As we approach Black History Month, we need to realize that to do full honor to the great man whose life we recently celebrated, we must overhaul K-12 education toward realization of economic justice, Dr. King’s foremost concern during the last two years of his life.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is in that class of eminent historical figures of the United States that includes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and A. Philip Randolph. He is not fully appreciated, even though the Congressional tally finally brought us a national day of recognition for him in 1986. By applying the principles of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s satyagraha assertive version of nonviolence, Dr. King put himself in harm’s way many times in efforts that contributed mightily to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Those were landmark pieces of legislation, of a kind that also brought us fair housing and employment opportunity legislation. All such legislation was hugely important in opening unprecedented pathways for those positioned to realize middle class aspirations. But all of this meant remarkably little to those left behind at the urban core, just trying to survive from day to day. Dr. King knew this.
At the time he was struck mortally by a bullet on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in April 1968, Dr. King was hurdling himself aggressively into his movement’s new and paramount Nonviolent Populism Phase (1967-1968) for economic justice. Dr. King’s trip to Memphis in the interest of economic justice for the city’s sanitation workers was to be a brief interruption in his larger effort to organize a Poor People’s March on Washington, bringing public attention to the plight of the nation’s most economically impoverished people.
And that is where we are today. Forty-six years later, we have never adequately addressed the problems that Dr. King knew still lay unresolved at the time that his heart stopped beating. We must do better. The time is now. No one can do this for you (readers of this article). All great movements require direct, persistent efforts on the part of masses of people. And this one may just take more effort than has heretofore been required.
We must overhaul public K-12 education to complete the second, economic justice phase of the Civil Rights Movement We must do this not by depending mainly on charter schools, and certainly not on some forlorn hope that privatization through vouchers could ever point us in the direction of educational excellence. We must do the hard work of transforming the centralized school districts that do now and will in the future serve most of those impoverished young people about whom Dr. King cared so deeply.
We must define excellent education as a matter of excellent teachers delivering a rich liberal arts curriculum in logical grade by grade sequence; and excellent teachers as those professionals possessed of broad and deep knowledge with the pedagogical ability to educate all students.
Then you yourself must do the hard work. Do not depend on any of the putative reform organizations to do the work for you. Leaders and members of such organizations have proven themselves timid and ineffective. The transformation of K-12 education must occur on the strength of the labor of masses of people willing to traverse inner city streets, meet challenged families at the urban core, volunteer as tutors in the most academically challenged schools, and support the efforts of serious educational professionals to do whatever is necessary to ensure that students of all ethnic and economic descriptors succeed.
Minneapolis Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson is such an educator. She has assembled an astonishingly talented staff that is making full effort to achieve the necessary educational transformation. So call Superintendent Johnson and tell her that you are behind her and will work in the coming months to elect school board members who support her mission. Let Early Literacy Tutoring Coordinator Kara Bennett know that you want to offer tutoring assistance to a struggling child.
Then get on the phone again and tell Teaching and Learning Director Mike Lynch that you admire his efforts to upgrade curriculum and teaching through “Focused Instruction.” Notify Human Resource Operations Executive Director Rick Kreyer that you are behind his efforts to advance Superintendent Johnson’s “Shift” campaign by placing the most effective teachers at severely challenged, “High Priority Schools.” And communicate to Associate Superintendent Sara Paul that you are fully behind her efforts to bring innovative design to schools that are both pedagogically engaging and academically substantive.
No one else can do this for you. Overhaul of K-12 education requires populist participation of the sort advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King. You can best honor Dr. King’s efforts in behalf of the most economically poor among us by working for high quality education for all students.
Designate Black History Month for commencing assistance to those at the Minneapolis Public Schools who are themselves already hard at work at the most important mission imaginable: the achievement of educational excellence in a large urban school district, for the benefit of students of all ethnicities and economic statuses.
Jan 27, 2014
Cold Weather Cancellations Expose Severe Shortcoming in Public Schools Curriculum and Pedagogy
Cancellations for cold weather represent failure for the public schools and expose severe shortcomings in approaches to curriculum and pedagogy.
The first shortcoming exposed is the weakness in curriculum, particularly at the K-5 level. For decades, teachers of students at the K-5 level have shortchanged children by failing to give them a substantive education in history, government, and economics. Students emerge from elementary school with little knowledge of colonial America, the institution of slavery, the reasons for and the facts of the American Revolution, the essence of the United States Constitution, and the many events and personages of note in the 19th , 20th, and 21st centuries of the United States. Names such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph McCarthy are lost on most students as they emerge from their K-5 years. Even such icons as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and John Kennedy are known only in the vaguest manner.
Students at the K-5 level have very little idea of how Congress functions, the nature of the Democratic and Republican parties, or what the Supreme Court does and who is now sitting on it. They have no sense at all of the major stock exchanges, how federal debt differs from federal deficit, or how budgetary decisions affect these latter realities. All of this would be very possible for a Grade 5 student to understand if, in the course of the K-5 years, there was the appropriate incremental accumulation of knowledge in specified grade by grade sequence.
But rather than teach substantive material in history and the social sciences, teachers follow a weak curriculum that purportedly has students focus on their own families and communities. But even this is taught in a shallow way that does nothing to consider these units in any sociological or anthropological context; rather, students conduct projects, participate in group work, and write essays that have them answering open-ended questions concerning their subjective feelings about family and community.
Certainly, if the claim by members of the education establishment is that they are educating students to function well in the context of their specific community environments, then in Minnesota proper dress during the wintertime should be a part of such an education. This really should not be very difficult.
How hard would it be to start from head to toe, demonstrating how one first of all covers one’s face with a good, thick, ski mask during truly cold weather, one that admits no moisture and shields against the wind, at the same time directing a great deal of heat from the head down toward the trunk of the body ?
How challenging would be the task of showing proper layering on the trunk of one’s body, how not to be dependent on a single coat so much as layers of sweaters and sweat shirts that build up pockets of warm air and are best topped with an outer level of moisture resistant material?
Could not an educator acting upon experience and pure reason show how important insulated gloves truly appropriate for the coldest weather are in avoiding frostbite?
And couldn’t the fairly adroit educator demonstrate the importance of thermal socks and a good pair of boots?
These would truly valuable demonstrations of how to live comfortably in one’s community, to understand that community, and to feel a part of the natural world manifested in the community throughout the seasonal transformations. But this is real knowledge, and the education establishment--- led by those lamentable creatures called professors of education--- thrives on the conceit that facts can always be looked up, so that learning “critical thinking” skills is more important that mastering facts.
Here we see the second weakness, pertaining to pedagogy. This weakness is inextricably bound up in the matter of curriculum. The pedagogical conceit of the education establishment is that imparting factual knowledge is unimportant, because facts can always be “looked up.” Teachers are best seen, in this skewed view of education, as facilitators who help their students find their way to their own knowledge. The notion of teacher as one who transmits knowledge key to an understanding of the past, present, and future world fades with this view of pedagogy.
But the closing of schools for cold weather exposes the failure of the education establishment on the basis of both critical thinking and factual knowledge. Having failed to teach young people how to dress properly in cold weather and to seize the opportunity to meld knowledge of human physiology with practical dress for winter, the education establishment would generally fall back on the excuse that critical thinking and instantaneous acquisition of facts is superior to patient accumulation and internalization of factual content. But if the education establishment’s approach were sufficient students would exercise critical thought about going out into cold weather conditions properly dressed, accessing the information necessary to achieve the task.
But this kind of follow through, even on its own principles, is not what the education establishment is about. Claims to teach critical thinking skills and instantaneous research capacity are just excuses for being too lazy to impart curriculum of substance.
As a result, we witness the spectacle of people who should know that, wow, Minnesota can be really cold in January, closing schools out of failure to teach students how to live comfortably in their environment. About a week of school is lost. Students feel alienated from their environment. Not only have they not acquired the factual knowledge in history, government, and economics that their teachers mostly lack; they have not even thrived on those terms that those would-be educators claim as their own key principles.
Hence, always understand that when a member of the education establishment claims to value critical thinking and the “you-can-always-look-up-facts” approach to education, this is due to members of that establishment lacking the requisite knowledge and pedagogical ability to educate our children properly, not because the approach that they purport to follow has any merit.
The first shortcoming exposed is the weakness in curriculum, particularly at the K-5 level. For decades, teachers of students at the K-5 level have shortchanged children by failing to give them a substantive education in history, government, and economics. Students emerge from elementary school with little knowledge of colonial America, the institution of slavery, the reasons for and the facts of the American Revolution, the essence of the United States Constitution, and the many events and personages of note in the 19th , 20th, and 21st centuries of the United States. Names such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph McCarthy are lost on most students as they emerge from their K-5 years. Even such icons as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and John Kennedy are known only in the vaguest manner.
Students at the K-5 level have very little idea of how Congress functions, the nature of the Democratic and Republican parties, or what the Supreme Court does and who is now sitting on it. They have no sense at all of the major stock exchanges, how federal debt differs from federal deficit, or how budgetary decisions affect these latter realities. All of this would be very possible for a Grade 5 student to understand if, in the course of the K-5 years, there was the appropriate incremental accumulation of knowledge in specified grade by grade sequence.
But rather than teach substantive material in history and the social sciences, teachers follow a weak curriculum that purportedly has students focus on their own families and communities. But even this is taught in a shallow way that does nothing to consider these units in any sociological or anthropological context; rather, students conduct projects, participate in group work, and write essays that have them answering open-ended questions concerning their subjective feelings about family and community.
Certainly, if the claim by members of the education establishment is that they are educating students to function well in the context of their specific community environments, then in Minnesota proper dress during the wintertime should be a part of such an education. This really should not be very difficult.
How hard would it be to start from head to toe, demonstrating how one first of all covers one’s face with a good, thick, ski mask during truly cold weather, one that admits no moisture and shields against the wind, at the same time directing a great deal of heat from the head down toward the trunk of the body ?
How challenging would be the task of showing proper layering on the trunk of one’s body, how not to be dependent on a single coat so much as layers of sweaters and sweat shirts that build up pockets of warm air and are best topped with an outer level of moisture resistant material?
Could not an educator acting upon experience and pure reason show how important insulated gloves truly appropriate for the coldest weather are in avoiding frostbite?
And couldn’t the fairly adroit educator demonstrate the importance of thermal socks and a good pair of boots?
These would truly valuable demonstrations of how to live comfortably in one’s community, to understand that community, and to feel a part of the natural world manifested in the community throughout the seasonal transformations. But this is real knowledge, and the education establishment--- led by those lamentable creatures called professors of education--- thrives on the conceit that facts can always be looked up, so that learning “critical thinking” skills is more important that mastering facts.
Here we see the second weakness, pertaining to pedagogy. This weakness is inextricably bound up in the matter of curriculum. The pedagogical conceit of the education establishment is that imparting factual knowledge is unimportant, because facts can always be “looked up.” Teachers are best seen, in this skewed view of education, as facilitators who help their students find their way to their own knowledge. The notion of teacher as one who transmits knowledge key to an understanding of the past, present, and future world fades with this view of pedagogy.
But the closing of schools for cold weather exposes the failure of the education establishment on the basis of both critical thinking and factual knowledge. Having failed to teach young people how to dress properly in cold weather and to seize the opportunity to meld knowledge of human physiology with practical dress for winter, the education establishment would generally fall back on the excuse that critical thinking and instantaneous acquisition of facts is superior to patient accumulation and internalization of factual content. But if the education establishment’s approach were sufficient students would exercise critical thought about going out into cold weather conditions properly dressed, accessing the information necessary to achieve the task.
But this kind of follow through, even on its own principles, is not what the education establishment is about. Claims to teach critical thinking skills and instantaneous research capacity are just excuses for being too lazy to impart curriculum of substance.
As a result, we witness the spectacle of people who should know that, wow, Minnesota can be really cold in January, closing schools out of failure to teach students how to live comfortably in their environment. About a week of school is lost. Students feel alienated from their environment. Not only have they not acquired the factual knowledge in history, government, and economics that their teachers mostly lack; they have not even thrived on those terms that those would-be educators claim as their own key principles.
Hence, always understand that when a member of the education establishment claims to value critical thinking and the “you-can-always-look-up-facts” approach to education, this is due to members of that establishment lacking the requisite knowledge and pedagogical ability to educate our children properly, not because the approach that they purport to follow has any merit.
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