The universe banged into existence almost 14 billion years ago, expanding in those processes that created the earth almost 10 billion years later. Simple cells took life comparatively quickly, just under a billion years after the earth formed, but not until 500 million years ago did fish swim in the sea. Amphibians crawled onto the earth about 360 million years ago, and reptiles roamed some 60 million years after that; then about 200 million years ago mammals moved across the surface of this planet. Birds flew across the skies at about 150 million years ago, and flowers bloomed some 20 million years thereafter. But not until 60 million years ago did the earth know primates, and the Great Apes did not make their terrestrial entrance until another 40 million years had transpired.
Not until 2.5 million years ago--- tens of millions of years after the appearance of those Great Apes--- did creatures of the genus homo appear, and life ensued another million years before representatives of that genus walked upright. Our more immediate progenitors, of the genus homo and the species sapiens, trod the expanses of East Africa for the first time only about 200 thousand years counting backward from this year of 2014.
So we are very young.
No wonder that we’ve made so many mistakes in this trial and error of a process called life. We are, as the Lord Hamlet tells us, “a work of art,” “noble in reason,” “infinite in faculty.” But we are still learning how to shape ourselves into the works of art that will make us worthy as the “paragons of the world,” to use our reason for creating conditions of peace, to call upon our faculties to be all that in our enormous potential we can be.
We have been so cruel to each other.
Even as we created marvelous works of early civilization--- the Pyramids of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Great Wall of China, the temple complex at Angkor Wat, the Colossus of Rhodes, the aqueducts of Rome--- we beat up on each other, calling Alexander and others “Great” for doing so. Even as we asked searching questions and as compassionate thinkers conceived of philosopher kings, enlightened beings, a King of Peace, we--- those same beings--- slaughtered each other by the millions. We fell before the legions of Caesar, the armies of the Great Khan, the banners of white and red roses, the marauders of the Aztec empire, the invaders of European colonizers, the ship captains of the Middle Passage, the despotic purveyors of genocide in Germany and Cambodia, the lynchers posing as citizens in what otherwise we have claimed to be the greatest democracy on earth.
But we have also done much good.
We have created alphabets, aesthetically pleasing written characters, presses that produce books. We have imagined ourselves at our best--- in prayer, meditation, and good works. We have made peace after war and established institutions for promoting human understanding. We have sought the truth of earth’s place among the planets, revealed the laws that govern motion and light and sound, discovered the relativity of time in space. We have probed the depths of our own mental processes and built machines that see into our very brains. We have made such technological advances that at any instant in this year of 2014 we can call forth facts on any given subject of our whim. We communicate with our fellows in a multiplicity of ways.
Now we must learn to communicate with as much quality as we do quantity.
We must go to work on ourselves.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
We do that through education.
Any worthy endeavor begins in one place and spreads to others. So let us make Minneapolis the place and the curriculum presented herein the basis for creating a more culturally enriched, civically engaged, professionally satisfied human being:
When people have a thorough knowledge of mathematics, they think more logically and reason with greater acuity.
When people have read the works of literary masters, their neural pathways are alive with rhythms, symbols, and ideas that elevate the quality of their own thoughts and the beauty of their personal expression.
When people command a thorough understanding of history; and evaluate the actions of the human past in the manner of its wisest philosophers, theologians, and religious teachers; they have a much stronger sense of what is right and what is wrong among behavioral options.
When women and men have a thorough grasp of the natural sciences, they are better able to live with a sense of appreciation and wonder at the sheer majesty of the universe, the celestial bodies, the earth, human beings themselves.
And when people come to understand the beauty, insight, and imagination embodied in the works of great painters, sculptors, architects, and musicians, they glimpse into the art forms that they themselves can be.
Let us make of ourselves works of artistic beauty through the power of education. Let us understand the religion of the other, the psychological motivations of our fellows, the history that may give evidence of misunderstanding, discord, and separation but that we can use to comprehend, to empathize, to unite.
Through the power of education we can know ourselves more thoroughly and walk more confidently into any arena of life:
We are culturally enriched, so we have a depth of appreciation for the artistry of humanity anywhere we go.
We are civically prepared, so we understand the nature of citizenship, and we dedicate ourselves to actions that improve our individual lives and the circumstances of our fellow human beings.
And because our brains are filled with knowledge and skills in magnificent array, we walk confidently and adeptly into the workplace with results that contribute to our personal wealth, the material wellbeing of our natal families, and the economic advancement of our society.
If we create ethically better and economically more prosperous people in Minneapolis
by revolutionizing K-12 education, our approach to curriculum moves centrifugally into other places where K-12 education is imparted. So do movements grow, ideas spread, and a revolution change the very basis of the way we live our lives. By creating the well-rounded individual, alive in the world of knowledge and anchored in a firm sense of the ethical, we establish that paragon toward which others cast an upward gaze. What once was local becomes national, then international, and as people across the world become well-educated, the terror that haunts too many human beings in their one chance on earth ends and existence worthy to be called “life” begins.
We do this by believing in the potential of every single human being. We do this by enriching with knowledge the brain of every student in the Minneapolis Public Schools. We do this by offering as exemplars of humanity those students who have been given the gift of an elevated life through the power of education.
Apr 30, 2015
Apr 26, 2015
Ted Kolderie Does Not Understand Excellence in Education or the Proper Mission of the Minneapolis Public Schools as a Centralized School District
Ted Kolderie’s scattershot approach to writing opinion pieces (“The City Schools’ Central Problem,” (Star Tribune, Opinion Exchange, Sunday, April 19, 2015), requires a firm hand in presenting summation. Here is that summary:
Kolderie argues that the Minneapolis Public Schools is in a fight for survival. This can be witnessed in the fact that 17,000 students eligible to attend the district’s schools now attend other public schools. Departing school board members openly wonder whether leaders in the district can respond.
A strategy is now emerging to replace the big urban school district; in Minnesota (similar to options available in other states) students may now enroll in other districts, earn post-secondary credit by attending classes on college campuses and then graduating with one’s high school class, and attend charter schools. The centralized management model of the big urban school district impedes the ability of conventional public schools to compete with the diverse options now available to students.
Actions by the Minnesota State Legislature to restructure public education, such as opening the way for inter-district open enrollment, have presented challenges to which the Minneapolis Public Schools have not responded, despite former Superintendent Richard Green’s vow in 1984 that the district he led would compete vigorously. The option to offer their own charter schools was not enthusiastically pursued by officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools, and directors of “New Schools” have served their time and then moved on without result.
Upset at national government encroachment on state and local prerogatives, Republican chairs of education committees (Rep. John Kline, Minnesota; Sen. Lamar Alexander, Tennessee) have moved to enlarge the state role. But what is the role of states: continue the traditional provision of funds, take over failing school districts, cede the ability to do the latter to city governments, annex bits of urban districts to those of the suburbs, break big school districts into smaller parts? These answers are variously thus far not successful, inconclusive as to results, or unfeasible.
What, then, might the State of Minnesota usefully do? The state should mandate that the Minneapolis Public Schools establish contracts with those representing schools or clusters of schools within the district, requiring accountability for academic performance in exchange for accountability. The Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education would be given first chance to establish these contracts, but if dithering beyond an established time limit would lose that power to the state.
Here and there this sort of approach has been suggested or attempted, but a move in this direction by three Minnesota superintendents back in 1998 proved aborted: Perhaps unforgivably, they never presented a plan to the legislature. And a recent vote by the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education to give greater autonomy to [Community] Partnership Schools will most likely run up against the impulse to centralize and standardize.
Authentic autonomy for performance would return decisions about how to improve learning to schools and teachers; make education responsive to families; and personalize learning according to the needs, aptitudes, and interests of students. This will avoid the scripting of teachers’ work (as is now the case for both the Minneapolis and St. Paul public school districts). Teachers resent this scripting, which is dangerous: Only by giving teachers dignity as professionals will the Minneapolis Public Schools retain quality teachers: and only when teachers are given authority over what matters for learning can the school board hold teachers accountable for student outcomes.
In this manner, the State of Minnesota should mandate accountability-for- autonomy contracts and see if the Minneapolis Public Schools can become a self-improving system, encouraging innovation in the contracted schools while working to improve conventional schools.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Kolderie errs on his main premise and the major points flowing from that thesis: Far from being the problem, the centralized school district must always be the solution in the United States.
The best school systems of the world are located in East Asia (Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) and the democratic socialist nations of Europe (Denmark, France, Finland, Singapore, and Sweden). These countries all centralize public education at the national level, so that schools throughout each nation deliver a common curriculum. Most members of the body politic in the European socialist democracies view education in the same way that they view health care, as a vital social good to be distributed equitably to people of all demographic descriptors.
For health care, this results in single payer systems that produce much healthier populations across lines of economic and social class. For education, the result is a common body of knowledge whereby students enter high school with more information stored and processed in their brains than students in the United States typically possess as they stride across the stage to claim a high school diploma.
An ongoing and intractable problem in anything that Ted Kolderie writes is failure to grasp the meaning and purposes of excellent K-12 education and the role of the excellent teacher. An excellent education is knowledge intensive, involving mastery of mathematics, natural science, physical education, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts; with information acquired sequentially and systematically throughout the K-12 years. In high school, each student should also acquire knowledge of a world language and thorough training in the industrial and technological arts. Excellent teachers are those who possess the knowledge pertinent to their subject areas and the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.
The purposes of an excellent education are cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction:
All people who have been educated in K-12 schools of pubic education deserve to have their brains teeming with commonly shared knowledge pertinent to mathematical and scientific principles underpinning the wonder of the natural world. They deserve to understand the prehistory and history that is their own as human beings. They deserve educations in the fine arts enabling them to appreciate Song Dynasty landscape painting and exquisite bronze sculpture from the Ibo; and to revel in the miracle of music of all genres. They deserve lives of cultural enrichment.
All people who have claimed a high school diploma also deserve to be prepared through knowledge of history, government, and economics to vote with discernment, run for government office, and discuss major issues in private conversations and public forums. They deserve to be ready for the obligation and privilege of civic engagement.
By the time that they graduate from high school students should have such thorough training in the liberal and industrial arts that they have multiple options at either two-year technical schools or four-year colleges and universities. All people deserve to possess the knowledge and skill sets that will allow them to move in this earthly sojourn with professional satisfaction.
This excellence of education would be best defined at the national level for implementation at the local level. But in the United States, there is a fixation on local control. Attempts to enforce or guide national policy such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core are invariably vitiated by interest groups on both the political left and right. So in this nation the unit of centralization must be the local school district. Officials at that level must, with reference to the curricula of Common Core, Core Knowledge, and the world’s best public education systems, define an excellent education in the liberal, industrial, and technological arts; and retrain their teachers in the delivery of this curriculum.
Ted Kolderie argues for decentralization of the Minneapolis Public Schools with an approach to K-12 education modeled on charter schools. Charter schools have been miserable failures. And they will never be capable of educating the broadly informed populace that Thomas Jefferson knew was necessary for a true democracy; or producing a unity of knowledge possessed by people of all demographic descriptors, as advocated by Horace Mann through “common schools.”
Interim School Superintendent Michael Goar and his staff would be much better advised to follow through on Focused Instruction (curricular consistency at all grade levels in all schools), High Priority Schools (aggressive skill development for academically faltering students), and Shift (reduction of central office staff with resource transfers to students and those working most closely with them).
Goar and staff should not allow themselves such distractions as Community Partnership Schools (modeled on faulty charter-school approaches) and the careless verbiage of Ted Kolderie.
Kolderie argues that the Minneapolis Public Schools is in a fight for survival. This can be witnessed in the fact that 17,000 students eligible to attend the district’s schools now attend other public schools. Departing school board members openly wonder whether leaders in the district can respond.
A strategy is now emerging to replace the big urban school district; in Minnesota (similar to options available in other states) students may now enroll in other districts, earn post-secondary credit by attending classes on college campuses and then graduating with one’s high school class, and attend charter schools. The centralized management model of the big urban school district impedes the ability of conventional public schools to compete with the diverse options now available to students.
Actions by the Minnesota State Legislature to restructure public education, such as opening the way for inter-district open enrollment, have presented challenges to which the Minneapolis Public Schools have not responded, despite former Superintendent Richard Green’s vow in 1984 that the district he led would compete vigorously. The option to offer their own charter schools was not enthusiastically pursued by officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools, and directors of “New Schools” have served their time and then moved on without result.
Upset at national government encroachment on state and local prerogatives, Republican chairs of education committees (Rep. John Kline, Minnesota; Sen. Lamar Alexander, Tennessee) have moved to enlarge the state role. But what is the role of states: continue the traditional provision of funds, take over failing school districts, cede the ability to do the latter to city governments, annex bits of urban districts to those of the suburbs, break big school districts into smaller parts? These answers are variously thus far not successful, inconclusive as to results, or unfeasible.
What, then, might the State of Minnesota usefully do? The state should mandate that the Minneapolis Public Schools establish contracts with those representing schools or clusters of schools within the district, requiring accountability for academic performance in exchange for accountability. The Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education would be given first chance to establish these contracts, but if dithering beyond an established time limit would lose that power to the state.
Here and there this sort of approach has been suggested or attempted, but a move in this direction by three Minnesota superintendents back in 1998 proved aborted: Perhaps unforgivably, they never presented a plan to the legislature. And a recent vote by the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education to give greater autonomy to [Community] Partnership Schools will most likely run up against the impulse to centralize and standardize.
Authentic autonomy for performance would return decisions about how to improve learning to schools and teachers; make education responsive to families; and personalize learning according to the needs, aptitudes, and interests of students. This will avoid the scripting of teachers’ work (as is now the case for both the Minneapolis and St. Paul public school districts). Teachers resent this scripting, which is dangerous: Only by giving teachers dignity as professionals will the Minneapolis Public Schools retain quality teachers: and only when teachers are given authority over what matters for learning can the school board hold teachers accountable for student outcomes.
In this manner, the State of Minnesota should mandate accountability-for- autonomy contracts and see if the Minneapolis Public Schools can become a self-improving system, encouraging innovation in the contracted schools while working to improve conventional schools.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Kolderie errs on his main premise and the major points flowing from that thesis: Far from being the problem, the centralized school district must always be the solution in the United States.
The best school systems of the world are located in East Asia (Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) and the democratic socialist nations of Europe (Denmark, France, Finland, Singapore, and Sweden). These countries all centralize public education at the national level, so that schools throughout each nation deliver a common curriculum. Most members of the body politic in the European socialist democracies view education in the same way that they view health care, as a vital social good to be distributed equitably to people of all demographic descriptors.
For health care, this results in single payer systems that produce much healthier populations across lines of economic and social class. For education, the result is a common body of knowledge whereby students enter high school with more information stored and processed in their brains than students in the United States typically possess as they stride across the stage to claim a high school diploma.
An ongoing and intractable problem in anything that Ted Kolderie writes is failure to grasp the meaning and purposes of excellent K-12 education and the role of the excellent teacher. An excellent education is knowledge intensive, involving mastery of mathematics, natural science, physical education, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts; with information acquired sequentially and systematically throughout the K-12 years. In high school, each student should also acquire knowledge of a world language and thorough training in the industrial and technological arts. Excellent teachers are those who possess the knowledge pertinent to their subject areas and the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.
The purposes of an excellent education are cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction:
All people who have been educated in K-12 schools of pubic education deserve to have their brains teeming with commonly shared knowledge pertinent to mathematical and scientific principles underpinning the wonder of the natural world. They deserve to understand the prehistory and history that is their own as human beings. They deserve educations in the fine arts enabling them to appreciate Song Dynasty landscape painting and exquisite bronze sculpture from the Ibo; and to revel in the miracle of music of all genres. They deserve lives of cultural enrichment.
All people who have claimed a high school diploma also deserve to be prepared through knowledge of history, government, and economics to vote with discernment, run for government office, and discuss major issues in private conversations and public forums. They deserve to be ready for the obligation and privilege of civic engagement.
By the time that they graduate from high school students should have such thorough training in the liberal and industrial arts that they have multiple options at either two-year technical schools or four-year colleges and universities. All people deserve to possess the knowledge and skill sets that will allow them to move in this earthly sojourn with professional satisfaction.
This excellence of education would be best defined at the national level for implementation at the local level. But in the United States, there is a fixation on local control. Attempts to enforce or guide national policy such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core are invariably vitiated by interest groups on both the political left and right. So in this nation the unit of centralization must be the local school district. Officials at that level must, with reference to the curricula of Common Core, Core Knowledge, and the world’s best public education systems, define an excellent education in the liberal, industrial, and technological arts; and retrain their teachers in the delivery of this curriculum.
Ted Kolderie argues for decentralization of the Minneapolis Public Schools with an approach to K-12 education modeled on charter schools. Charter schools have been miserable failures. And they will never be capable of educating the broadly informed populace that Thomas Jefferson knew was necessary for a true democracy; or producing a unity of knowledge possessed by people of all demographic descriptors, as advocated by Horace Mann through “common schools.”
Interim School Superintendent Michael Goar and his staff would be much better advised to follow through on Focused Instruction (curricular consistency at all grade levels in all schools), High Priority Schools (aggressive skill development for academically faltering students), and Shift (reduction of central office staff with resource transfers to students and those working most closely with them).
Goar and staff should not allow themselves such distractions as Community Partnership Schools (modeled on faulty charter-school approaches) and the careless verbiage of Ted Kolderie.
Apr 9, 2015
Three Important Matters to Consider in Anticipation of the 14 April 2015 MPS School Board Meeting: Your Abysmal Three-Month Performance; Firmness vs. Flexibility; Community Partnership Schools
Eighth Major Communication to MPS School Board
As you anticipate the next meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, you should take stock of your terrible start with newly composed membership at the advent of 2015.
Three matters are paramount:
1) Your three-month performance has been abysmal.
Because you have so little grip on your identity as a school board and have no sense of what excellent education means, you are forever making terrible decisions. You sent a lamentable message to students and teachers by cutting high school credit requirements in health, physical education, and social studies, while also failing to implement a world language requirement; the latter should be at least two years. In taking this action, you revealed two deficiencies in your powers of reasoning:
(1) You have no abiding definition of an excellent education.
(2) You lack faith that all students are capable of advancing along a challenging liberal arts course of study.
To fully understand your bad judgment, you must understand and start to internalize the following definitions, which by now you have read a number of times before in these communications to you:
>>>>> An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum emphasizing math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and fine arts to all students throughout the K-12 years.
>>>>> An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge in her or his subject area, with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.
You must now spend some time in serious individual contemplation and group discussion. Think about these definitions. Internalize, get in your gut, that an excellent education proceeds on the basis of a solid set of knowledge and skills, well-defined, acquired sequentially, implemented logically at each successive grade level, so that your students walk across the stage holding more than a piece of paper in their hands upon the receipt of that diploma that is supposed to authenticate graduation from high school. Your students deserve to be people who possess an authentic high school graduate’s and college aspirant’s knowledge of math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts; and to have gained great training also in world languages and the industrial arts. Reflect on how little your students now know after thirteen--- count them, thirteen --- years in your awful schools.
You should exercise extreme caution in backing off high school credit requirements that are already set; you should never have even allowed discussion on such changes until you had established a higher quality academic program, upgraded your counseling services, and added many more counselors.
You are either just not thinking or you are prevaricating when you declare that students will still get good health information in the early grades to make up for any loss in health course hours at high school; and likewise will be launched on a course of study in world languages from the early grades of their K-12 years.
Students are not getting good health, physical exercise, and proper nutrition information now, and there is no solid reason to expect improvement until the upgrade in information has actually been observed. And there is absolutely no evidence that you have the staff in place to provide high quality world language instruction during the K-5 or even Grades 6-8 years.
You must quit making careless statements, based on mere hope or daunting ignorance or audacious deception--- in the stated assumption that things will be a certain way before you have any reason to think scenarios are likely to unfold as you imagine (or say that you imagine) that they will.
You plainly lack confidence that most students are capable of rising to the challenges of a rigorous course of academic study. Mouthing platitudes proposing “different pathways to success” constitutes alternative phraseology for tracking.
We do not want alternative pathways for different students, with some focusing on a connotatively academic track, while others pursue trades; rather, we want the same alternative pathways for all students, training each of them so that she or he can go forward for more liberal arts education found at four-year colleges and universities--- or enter a technical arts program at a two-year institution. We should offer to all K-12 students the lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparedness, and professional satisfaction that will only come with thorough training in the liberal arts, backed especially at the high school level with high-quality industrial arts training, as well.
I have students in the New Salem Educational Initiative who come from the roughest backgrounds imaginable. I have recounted to you how I work with two brothers in the hallway outside their shabby apartment, because that abode is so litter-strewn, ill-lit, and furniture-poor. These youngsters are thriving in school, one at Grade K, the other at Grade 6, because I will not have it any other way. The mom of these boys is something of slob, and the dude who functions as their stepdad is frequently high on weed--- but these two care a great deal about their kids, call me if they go astray in their school assignments, and count on me to show up every week to give these two desperately impoverished but eager young students most of their real education.
So you cannot fool me, and it is impossible for anyone--- most certainly including yourselves--- to match the hours that I spend each week serving the poorest of the poor. They read Shakespeare. They read Aeschlyus and Sophocles. They master world and American history. They contemplate the essential theoretical claims of Einstein and Newton. They solve quadratic equations in Grade 5.
They do things that you would be hard-pressed to do, which just may be why you have so little faith that they can do these things.
There are some kids who have those sub-60 IQs that are hard to surmount in teaching them all that we should want to teach them. Those cases are rare, though. Most students respond with alacrity to all of the challenging material that I put before them. And they know what the word, “alacrity,” means. They are so knowledge-hungry after spending day after day in your lousy schools that they fervently desire all the knowledge that I can give them, which is considerable. And they know what “fervently” means.
The reasons that these students are not getting the full-throttle liberal arts education that they deserve is that you cannot define an excellent education; and you do not have teachers knowledgeable enough at every grade level and in every classroom to guarantee that a challenging liberal arts curriculum could be delivered, even if you were somehow able to internalize the definition of educational excellence.
So get faith in all of these students who want to be and can be brilliant, if you get your definitions straight. And proceed immediately to retrain your teaching force for the delivery of a challenging liberal arts education. You’ve made a start with Focused Instruction, but your effort thus far is just the bare beginning.
You must improve on your abysmal performance thus far in the year 2015.
2) Toward improving your performance, stop worrying so much about trying to parrot mostly wretched charter schools and emulating that sort of nonsensical “flexibility”; opt for firmness instead.
Focused Instruction is the programmatic conduit into which you can build a challenging, knowledge-based curriculum and retrain teachers while doing so. So gain some focused instruction yourselves--- with curricular richness and consistency manifested in schools throughout the district. Train the teachers needed to impart such a curriculum. Understand that site-based freedom for action should be in how to deliver the curriculum: Pedagogically, there are many means of delivery; but the content in knowledge and skills must be delivered to all students, in all classrooms at corresponding levels, through the schools of public education in Minneapolis.
3) Irritating in the extreme was my discovery of Community Partnership Schools already in the forecast of coming attractions on the Minneapolis Public Schools website.
You as a school board have the power to stop that juggernaut approach. Be careful. Nixing these applications from Bancroft, Folwell, Nellie Stone Johnson, and Ramsey is still very much possible. Make sure before signing off affirmatively on any of these applications that the requirement to observe all aspects of Focused Instruction is made clear and accepted unreservedly; otherwise, make this the definitive deal-breaker for Community Partnership Schools.
Beware of education-professor-speak that intones on and on about critical thinking and lifelong learners.
Oh, please--- give us all a break.
I will challenge any of these emolument-snatching, lazy-brained escapees from the demands of K-12 teaching, these imposters who have ruined generations of teachers with their verbal refuse, to a debate featuring critical analysis and the actual result in books read and written as a function of lifelong learning. Out of the mouths of these human urns of lassitude have come words that have denied at least four decades worth of precious human specimens their real education.
Do this instead, as indicated above:
1) Know the meaning of excellence in K-12 education and teaching.
2) Let this definition guide all of your decision-making. Pursue educational excellence firmly, with content defined and any flexibility coming with the pedagogy.
3) Take responsibility.
You should have moved forcefully through an in-house human resources search to expedite the hiring of Michael Goar--- and if not him, someone else dedicated to the signature programs of Bernadeia Johnson: Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift.
You should have integrated District Member Tracine Asberry’s amendment--- emphasizing school board accountability for positive educational outcomes--- into your counter-statement to the foolishness of a 6-district breakdown. Quit being knee-jerk petty to all of Ms. Asberry’s good suggestions, and act in behalf of the young people and their families whom you should be serving instead.
Do these things, internalizing the necessary definitions and philosophical premises. Act clearly, courageously, and consistently toward the goal of true educational excellence for all for these precious students. They are so capable. You need to match the capability of your students as revealed in the decisions that you make in their behalf.
The impartation of excellent K-12 education to students of all demographic descriptors will end generations of familial cyclical poverty. By properly educating all of our precious children, we will become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
You must dedicate yourselves to hastening the delivery of excellent K-12 education, achievable only via the talents of excellent teachers. If you cannot so dedicate yourselves, you should go. If you do not dedicate yourselves as you should, or if you lack the ability and do not make your exit, understand that I am in this for the long haul and will be building a community movement that will leave you no other option but to commit your daily activity to other pursuits.
As you anticipate the next meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, you should take stock of your terrible start with newly composed membership at the advent of 2015.
Three matters are paramount:
1) Your three-month performance has been abysmal.
Because you have so little grip on your identity as a school board and have no sense of what excellent education means, you are forever making terrible decisions. You sent a lamentable message to students and teachers by cutting high school credit requirements in health, physical education, and social studies, while also failing to implement a world language requirement; the latter should be at least two years. In taking this action, you revealed two deficiencies in your powers of reasoning:
(1) You have no abiding definition of an excellent education.
(2) You lack faith that all students are capable of advancing along a challenging liberal arts course of study.
To fully understand your bad judgment, you must understand and start to internalize the following definitions, which by now you have read a number of times before in these communications to you:
>>>>> An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum emphasizing math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and fine arts to all students throughout the K-12 years.
>>>>> An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge in her or his subject area, with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.
You must now spend some time in serious individual contemplation and group discussion. Think about these definitions. Internalize, get in your gut, that an excellent education proceeds on the basis of a solid set of knowledge and skills, well-defined, acquired sequentially, implemented logically at each successive grade level, so that your students walk across the stage holding more than a piece of paper in their hands upon the receipt of that diploma that is supposed to authenticate graduation from high school. Your students deserve to be people who possess an authentic high school graduate’s and college aspirant’s knowledge of math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts; and to have gained great training also in world languages and the industrial arts. Reflect on how little your students now know after thirteen--- count them, thirteen --- years in your awful schools.
You should exercise extreme caution in backing off high school credit requirements that are already set; you should never have even allowed discussion on such changes until you had established a higher quality academic program, upgraded your counseling services, and added many more counselors.
You are either just not thinking or you are prevaricating when you declare that students will still get good health information in the early grades to make up for any loss in health course hours at high school; and likewise will be launched on a course of study in world languages from the early grades of their K-12 years.
Students are not getting good health, physical exercise, and proper nutrition information now, and there is no solid reason to expect improvement until the upgrade in information has actually been observed. And there is absolutely no evidence that you have the staff in place to provide high quality world language instruction during the K-5 or even Grades 6-8 years.
You must quit making careless statements, based on mere hope or daunting ignorance or audacious deception--- in the stated assumption that things will be a certain way before you have any reason to think scenarios are likely to unfold as you imagine (or say that you imagine) that they will.
You plainly lack confidence that most students are capable of rising to the challenges of a rigorous course of academic study. Mouthing platitudes proposing “different pathways to success” constitutes alternative phraseology for tracking.
We do not want alternative pathways for different students, with some focusing on a connotatively academic track, while others pursue trades; rather, we want the same alternative pathways for all students, training each of them so that she or he can go forward for more liberal arts education found at four-year colleges and universities--- or enter a technical arts program at a two-year institution. We should offer to all K-12 students the lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparedness, and professional satisfaction that will only come with thorough training in the liberal arts, backed especially at the high school level with high-quality industrial arts training, as well.
I have students in the New Salem Educational Initiative who come from the roughest backgrounds imaginable. I have recounted to you how I work with two brothers in the hallway outside their shabby apartment, because that abode is so litter-strewn, ill-lit, and furniture-poor. These youngsters are thriving in school, one at Grade K, the other at Grade 6, because I will not have it any other way. The mom of these boys is something of slob, and the dude who functions as their stepdad is frequently high on weed--- but these two care a great deal about their kids, call me if they go astray in their school assignments, and count on me to show up every week to give these two desperately impoverished but eager young students most of their real education.
So you cannot fool me, and it is impossible for anyone--- most certainly including yourselves--- to match the hours that I spend each week serving the poorest of the poor. They read Shakespeare. They read Aeschlyus and Sophocles. They master world and American history. They contemplate the essential theoretical claims of Einstein and Newton. They solve quadratic equations in Grade 5.
They do things that you would be hard-pressed to do, which just may be why you have so little faith that they can do these things.
There are some kids who have those sub-60 IQs that are hard to surmount in teaching them all that we should want to teach them. Those cases are rare, though. Most students respond with alacrity to all of the challenging material that I put before them. And they know what the word, “alacrity,” means. They are so knowledge-hungry after spending day after day in your lousy schools that they fervently desire all the knowledge that I can give them, which is considerable. And they know what “fervently” means.
The reasons that these students are not getting the full-throttle liberal arts education that they deserve is that you cannot define an excellent education; and you do not have teachers knowledgeable enough at every grade level and in every classroom to guarantee that a challenging liberal arts curriculum could be delivered, even if you were somehow able to internalize the definition of educational excellence.
So get faith in all of these students who want to be and can be brilliant, if you get your definitions straight. And proceed immediately to retrain your teaching force for the delivery of a challenging liberal arts education. You’ve made a start with Focused Instruction, but your effort thus far is just the bare beginning.
You must improve on your abysmal performance thus far in the year 2015.
2) Toward improving your performance, stop worrying so much about trying to parrot mostly wretched charter schools and emulating that sort of nonsensical “flexibility”; opt for firmness instead.
Focused Instruction is the programmatic conduit into which you can build a challenging, knowledge-based curriculum and retrain teachers while doing so. So gain some focused instruction yourselves--- with curricular richness and consistency manifested in schools throughout the district. Train the teachers needed to impart such a curriculum. Understand that site-based freedom for action should be in how to deliver the curriculum: Pedagogically, there are many means of delivery; but the content in knowledge and skills must be delivered to all students, in all classrooms at corresponding levels, through the schools of public education in Minneapolis.
3) Irritating in the extreme was my discovery of Community Partnership Schools already in the forecast of coming attractions on the Minneapolis Public Schools website.
You as a school board have the power to stop that juggernaut approach. Be careful. Nixing these applications from Bancroft, Folwell, Nellie Stone Johnson, and Ramsey is still very much possible. Make sure before signing off affirmatively on any of these applications that the requirement to observe all aspects of Focused Instruction is made clear and accepted unreservedly; otherwise, make this the definitive deal-breaker for Community Partnership Schools.
Beware of education-professor-speak that intones on and on about critical thinking and lifelong learners.
Oh, please--- give us all a break.
I will challenge any of these emolument-snatching, lazy-brained escapees from the demands of K-12 teaching, these imposters who have ruined generations of teachers with their verbal refuse, to a debate featuring critical analysis and the actual result in books read and written as a function of lifelong learning. Out of the mouths of these human urns of lassitude have come words that have denied at least four decades worth of precious human specimens their real education.
Do this instead, as indicated above:
1) Know the meaning of excellence in K-12 education and teaching.
2) Let this definition guide all of your decision-making. Pursue educational excellence firmly, with content defined and any flexibility coming with the pedagogy.
3) Take responsibility.
You should have moved forcefully through an in-house human resources search to expedite the hiring of Michael Goar--- and if not him, someone else dedicated to the signature programs of Bernadeia Johnson: Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift.
You should have integrated District Member Tracine Asberry’s amendment--- emphasizing school board accountability for positive educational outcomes--- into your counter-statement to the foolishness of a 6-district breakdown. Quit being knee-jerk petty to all of Ms. Asberry’s good suggestions, and act in behalf of the young people and their families whom you should be serving instead.
Do these things, internalizing the necessary definitions and philosophical premises. Act clearly, courageously, and consistently toward the goal of true educational excellence for all for these precious students. They are so capable. You need to match the capability of your students as revealed in the decisions that you make in their behalf.
The impartation of excellent K-12 education to students of all demographic descriptors will end generations of familial cyclical poverty. By properly educating all of our precious children, we will become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
You must dedicate yourselves to hastening the delivery of excellent K-12 education, achievable only via the talents of excellent teachers. If you cannot so dedicate yourselves, you should go. If you do not dedicate yourselves as you should, or if you lack the ability and do not make your exit, understand that I am in this for the long haul and will be building a community movement that will leave you no other option but to commit your daily activity to other pursuits.
Apr 8, 2015
The Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education Must Define Excellence in Education, Establish Its Own Identity, and Move Forward with No Such Wasteful Exercises as the Meeting of 24 March 2015
Seventh Major Communication to MPS School Board
All tasks are made more difficult when the fundamental basis for fulfilling them has not been established. This was revealed clearly at the wasteful exercise of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education in conducting the meeting of 24 March 2015.
I was there for the first hour of that meeting before I had to depart to oversee and teach in the Tuesday Night Tutoring Program of New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, one facet of the multiple, seven-day-a-week efforts now being conducted under the New Salem Educational Initiative. I sat through one hour that featured mostly a simple message delivered by Michael Cassidy, Executive Director of the Council of Great City Schools. In a longwinded exposition of consultant-speak, Mr. Cassidy told the members of the school board that in hiring a superintendent, they wanted to do the following:
1) make sure that in hiring a new superintendent they choose a person whose views are in sync with the goals of the school board and administration of the Minneapolis Public Schools; and
2) be clear that while leadership and favorable personality features are desirable, these should be considered only inasmuch as they indicate ability to implement the goals of the school district, presumably already identified in the 2020 plan for improved student performance, especially outcomes at schools where student achievement has languished.
That was it. That took 35 minutes.
Then District member Don Samuels asked about the desirability of having a forceful leader, given that such a person might prove headstrong in moving the school district in a direction not consonant with the established goals of the school district.
Mr. Cassidy then took another 15 minutes to tell Mr. Samuels what should have already been clear in #2 above: Yes, be careful of being swayed by personality characteristics and ensure that commitment to the goals of the district is paramount.
That was it. Another 15 minutes wasted.
Then, for the final 10 minutes that I had for sitting at this temporally untidy and substantively uninformative affair, board members discussed when they might meet to discuss a set of priorities to which they could agree in the hiring of the new school superintendent. District Members Tracine Asberry and Carla Bates took the lead in touting such a meeting, conveying that this should be done before moving forward to hire a firm to conduct the search.
Board chair Jenny Arneson secured from Mr. Cassidy assurance that he needed no longer than an additional hour for his comments (I was hard-pressed not to laugh at that one); although District Member Rebecca Gagnon expressed concerned that this might rush the august presentation of Mr. Cassidy, the board seemed headed for a 7:00 PM discussion on the matter of consensual priorities for this gathering that was slated to end at 8:00 PM.
Here is my advice and commentary to the board on matters raised at and concerning that meeting of 24 March 2015:
1) You should have already essentially decided to hire Michael Goar. He’s good enough.
Any need to appear even handed via an open search should have been handled quickly, in house, under the auspices of your own human resources staff. With reference to my previous articles on the matter, don’t fantasize about there being a lot of great candidates out there.
With an in-house approach to a formal search, you might have found a candidate that you felt suited the needs of the Minneapolis Public Schools better than does Mr. Goar. And this could be true now you have opted for the more expensive search firm route. But this is not likely.
As the district’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Goar worked with Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson in establishing Focused Instruction (curricular consistency for subject areas at each grade level throughout the district), High Priority Schools (boosting performance at schools with students who have struggled academically), and Shift (moving resources closer to students and those who actually work with them in the classroom). You should have just secured Mr. Goar’s commitment to those three most important programs and then moved forward rapidly to hire him or someone else to implement those programs.
There should have never been something called a Chief Executive Officer when there is a position called a Superintendent. But as long as Mr. Goar did occupy that duplicative position, you should now tap his familiarity with the key programs that will maximize chances of reaching the goals of the 2020 Plan.
>>>>> In cutting district central office staff from 651 to 531 (a reduction of 120 positions, 18% lower than the previous level), Mr. Goar has done as well in that regard as even my still unsatisfied self can realistically expect for a while.
>>>>> Now you do need to make sure that Mr. Goar is fully committed to Focused Instruction and High Priority Schools.
The promotion of Community Partnership Schools has gotten more verbal play under Goar than have two of the three landmark legacies of Bernadeia Johnson: To his great credit, Goar has made sizable strides in moving the Shift program forward; but he and his staff have not spoken very often about Focused Instruction and High Priority Schools during these past three months.
Community Partnership Schools are unnecessary if the school district goes forward at full throttle on Focused Instruction and High Priority Schools. Do not allow yourselves to be distracted by yet another program. Either jettison the Community Partnership Schools or insist that pseudo-charter schools at Bancroft, Folwell, Nellie Stone Johnson, and Ramsey observe the curricular coherence of Focused Instruction.
2) Decide, consistent with the goals of Focused Instruction that you embrace the following definitions of excellence;
>>>>> An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum emphasizing math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and fine arts to all students throughout the K-12 years.
>>>>> An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge in her or his subject area, with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.
3) As members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, commit to your own accountability and your own obligation to become informed on all matters pertinent to educational excellence and excellent teachers.
You should already have gained clarity as to your own goals and priorities before that desultory meeting of 24 March 2015.
As Albert Einstein, B. F. Skinner, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett would tell you, each according that person’s particular genius, the complexity should come in full detail, not in basic principles.
For you, those basic principles should be the following:
1) Move forward with full implementation of Focused Instruction.
2) Do everything necessary to raise student performance to grade level in math, reading, and all major subject areas, especially at the High Priority Schools.
3) Thank Michael Goar for his courageous and astute work with regard to Shift.
4) Insist that Mr. Goar or any other new superintendent follow through on the three key programs of Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift.
5) Make a forceful and enduring commitment to your own accountability for an excellent education, imparted to all of our precious children.
If you so insist and she or he follows through, you will attain the goals of the 2020 plan and achieve excellence in the Minneapolis Public Schools. If you first gain clarity on fundamental precepts and overall goals, and commit yourselves to accountability for achieving these goals, you will not waste your time in degraded exercises such as that to which you subjected yourselves and observers at the 24 March 2015 meeting.
You can thereby save your energies for discussion of issues that really matter, toward the attainment of educational excellence, so that we may witness the cessation of cyclical poverty and the attainment of equitable opportunity worthy of the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
All tasks are made more difficult when the fundamental basis for fulfilling them has not been established. This was revealed clearly at the wasteful exercise of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education in conducting the meeting of 24 March 2015.
I was there for the first hour of that meeting before I had to depart to oversee and teach in the Tuesday Night Tutoring Program of New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, one facet of the multiple, seven-day-a-week efforts now being conducted under the New Salem Educational Initiative. I sat through one hour that featured mostly a simple message delivered by Michael Cassidy, Executive Director of the Council of Great City Schools. In a longwinded exposition of consultant-speak, Mr. Cassidy told the members of the school board that in hiring a superintendent, they wanted to do the following:
1) make sure that in hiring a new superintendent they choose a person whose views are in sync with the goals of the school board and administration of the Minneapolis Public Schools; and
2) be clear that while leadership and favorable personality features are desirable, these should be considered only inasmuch as they indicate ability to implement the goals of the school district, presumably already identified in the 2020 plan for improved student performance, especially outcomes at schools where student achievement has languished.
That was it. That took 35 minutes.
Then District member Don Samuels asked about the desirability of having a forceful leader, given that such a person might prove headstrong in moving the school district in a direction not consonant with the established goals of the school district.
Mr. Cassidy then took another 15 minutes to tell Mr. Samuels what should have already been clear in #2 above: Yes, be careful of being swayed by personality characteristics and ensure that commitment to the goals of the district is paramount.
That was it. Another 15 minutes wasted.
Then, for the final 10 minutes that I had for sitting at this temporally untidy and substantively uninformative affair, board members discussed when they might meet to discuss a set of priorities to which they could agree in the hiring of the new school superintendent. District Members Tracine Asberry and Carla Bates took the lead in touting such a meeting, conveying that this should be done before moving forward to hire a firm to conduct the search.
Board chair Jenny Arneson secured from Mr. Cassidy assurance that he needed no longer than an additional hour for his comments (I was hard-pressed not to laugh at that one); although District Member Rebecca Gagnon expressed concerned that this might rush the august presentation of Mr. Cassidy, the board seemed headed for a 7:00 PM discussion on the matter of consensual priorities for this gathering that was slated to end at 8:00 PM.
Here is my advice and commentary to the board on matters raised at and concerning that meeting of 24 March 2015:
1) You should have already essentially decided to hire Michael Goar. He’s good enough.
Any need to appear even handed via an open search should have been handled quickly, in house, under the auspices of your own human resources staff. With reference to my previous articles on the matter, don’t fantasize about there being a lot of great candidates out there.
With an in-house approach to a formal search, you might have found a candidate that you felt suited the needs of the Minneapolis Public Schools better than does Mr. Goar. And this could be true now you have opted for the more expensive search firm route. But this is not likely.
As the district’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Goar worked with Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson in establishing Focused Instruction (curricular consistency for subject areas at each grade level throughout the district), High Priority Schools (boosting performance at schools with students who have struggled academically), and Shift (moving resources closer to students and those who actually work with them in the classroom). You should have just secured Mr. Goar’s commitment to those three most important programs and then moved forward rapidly to hire him or someone else to implement those programs.
There should have never been something called a Chief Executive Officer when there is a position called a Superintendent. But as long as Mr. Goar did occupy that duplicative position, you should now tap his familiarity with the key programs that will maximize chances of reaching the goals of the 2020 Plan.
>>>>> In cutting district central office staff from 651 to 531 (a reduction of 120 positions, 18% lower than the previous level), Mr. Goar has done as well in that regard as even my still unsatisfied self can realistically expect for a while.
>>>>> Now you do need to make sure that Mr. Goar is fully committed to Focused Instruction and High Priority Schools.
The promotion of Community Partnership Schools has gotten more verbal play under Goar than have two of the three landmark legacies of Bernadeia Johnson: To his great credit, Goar has made sizable strides in moving the Shift program forward; but he and his staff have not spoken very often about Focused Instruction and High Priority Schools during these past three months.
Community Partnership Schools are unnecessary if the school district goes forward at full throttle on Focused Instruction and High Priority Schools. Do not allow yourselves to be distracted by yet another program. Either jettison the Community Partnership Schools or insist that pseudo-charter schools at Bancroft, Folwell, Nellie Stone Johnson, and Ramsey observe the curricular coherence of Focused Instruction.
2) Decide, consistent with the goals of Focused Instruction that you embrace the following definitions of excellence;
>>>>> An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum emphasizing math, natural science, history, economics, literature, and fine arts to all students throughout the K-12 years.
>>>>> An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge in her or his subject area, with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.
3) As members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, commit to your own accountability and your own obligation to become informed on all matters pertinent to educational excellence and excellent teachers.
You should already have gained clarity as to your own goals and priorities before that desultory meeting of 24 March 2015.
As Albert Einstein, B. F. Skinner, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett would tell you, each according that person’s particular genius, the complexity should come in full detail, not in basic principles.
For you, those basic principles should be the following:
1) Move forward with full implementation of Focused Instruction.
2) Do everything necessary to raise student performance to grade level in math, reading, and all major subject areas, especially at the High Priority Schools.
3) Thank Michael Goar for his courageous and astute work with regard to Shift.
4) Insist that Mr. Goar or any other new superintendent follow through on the three key programs of Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift.
5) Make a forceful and enduring commitment to your own accountability for an excellent education, imparted to all of our precious children.
If you so insist and she or he follows through, you will attain the goals of the 2020 plan and achieve excellence in the Minneapolis Public Schools. If you first gain clarity on fundamental precepts and overall goals, and commit yourselves to accountability for achieving these goals, you will not waste your time in degraded exercises such as that to which you subjected yourselves and observers at the 24 March 2015 meeting.
You can thereby save your energies for discussion of issues that really matter, toward the attainment of educational excellence, so that we may witness the cessation of cyclical poverty and the attainment of equitable opportunity worthy of the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
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