Article #5 Concluding Thoughts

Article #5


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




Human Relationships  Enduring, Loving, Substantive


Revolutionizing K-12 Education by Doing Whatever is Necessary To Impart Strong Liberal Arts Content to Every Single Child


Where are out guts, indeed?


Why don’t we care enough to do what needs to be done?


Why have we not, three decades after publication of A Nation at Risk, found a way to transform K-12 education at the central school district level so as to give every young person in the United States a chance for a life of cultural richness, productive citizenship, and professional satisfaction?


The problem with K-12 education in the United States is not fundamentally with children or the families from which they hail. The problem is with adults and with a society that does not place a high enough value on the cultural richness found in the human inheritance as art, music, literature, historical records, political systems, economic organization, natural science, and mathematics. Too often when people say that they want an excellent education for their children, they mean that they want for their children a route to success as defined by a well-paying job, a substantial house, and a great store of material goods.


Those claiming to want an excellent education for their children frequently have very little consideration for the sustenance to be found in a life spent with an appreciation of great music, fine writing, exquisite art, mathematical elegance, scientific wonder, and the nature of being human suggested by historical experience and in contemporary patterns. They also have little regard for the importance of educational excellence for the practice of responsible citizenship. They are not thinking of how much better off we would be if we really knew something about the history and culture of people who very well might be much better off if we recoil from sending our mother’s sons and father’s daughters into wars on turf that we understand very little.


Most people who claim to want an excellent education for their children are not thinking of holding informed discussions as to why everyone in our society deserves or does not deserve access to good medical care at minimal cost. They are not thinking of creating institutions of learning which would convey important information about the Federal Reserve, deficit and debt, wages and prices. They are not thinking of understanding people on the basis of their ideas concerning the Noble Eightfold Path, Five Pillars, or the search for release from the Karmic Wheel through meditation, dharma, or devotion.


Our children are knowledge-poor, because we as a society are knowledge poor.


Most people in the United States of upper middle and upper economic class status cannot offer a cogent definition of an “excellent education,” but they can shuffle their kids off to private schools when they perceive that the public schools are not giving their children that which they are unable to define.


Most people dwelling in the broad middle economic class also cannot articulate the meaning of “excellent education”; but if unable to afford private school for their offspring, they nevertheless can locate their houses in areas where schools deliver something that they, too, perceive as somehow better than what the public schools have to offer, but which they cannot define.


People languishing at the lower end of the economic scale also falter when pressed to specify the meaning of “excellent education,” but they think that other people’s children are getting a closer approximation of this seemingly undefinable thing; stuck on a generational treadmill, they often must place their children in public schools of lowest reputation and hope for the best.          


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In order to work for excellent education for all of our precious children, we need a different attitude as to the purpose of education, we need definitions, and we need a commitment to social justice.


We need to agree that the purpose of education is about cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction. We must define an excellent education as a knowledge-rich curriculum imparted by excellent teachers; and understand that excellent teachers are professionals of broad and deep knowledge, with the pedagogical ability to impart their knowledge to students of all economic descriptors.


And we must feel in our guts the mission to deliver excellent education to all young people, so that we can become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.


In the New Salem Educational Initiative, Damon Preston and Javon Jakes (Article #2 in this series) have received an excellent education, knowing the love that will follow them anywhere they go. Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz (Article #3) have a teacher who understands their particular needs as students from immigrant families, who will strengthen their vocabularies, ask piercing questions for raising reading comprehension, and deliver loving but tough messages regarding the level of effort that they themselves need to expend. And Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor-Myers, and Orlando Martinez (Article #4) have shot into the academic stratosphere because their teacher had the discernment to recognize their academic gifts and precociousness; the knowledge base to take gifted students as high as they can go; and the loving dedication to challenge them to make the most of their extraordinary talents.


I am fired by the conviction that what I have done in the New Salem Educational Initiative for these and all of my students, centralized school districts must do for all of our precious children.  


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Thus, in late summer and autumn 2013, I attended the negotiations between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and the Minneapolis Public Schools, agitating for a contract that will serve the educational interests of students. I have showed up at Bernadeia Johnson’s “Soup with the Supe” events to urge her to fulfill her promise. I have written frequent opinion pieces published in the Star Tribune. I have inaugurated the Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have attended all recent congregations of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education. I am organizing community members, especially in North Minneapolis, to encourage Superintendent Johnson to realize her potential, following through with her promising initiatives and always refining approaches to the impartation of excellent education to Minneapolis students of all economic descriptors. And I will be delivering my message pertinent to the needed K-12 revolution via all available media.


I have done, am doing, and will do these things as I continue to direct and teach in the seven-day-a-week program of 17 different academic sessions that are transforming lives such as those of Damon Preston, Javon Jakes, Felicia Benitez, Raul Sanchez-Ruiz, Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor-Myers, and Orlando Martinez. I will continue directly to present a model for educational excellence worthy for extrapolation by educators at the Minneapolis Public Schools and at other locally centralized school districts that must be revolutionized so as to give an excellent education to all children.


I do these things because I believe in democracy as equality of opportunity for every person. I do these things because I know that democracy will only be achieved through excellent education for every child.I work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, doing all of the things that are necessary to impel the revolution in K-12 education.


I ask and welcome the help of others, but the time has come when I know that I must embrace the responsibility to lead. No one else is working hard enough or with enough conviction to do the range of things necessary to superintend the needed revolution at the level of the locally centralized school district.


My students receive immense knowledge, delivered with the love that they know will never go away. I forge relationships with their families that are loving, enduring, and substantive. This is the essence of the New Salem Educational Initiative.


And I am absolutely intent on doing all of those things necessary to assure that all children of our nation will have the knowledge that they need in life for cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction--- all the while, feeling secure in the love that never goes away.