The Overhaul of K-12 Education Requires a Mass Movement

As we move deeper into this Black History Month, we must realize that the overhaul of K-12 education is central to the Second Stage of the Civil Rights Movement, and that the needed revolution in public education requires a mass movement.


Historically, the most challenging agendas for social change have required popular participation. This was true of the quest for women’s right to equal citizenship, succeeding through increasingly participatory stages from attendance at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, to agitation for passage of the 19th Amendment (1920) for women’s suffrage, to much larger demonstrations of the late 1960s for fuller equality in the corridors of professional and corporate power.


Similarly, mass participation in the quest for constitutional and statutory justice for African Americans gained momentum with the courageous protests of A. Philip Randolph and his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the 1930s and 1940s. Randolph was a pioneer in the kind of agitation that would eventually materialize as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.


Such pressure necessitated highly aggressive action by leaders and organizations with large popular followings: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC, led by Martin Luther King), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, led by Floyd McKissick), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael [later known as Kwame Toure), the Black Panthers (Bobby Seale and Huey Newton), and the Nation of Islam (“Black Muslims,” with Malcolm X as chief spokesperson).


The overhaul of K-12 education will require the sort of agitation and mass involvement that characterized these organizations. The impediments to achieving the necessary revolution are abundant, and the vested interests to be overcome are daunting. Education professors impart to the teachers whom they train an impoverished curriculum and weak pedagogy; they will not give up their approaches or positions lightly. Teacher training programs of departments, schools, and colleges of education are lucrative revenue producers for universities; administrators at these universities will hold on to these insidious programs as long as they can.


Teachers unions will fight objective evaluations of their performance and merit-based pay in order to maintain the status quo that results in so much mediocrity in the classrooms of our K-12 students. In the halls of central school district edifices, those occupying highly remunerative sinecures will give up their positions and their policies only if a courageous superintendent says that it must be so.


The quite remarkable turn of events is that Bernadeia Johnson is proving to be such a superintendent at the Minneapolis Public Schools. She recognizes that the status quo can no longer abide, and that new policies must be implemented. Very specifically, she knows that a rich liberal arts curriculum must be standardized and imparted to all students at particular grade levels;  such a program is being implemented in the form of Focused Instruction. She knows that teachers must be retrained in order to implement the new curriculum; thus, she has designated Teaching and Learning Director Mike Lynch as her point person in this initiative.


Superintendent Johnson knows that she needs flexibility in hiring and targeting interventions in behalf of the most struggling students at High Priority Schools; accordingly, Human Resource Operations Executive Director Rick Kreyer is seeking agreement to this new “Shift” strategy from the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers in negotiating a new contract.


Further, Johnson has placed Associate Superintendent Sara Paul in position to examine effective approaches at schools such as Harvest Prep and the Hiawatha Academies for application at High Priority Schools and at new schools of innovative design.


Ultimately, though, we cannot depend on such outliers of charter school success or on voucher-backed privatization to serve the mass of students failed by the public schools. Rather, we must overhaul our centralized systems of public education such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.


For that to happen, more members of the public must become engaged. We need a mass movement. We need dedicated individuals willing to put in the time necessary to monitor teacher-union negotiations, promote the election of school board members supportive of innovative policies, volunteer to tutor students now languishing far below grade level in math and reading, and to agitate at any available public forum for the revolution that we need in K-12 education.


Only the overhaul of K-12 education can complete the second stage of the Civil Rights Movement for economic justice, toward which Dr. King was working at the time of his death 1968.


So go ahead and sing “We Shall Overcome” yet again if you wish, and utter those verbal platitudes to the importance of Black History Month if it makes you feel better.


But know that only vigorous personal action of your own will convey that you truly understand what needs to be overcome and the nature of the next chapter that should be written for the definitive textbook on African American History.