The Immature Provincialism of Dane Smith

As if channeling Ted Kolderie, Dane Smith gave us another muddled and provincial presentation of opinion in the Sunday, 2 August 2015, edition of the Star Tribune.


Smith cites several “educational partnership groups” working with the education establishment to improve K-12 education. These groups include the Itaska Area Initiative for Student Success, Partnership for Student Success (St. Cloud and Sauk Rapids), Northfield Promise, Promise Neighborhoods (Northside Minneapolis and St. Paul), Generation Next (Minneapolis and St. Paul), and Every Hand Joined (Red Wing). He’s all excited about and makes excessive claims for the potential of these unproven and nascent groups--- the existence of which play into Smith’s false assumptions about “ordinary people” at the local level being the best sources for ideas on educational improvement--- offering routes to success for the students within their spheres of action.


Smith is also energized by an Aspen Ideas Festival appearance by author (Bowling Alone [2000]; Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis [2015]) Robert Putnam, at which the latter perpetuated the myth that great education movements typically don’t flow from Washington, D. C.


So Dane Smith is animated by the usual errors typically emanating from most of our Twin Cities pontificators and promulgators on K-12 education issues:


There have been few great education movements of any sort in the United States, so no source--- local or federal--- has been all that seminally insightful. The few decent and socially responsible ideas that we have had in this nation have emanated from a mix of individual, local, and federal sources, but have all required at least the legislative approval and the budgetary backing of the federal government. Such legislation has resulted in our K-12 schools having greater accessibility and equity across lines of ethnicity, economic status, and gender.


But neither local nor federal initiative has done much to make of K-12 schools in the United States effective institutions for the delivery of an excellent education. The best school systems in the world, revealed by such international rankings as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), are highly centralized at the national level, with curriculum well-defined across both the liberal and vocational arts, and with teacher qualifications rigorously detailed for reference by teacher training programs across each nation. These best public education systems tend to be situated in East Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore [located in Southeast Asia but fundamentally a Chinese-led society]) and northern Europe (Germany and the Scandinavian nations (of most recent note, Finland]).


Hence, the assertion that the best ideas bubble up from local communities inhabited by “ordinary people” is nonsense. This is no more true for education than it is for health care, another area of human service toward which the United States is engaged in a comparative crawl toward the sort of universal systems that work best for the most people across the globe. People in the United States are so inured with the illusions of rugged individualism and local control that they fail to observe that the fairest and most equitable governments in the world are those that are either of the democratic socialist type or those that have a history of central government involvement and have in contemporary times borrowed intelligently from the social democracies.


The problem with the Dane Smith and Ted Kolderie types is that they are reticent to be adults capable of emerging from their provincial perspectives.


Young people deserve instead to have adults making decisions about K-12 education who are willing to say, “This is what all of you need to know about mathematics, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), history, government, economics, literature, and the fine (visual and musical) arts.”


And they deserve to have well-informed people making key decisions affecting their lives who actually understand the best systems for health care and educational delivery from an international perspective--- people willing to assert themselves as adults. Mature internationalists making decisions that affect our precious young people have an obligation to convey the clear message that well-informed citizens must have training in shared knowledge and skill sets in order to be culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied to live life to the fullest in this one earthly sojourn--- regardless of original economic and geographic circumstances at birth.


Inasmuch as many high-profile people in our society dwell in fame that far exceeds the significance of their deeds, I do not make the distinction that the shallow-thinking Dane Smith makes between “ordinary people” and those presumably less “ordinary.” I revere most, rather, those of low profile who transform the world for the better every day their feet hit the ground. It will be these people, rather than the Dane Smiths and the Ted Kolderies of this world, who will eventually apply the elbow grease necessary to revolutionize central school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.


Courageous activists will be forced to start at this level because they live in a nation in which the promise of “local control” is proven false by the weighty achievements of students in the best public education systems in the world, located in highly centralized social democracies. Using the central school system as a surrogate for the central government, extraordinary low-profile education activists will aim toward the ultimate goal of inaugurating nation-wide curriculum and standards for teacher training.


In so doing, these low-profile change-makers will reveal in their efforts a maturity and worldliness in the best interests of the young people whose futures are their adult responsibility. The rising generation of citizens is awaiting genuine rather than merely chronological adults capable of showing them the way toward an education of excellence--- an education capable of giving them the lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that they deserve in this one earthly sojourn.