For the Face of the K-12 Revolution, You Must Look in the Mirror

I have come in painful steps toward the most definite conclusion that there is no existing entity outside myself that can lead the way toward the complete overhaul of K-12 education that we need.


I have as my first responsibility superintending all aspects--- including teaching--- of the New Salem Educational Initiative, a program of total academic support for students living at the urban core of Minneapolis. My program now includes 125 students and family members receiving teaching, mentoring, resource referrals, and many other items of my personal attention. I teach seven days a week, conducting small-group academic sessions (three to five students per group, with a few two-hour slots set aside for just one student). I instruct students of all ages, from Grade K (kindergarten) through Grade 12, and now continue mentoring and academic instruction to those students who have graduated from high school and are matriculating at colleges and universities. I also have several adults in the program, mostly parents of students seeking to burnish and boost their English language skills or get the K-12 education that they never really received so that they can improve their career position or go on to college. That would all be quite enough, so I’d be most grateful if someone else would lead the effort to overhaul K-12 education.


But I have discovered the following:


>>>>> Michelle Rhee (former Chancellor of the Washington, D. C., public schools and now heading StudentsFirst) cannot lead the overhaul. She is more comfortable sporting those foot-damaging high heels, overlaid with that cosmetic fraud dubbed “make-up,” sitting with would-be or actual powerbrokers in big-shot settings, than she is going into the trenches where real education change must happen. Rhee closed down the Minnesota chapter of Students First and her Minnesota point person (Kathy Saltzman) has been very quiet ever since.


Elsewhere >>>>>


>>>>> Joe Nathan has been directing the Center for School Change for about 20 years. He is primarily an advocate for ineffectual charter schools--- and very little has changed for the better.


>>>>> Daniel Sellars at MinnCAN claims great shakes for his organization, but it works at the state capital level for the most part, much in the manner of StudentsFirst. Anytime there is any sort of legislation that can be construed to move the education reform effort forward, MinnCAN claims the same credit that Students First and other such organizations claim.


These organizations accomplish very little from the tower, never going into the trenches, trying to change K-12 education through legislation, rather than by pressuring systems as they exist to do what they should be doing.


>>>>> There are a number of gadflies on the education change scene who sing the same tired songs in slightly different verses time after time.


>>> Ted Kolderie sings the song of innovation, with very little specificity.


>>>  Dane Smith recently seemed to audition for the Kolderie chorus.


>>>  Mitch Pearlstein (head of the Center of the American Experiment [not just for the experiment, mind you, but at the very center of the experiment] in Minneapolis) considers himself an “education guy” on the strength of a degree that bears the word, “education.” But the guy has only one, really bad, idea: “We must fix the family first.” (This reminds me of Henry Kissinger, who fooled legions of politicos with his mysteriously lingering German accent, and one idea: balance of power, a la the Austrian Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna [1814-1815].) And Pearlstein’s single idea is absurd, because in fact we must first overhaul K-12 education so that familial cycles of poverty end and historically abused families may heal.


>>> R. T. Rybak spent 12 years as mayor, then said effectively, “Oh, wow, I should have been doing more about K-12 education,” then settled into a cushy job at Generation Next, which thus far has supposedly done studies about the K-12 dilemma and offered a few ideas related to early childhood education and the importance of reading in the early grades--- as if we really needed a lot of research to understand that one.


And that really homes in on the main point. We don’t need a whole bunch of new research to know what to do in conducting the K-12 revolution. We need instead applications of logic and elbow grease to accomplish the following:


We need to set about defining a rich, highly sequenced, grade-by grade K-12 curriculum in the liberal and technical arts.


And we need to train the teachers capable of imparting that curriculum, because our wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education can never do so.


So I have set about pressuring the Minneapolis Public Schools to do these things, by launching a new academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota); premiering a new television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, televised Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on Channel 17 or streaming in real time on the MTN [Minneapolis Telecommunications Network] and found also at Holy4Grace, YouTube), and speaking frequently at public venues, including the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.


I am also five chapters into the writing of my ninth book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, to enable me to deliver with ever greater efficiency to my students in their two hours per week with me the education that they are not receiving during their 30-35 hours or so in their regular schools of attendance.


I am doing these things, in addition to teaching 17 two-hour academic sessions over the course of a seven-day week, because no one else is advocating for the needed changes in K-12 education. The situation became a matter of, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”


So know that if you really want to change K-12 education, you cannot count on the numerous gadflies flitting about the real issues:


You can support my efforts (I am not hard to find in this technologically route-laden age), or you can start to make something like the time commitment that I make by starting your own street-level, in-the-meetings-and-at-the-venues approach that I have adopted.


Either way, you must look in the mirror and know that when it comes to change in K-12 education, you are both the problem and the potential solution.


No more studies---


Just logic and elbow grease---


You yourselves must get to work to revolutionize K-12 education, overturn the injustice of history, and make a better world for young people and families who have been waiting for decades and even centuries for the change that must come.