, rewarding, and retention of excellent teachers; and enough time to do what needs to be done; are all effective tenets of successful programs such as the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools, the Harlem Achievement Zone superintended by Geoffrey Canada, and many of the most effective, high-poverty, high-performing schools across the nation.

Embedded in the expressed and implied conceptualization is the assertion that administrators should take responsibility for running schools and that the very best teachers should be in the classroom educating students to their maximum capacity. This makes extraordinary sense. Teaching is quite enough of a responsibility when it is done with excellence. Excellent teachers, secure in what they are doing in the classroom, focus on students and the classroom. Talented administrators are secure in taking responsibility for hiring the best staff possible and employing the skills of excellent teachers to maximum effect.

To their great credit, officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools are making a move toward a program, to be stipulated in the contract, to streamline processes most likely to enable talented administrators to use their talents, to allow excellent teachers to manifest their excellence, and for students (all of whom have enormous potential) to reach their full potential in mastering skill and knowledge sets that will define their experiences now and in their futures.

In business, industry, much of higher academia, and the best performing schools across the nation, administrative flexibility exists to search for and hire the best staff members, rewarding them with whatever incentives are appropriate (including those spontaneously dispensed as monetary reward for demonstrated and particular excellence). Well-functioning organizations feature administrators and managers who can make calls on the spot to meet the exigencies of the moment, assuming full responsibility for the calls that are made.

But in the stodgy world of the education establishment, this sort of talent and flexibility is not cultivated or allowed. Grade K-5 teachers undergo terrible teacher preparation, under the influence of education professors who do not respect knowledge. Grade K-5 teachers typically arrive in classrooms devoid of key knowledge sets in math, science, literature, history, economics, the fine arts, and languages. They are not prepared to impart knowledge to their students, because they have so little knowledge themselves. So as a posture to hide their insufficient knowledge, they pretend that instead of imparting knowledge, they are teaching students to “learn how to learn,” be “lifelong learners,” and to “think critically.”

Secondary teachers are a bit better trained. They have to undergo excruciatingly terrible education courses, but they do get majors in legitimate disciplines (e. g., math, chemistry, English, history, music, or Spanish)--- except for those who attend institutions that allow them to take the less rigorous major of “Teaching Social Studies” (Math, Science, etc.). But at the middle school level, the going philosophy of the education establishment has tended toward viewing socialization of the early adolescent as paramount, so that we wait until high school to deliver anything like a decent liberal arts curriculum. But here, too many teachers are inadequate to the task.

Thus, we have students (those who do at least manage to graduate) who walk across the stage not knowing who Frederick Douglass was, not knowing a cerebral cortex from a corpus callosum, never having really learned and understood how to apply the Pythagorean Theorem (much less the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus), never having had the full literary genius of Homer and Shakespeare revealed to them, having no idea of the difference between federal deficit and federal debt.

Our students are educated atrociously, officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools know it, and they are trying to do much better, especially with regard to the students failed the most by a failed system. The response of the representatives of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers is expected but even worse than one might hope. They resist giving principals and administrators the power that they need to hire, reward, and retain the best teachers, because many in the MFT membership would not measure up. Insecure in their considerable power to teach, they are distrustful of those who would wield proper administrative authority.  Unable to teach students fundamental math and reading skills to give grade level performance on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs), they reject fair and objective standardized teaching in favor of a deceptively titled “Authentic Assessment” that was tossed out over a decade ago under the pressure of an outside review that deemed the old Profile of Learning to be virtually no learning at all.

But some of the statements issued in response to the Proposed Contract Language are particularly, stunningly, deeply disturbing:

In what world do these teacher representatives dwell, in which there is no comprehension that additional explicit instruction in math and reading are necessary for students operating two and three grades below that of school enrollment?

From where comes the assumption that students will be bored when given proper instruction in math and reading?

Under what impoverished educational model does a putative educator claim that going to camp, museums, and outdoor nature venues will address math and reading skills--- because upper middle class students get to do more of these kinds of things?

Understand that I write this as a teacher who in the New Salem Educational Initiative takes students to the Great River Shakespeare Festival every summer, who invites students to dine in my home with my wife and me (sampling international fare that they are not likely to get as ordinary diet), who has taken groups to the Boundary Waters and on tours of East Asia.

But as the staple of their experience with me, my students eagerly run to my car after school, early Saturday morning, and on Sunday afternoons and evenings for the ride to the classrooms at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church to focus like a laser on math and reading fundamentals, then to embark on a magnificent exploration of subjects from across a liberal arts curriculum that they never get in their daily instruction in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

And anyone reading this is welcome to meet these students, all of whom come from economically challenged circumstances, any time, any academic session, any day of the week.

Conclusion

Officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools are to be lauded for having conceived and generated a contract that addresses the needs of students to acquire fundamental skill and knowledge sets, particularly in High Priority Schools.

The public should put its full weight of approval behind the efforts of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and a dedicated team of negotiators, conveying to the representatives of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers that the stipulations in the Proposed Contract Language are necessary, long overdue, and imperative.