Article #1 Introductory Thoughts

Article #1


Introductory Thoughts


First in a Five-Article Series:  The Essence of the New Salem Educational Initiative in the Expanding Mission to Revolutionize K-12 Education, Summer 2014


Human Relationships:    Enduring, Loving, Substantive


The Power of Knowledge and Love




Love and knowledge fuel the New Salem Educational Initiative.


I have been on my central mission in life for over forty years now. As a sophomore at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, I began coordinating and teaching in academic programs for students in the Dallas Independent School District who received instruction from fellow students and myself through SMU Volunteer Services (now called MOVE). I began my professional career teaching at L. G. Pinkston High School, near what were then the West Dallas projects. From the 1970s forward, I have taught in most situations that one could imagine: a prison (Missouri Eastern Correctional Center), overseas (in Taiwan, as an English as a Second Language instructor); at universities (University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota); and high schools that have covered the rural, suburban, and urban.


I have always believed in knowledge. I always aspired to be primarily a high school teacher, but I trained in the manner more typical of the college professor, studying through to the M. A. at the University of Iowa and the Ph. D. at the University of Minnesota. I put the knowledge that I have acquired to use every day in the teaching that I do now as the director of the New Salem Educational Initiative, conveying to my students a respect not just for the process of learning but for the knowledge that should be the goal of learning.


I emphasize the love that I have for knowledge and the love of knowledge that I instill in my students because the K-12 education establishment, astoundingly, devalues knowledge. Education professors operate on the basis of a bankrupt ideational formulation called “constructivism,” which calls for the generation of topics for study on the basis of the experiences and interests of students, who are assisted in their quests for information on those topics by teachers in the role of facilitators.


This approach to education has been particularly damaging in urban school systems, wherein many a student is impoverished and comes from a family of low educational attainment; such students need well-defined skill and knowledge sets delivered in grade-by grade sequence throughout the K-12 years, by teachers possessing deep and broad subject area knowledge. They are ill-served when their own whims, or those of their teacher, are given more curricular weight than the cumulative knowledge inherited from the greatest scholars and thinkers across the centuries of the human experience.           


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Thus, in the two-hour weekly academic sessions that I conduct for my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, I show my love for them by imparting to them the knowledge that I have accumulated over many decades. We read Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth) in full and in the original Elizabethan language.


We study African American history in the context of United States history, so that they know what few public school students know--- about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; the Compromise of 1877; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Northern Migration, Harlem Renaissance (Countee Cullen, Paul Dunbar, Angelina Grimke, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes), A. Phillip Randolph, and the great figures, issues, and organizations of the contemporary Civil Rights Movement.


My students know the difference in the central tenets and cosmological focus of Newtonian versus Einstein’s physics; the difference between humanist and behaviorist psychology; the major components of Freud’s psychoanalysis; the main structures of the brain and the importance of neuroscience. They learn and utilize all key major mathematical concepts from those first numbers, time, and money in Grade K; to the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus near the upper level of high school mathematics.


My students get an education. Empowered by their accumulation of knowledge, they then define their own raging interests and follow these, in the context of major courses of study across the liberal arts--- doing research papers, properly including citations, whether internal, footnoted, or end-noted.


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  I love working as hard as I do, but I shouldn’t have to. We have now traversed over 30 years since the federally commissioned study, A Nation at Risk (1983), detailed the sorry state of education in the United States. We have endured fad after fad. We have created charter schools that are typically worse than the public schools; there are some academically better outliers, but for the most part, we have wasted money and reduced pressure on schools of centralized school districts to define high quality education and deliver academic excellence to all students, regardless of demographic descriptors.


Similarly, some people have forlornly placed their hopes in a future of K-12 education dominated by vouchers for impoverished children to attend private schools. But there are not enough private schools to accommodate the masses of students currently enrolled in public schools; private schools vary greatly in quality; and both the charter school and voucher approaches would deny our children a common set of knowledge and skills of the sort that make the nationally centralized systems of East Asia and the European socialist democracies much more successful by comparison with the United States.


We will not any time soon have a nationalized system of K-12 education in the United States. We claim a penchant for local control, even though our local systems of public education function much the same, with classrooms filled with teachers who are trained by education professors touting the philosophically degraded constructivist pap; teachers unions that block any initiative that would redound to the benefit of students but require adjustments or sacrifices from union members; school boards that largely rubber stamp superintendent decisions until she or he commits some illegal act or moral peccadillo; principals who hide out in their offices until time for transfer or retirement; and central school district offices vastly overstaffed by outlandishly overpaid bureaucrats.


But understand me. I am a vehement critic of the way the education establishment of education professors, central office bureaucrats, and teachers unions function, but I am a strong supporter of the institution of the centralized public school district. At this level of operation, educators are in a position to articulate a challenging, coherent, logically sequenced liberal arts curriculum for acquisition grade by grade throughout the K-12 years; and to retrain teachers to impart those knowledge and skill sets to students of all demographic descriptors.


They are in a position to do so, but they don’t. So I have decided to intensify my efforts to revolutionize K-12 education. I have come to respect greatly the courage and acumen of Minneapolis Pubic Schools Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson. In the inaugural (Volume I, No. One) edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, I discuss the promising initiatives that educators under Superintendent Johnson’s leadership are pursuing in the form of High Priority Schools (identified for enhanced efforts to raise achievement levels for students facing multiple challenges); and of Focused Instruction (a fine nascent effort to achieve the necessary challenging, sequenced, coherent, comprehensive liberal arts curriculum for impartation to students of all demographic descriptors). These are the sorts of approaches that promise to bring well-defined skill and knowledge sets to students in Minneapolis served by the most important unit of academic instruction: the centralized public school district.


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But the superintendent is just beginning. There is much work to be done in fully upgrading the curriculum defined for Focused Instruction. Teachers must be retrained, since they have been so horribly trained in departments, schools, and colleges of education. Delivery of strong liberal arts content demands knowledge and skill sets on the part of teachers themselves that they are not likely to have at any level, especially those teaching at the K-5 elementary level.


And at the High Priority Schools, teachers must be rallied to rise to the very particular challenges of students who attend those institutions. These teachers must be recruited specifically for their sacred mission, they should be imbued with a sense of that mission, they should be materially rewarded for excellent performance in the pursuit of the mission, and every effort should be made to retain these most important of professionals at the height of their success.


The superintendent will also need to work to slim the bureaucracy that she heads, eliminating many central office staff positions and retraining individuals in those positions as needed tutors, teachers’ aides, and family liaisons who are truly needed to enhance student learning and establish strong relationships with parents and other family members of students.


Over the course of the next many months, years, to the end of my days if necessary, I will be variously supporting and critiquing the efforts of Bernadeia Johnson and her staff. Superintendent Johnson shows promise to be a truly transformative leader, capable of creating a centralized school district worthy of emulation as a national model. I intend to encourage her to do this by every means at my disposal--- through my seven-day-a-week-academic sessions in the New Salem Educational Initiative; the new Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; personal attendance at school board meetings, contract negotiations between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and the Minneapolis Public Schools, and other important gatherings of educators and professionals whose actions affect the academic and therefore life prospects of our children; by taking my message to many forums and media; and by organizing community members who will help foment the necessary revolution in K-12 education.


The following three articles (followed by an article in which I express concluding thoughts) offer accounts of student experiences in the New Salem Educational Initiative, with much that discerning readers can extrapolate for application in the needed revolution. These students are thriving in a program that offers love and knowledge. They are on their way to a better life.


And so it should be with every young person in the city of Minneapolis, in the state of Minnesota, and in the nation formed by these United States.