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.