The Multi-Culpability for Poor Quality K-12 Education in Minnesota and the United States

Many people and institutions are culpable with regard to the poor quality of K-12 education in the United States, very much including the incarnation of that beast in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For conditions are the same in central school districts across the nation, especially those serving students living at the urban core.


Among those culpable are the following institutions and people:


1) Universities >>>>> Departments, colleges, and schools of education are cash cows for institutions of would-be higher learning. Many folk campus-wide know that education professors are academic light-weights rendering atrocious teacher training to prospective teachers. But no one raises a voice for a multiplicity of reasons.


These reasons include the financial boon to the university for the tuition paid by students who are effectively buying their certification--- and, in application of salt to the wound, then buy advanced degrees in education unworthy of the appellations, “master’s” and “doctorates.” The latter not only secure pathways to higher pay in the degraded “step and lane” system, they also give the needed professional boost to those aspiring to administrative positions.


Also, university professors are smugly hypocritical with regard to K-12 education and the teachers who dwell therein. Most university professors do not have very clear notions of what constitutes an excellent education broadly construed, so they’re in a poor position to weigh in on pertinent matters. Yet they regard themselves as superior to those they obnoxiously dub, “schoolteachers.” Having a low level of understanding that knowledge, imparted for broad and deep internalization, is the essence of education--- university professors frequently sign off on the shibboleths of “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning.”


These same professorial hypocrites nevertheless love to rail about how students arrive to them math-deprived, reading-challenged, writing-deficient, and ignorant of all manner of subjects.


With regard to K-12 matters, there is hypocrisy and false hubris everywhere one turns in university departments and offices.


2) Churches and do-gooders


Churches collect a lot of money from church-folk, but very little of it goes to address the deepest needs of our own society. A lot it goes to church administration and then to select missionary efforts and to hot-topic international relief efforts. I am perpetually attune to the labor and funding that can be generated when hurricanes or famine strike far, far away--- but so little is done for needy people who may live either down the street or just a few feet away as the bird flies (say, across the Walker Art Museum from Lowry Hill, toward North Minneapolis).


And inasmuch as the overhaul of K-12 education is the paramount societal imperative of our time, church-folk give bare smidgeons of money and elbow grease to any activity that would ever produce the necessary transformation.


3) Politicians and the citizens who elect them


Politicians time after time use education issues to promote their own career aspirations.


But Democrats are bought and paid for by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the National Education Association (NEA)--- affiliations combined in Minnesota as Education Minnesota.


And Republicans are wildly inconsistent and chronically confused--- at one stage, for example, presenting themselves as supporters of No Child Left Behind and tough standards, then turning on that very program with the assertion of intrusive government.


And citizens clearly are variously selfish and muddled in their own views. Abused themselves in most instances by horrid public schools, they themselves are ill-educated and in no position to offer any instructive counsel on K-12 education. Yet these same citizens will weigh in on matters particularly pertinent to their own children, or arrogate to themselves an ability to run charter schools that they do not have.


Culpability for the atrocity that is K-12 education in Minnesota and in the United States is multiple.


If you are genuinely concerned about K-12 education and are seeking to find the source of its difficulty, take another look in that mirror.