In this brief note I alert Minneapolis Public Schools Interim Superintendent Michael Goar, the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, and my many other interested readers to the connectedness of the next five articles on the blog.
My blog in all contains 198 articles that will provide readers with many details on the matters covered in the succeeding five articles. But please do start with those five articles and grasp the important message that I am delivering to officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools as to the necessity of getting curriculum and teachers right.
Officials of the district will forever be engaging in whirls of meaningless activity until they get focused on curriculum and teachers.
So please keep scrolling on down the blog until you have read at least the next five articles, which convey the essence of excellent K-12 education as found in curriculum and
teachers--- with a summary of the teaching training by the central school district itself that will be necessary to secure the level of teaching talent required to deliver a knowledge-intensive K-12 curriculum.
Sep 30, 2015
Program for Minneapolis Public Schools Retraining of Secondary (Grades 6-12) Teachers
The Challenge of Earning a Terminal Master’s Degree in a Legitimate Academic Discipline
The chair of the Department of History at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) looked away for a moment, searching her memory bank.
“No, I can’t think of any in the last ten years or so.”
This answer came in response to my question, “Can you think of any graduate students who aspire to be K-12 teachers who have been in your program in recent memory?”
In the case of the history department, her answer was fully anticipated. For at least ten years, the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) Department of History has had no terminal master’s degree. This means that all graduate students in history enroll with the intention of seeking the Ph. D., typically for the purpose of gaining the expertise expected for one teaching at universities or four-year colleges. If these aspirants have their programs interrupted for some reason, and have studied sufficiently into their programs, professors in the department may agree to grant such a student a master’s degree. But no graduate student in the history department starts out seeking the master’s.
This is now a common situation at the University of Minnesota.
The same essential situation prevailing for history applies to the departments of political science, sociology, and chemistry. The departments of biological sciences, economics, physics, and English do have terminal master’s degrees, but no one connected to graduate studies in the those departments remembers any student in recent memory who was aspiring to, or proceeded to, teach in a K-12 system.
The math department has a master’s program for teachers that does prepare participants as rigorously as those who intend to go forward to the Ph. D. But this sort of program is a rare exception, and it only attracts two to four students a year; overwhelmingly, aspiring teachers opt for the far, far less rigorous program in the College of Education and Human Development.
Given the rarity of legitimate master’s degrees these days, officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools will need to work with area colleges and universities to reestablish terminal master’s degrees of the desired academic weight. Such a relationship will be abetted by the efforts needed to get the Masters of Liberal Arts established for aspiring K-5 teachers. Great benefit will accrue to both college/university programs and to the teacher training initiative of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The seriousness of scholarship at the level of the master’s degree will intensify once a major school district communicates that its leaders will tolerate meaningless graduate degrees no longer.
Full Training Requirements for Teachers of Grades 6-12 Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools
>>>>> Academic Requirements
Reestablishing the legitimate academic master’s degree will be important, because the attainment of such a degree will be necessary to secure employment in the Minneapolis Public Schools. What we have seen to be the case for teachers of students at Grades K-5 who earn a specially designed Masters of Liberal Arts degree of the highest academic caliber, will be true for teachers of students at Grades 6-12: They, too, will have to prove their academic mettle before assuming the teacher’s position.
Since there have historically been terminal master’s degrees offered at universities, and most departments still grant these for doctoral (Ph. D.) candidates who for one reason or another cannot continue past the point at which a master’s would be granted, the reinstitution of these degrees should be easily accomplished once decision-makers in departments such as history and chemistry become convinced that viable candidates in sufficient numbers are requesting programs culminating in the granting of the legitimate academic Masters of Arts or Masters of Science.
Thus, prospective teachers at the 6-12 level must have a legitimate, field-specific master’s degree.
Teachers at the high school (9-12) level will be further encouraged to study through to the Ph. D. in a field-specific discipline and to be fully prepared to teach Advanced Placement (AP) courses and courses for college or university credit.
>>>>> Year of Internship
Once applicants have been accepted for consideration as teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools, having earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees with strong academic records, they then will spend a year internship under the guidance of a teaching mentor of the highest caliber possible.
Such an internship will involve observation, tutoring and teacher’s aide responsibility, and several weeks of full responsibility for day-to-day teaching under the observation and with ample advice of the teaching mentor. Administrative evaluation of this teacher aspiring for a position in a Grade 6, 7, or 8 classroom will then determine if the candidate is performing at a high enough level to be assigned full teacher status.
In the event that legislation making theoretically possible alternative routes into teaching becomes reality, the rigorous subject area and pedagogical training described above will obviate the necessity of a Grades 6-12 teacher candidate having to endure the misery of taking education courses in traditional teacher preparation programs.
Until alternative routes do become reality, though, teacher candidates at the Grades 6-12 level will have to make room for ineffective education courses in order to meet official stipulations for certification. Over time, though, observers in many quarters should come to understand that the real training is coming with study for the master’s degree and the year of internship provided by the teacher preparation program within the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Officials of the school district should aggressively pursue the idea of an alternative program such as that worked out between Teach for America and the University of Minnesota; properly conceived, this will allow aspiring teachers to avoid wasting time in conventional education courses, and the alternative program should meld easily with the program of internship and evaluation put in place by officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Professionalization and Remuneration of the Secondary (Grades 6-12) Teacher
As with K-5 teachers who undergo the rigorous in-house Masters of Liberal Arts degree program, complete with master's thesis and followed by a year's internship, secondary (Grades 6-12) teachers who undergo the given program will emerge as experts with training comparable to those in the true professions.
They should be expected to deliver a knowledge-intensive curriculum in the field of specialty, remunerated and evaluated accordingly.
The chair of the Department of History at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) looked away for a moment, searching her memory bank.
“No, I can’t think of any in the last ten years or so.”
This answer came in response to my question, “Can you think of any graduate students who aspire to be K-12 teachers who have been in your program in recent memory?”
In the case of the history department, her answer was fully anticipated. For at least ten years, the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) Department of History has had no terminal master’s degree. This means that all graduate students in history enroll with the intention of seeking the Ph. D., typically for the purpose of gaining the expertise expected for one teaching at universities or four-year colleges. If these aspirants have their programs interrupted for some reason, and have studied sufficiently into their programs, professors in the department may agree to grant such a student a master’s degree. But no graduate student in the history department starts out seeking the master’s.
This is now a common situation at the University of Minnesota.
The same essential situation prevailing for history applies to the departments of political science, sociology, and chemistry. The departments of biological sciences, economics, physics, and English do have terminal master’s degrees, but no one connected to graduate studies in the those departments remembers any student in recent memory who was aspiring to, or proceeded to, teach in a K-12 system.
The math department has a master’s program for teachers that does prepare participants as rigorously as those who intend to go forward to the Ph. D. But this sort of program is a rare exception, and it only attracts two to four students a year; overwhelmingly, aspiring teachers opt for the far, far less rigorous program in the College of Education and Human Development.
Given the rarity of legitimate master’s degrees these days, officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools will need to work with area colleges and universities to reestablish terminal master’s degrees of the desired academic weight. Such a relationship will be abetted by the efforts needed to get the Masters of Liberal Arts established for aspiring K-5 teachers. Great benefit will accrue to both college/university programs and to the teacher training initiative of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The seriousness of scholarship at the level of the master’s degree will intensify once a major school district communicates that its leaders will tolerate meaningless graduate degrees no longer.
Full Training Requirements for Teachers of Grades 6-12 Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools
>>>>> Academic Requirements
Reestablishing the legitimate academic master’s degree will be important, because the attainment of such a degree will be necessary to secure employment in the Minneapolis Public Schools. What we have seen to be the case for teachers of students at Grades K-5 who earn a specially designed Masters of Liberal Arts degree of the highest academic caliber, will be true for teachers of students at Grades 6-12: They, too, will have to prove their academic mettle before assuming the teacher’s position.
Since there have historically been terminal master’s degrees offered at universities, and most departments still grant these for doctoral (Ph. D.) candidates who for one reason or another cannot continue past the point at which a master’s would be granted, the reinstitution of these degrees should be easily accomplished once decision-makers in departments such as history and chemistry become convinced that viable candidates in sufficient numbers are requesting programs culminating in the granting of the legitimate academic Masters of Arts or Masters of Science.
Thus, prospective teachers at the 6-12 level must have a legitimate, field-specific master’s degree.
Teachers at the high school (9-12) level will be further encouraged to study through to the Ph. D. in a field-specific discipline and to be fully prepared to teach Advanced Placement (AP) courses and courses for college or university credit.
>>>>> Year of Internship
Once applicants have been accepted for consideration as teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools, having earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees with strong academic records, they then will spend a year internship under the guidance of a teaching mentor of the highest caliber possible.
Such an internship will involve observation, tutoring and teacher’s aide responsibility, and several weeks of full responsibility for day-to-day teaching under the observation and with ample advice of the teaching mentor. Administrative evaluation of this teacher aspiring for a position in a Grade 6, 7, or 8 classroom will then determine if the candidate is performing at a high enough level to be assigned full teacher status.
In the event that legislation making theoretically possible alternative routes into teaching becomes reality, the rigorous subject area and pedagogical training described above will obviate the necessity of a Grades 6-12 teacher candidate having to endure the misery of taking education courses in traditional teacher preparation programs.
Until alternative routes do become reality, though, teacher candidates at the Grades 6-12 level will have to make room for ineffective education courses in order to meet official stipulations for certification. Over time, though, observers in many quarters should come to understand that the real training is coming with study for the master’s degree and the year of internship provided by the teacher preparation program within the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Officials of the school district should aggressively pursue the idea of an alternative program such as that worked out between Teach for America and the University of Minnesota; properly conceived, this will allow aspiring teachers to avoid wasting time in conventional education courses, and the alternative program should meld easily with the program of internship and evaluation put in place by officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Professionalization and Remuneration of the Secondary (Grades 6-12) Teacher
As with K-5 teachers who undergo the rigorous in-house Masters of Liberal Arts degree program, complete with master's thesis and followed by a year's internship, secondary (Grades 6-12) teachers who undergo the given program will emerge as experts with training comparable to those in the true professions.
They should be expected to deliver a knowledge-intensive curriculum in the field of specialty, remunerated and evaluated accordingly.
The Imperative of the Minneapolis Public Schools to Retrain K-5 Teachers
The Currently Abysmal Training of Prospective Teachers for Grades K-5
There is a rough similarity among the major teacher preparation programs offered by colleges and universities in the Twin Cities:
Programs that train large contingents of prospective teachers include the University of Minnesota/ Twin Cities, Augsburg College, and the Universities of Concordia, Hamline, St. Catherine, and St. Thomas. At most of these institutions, prospective Grades K-5 teachers major in elementary education.
Hamline is unique among the metro area institutions offering teacher preparation programs in requiring its aspiring Grades K-5 teachers to get a degree in a discipline other than education. At Hamline, both prospective Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12 teachers get majors in subjects such as economics, psychology, chemistry, math, or English literature while also getting a co-major in education. Required education courses for Grades K-5 teachers at Hamline include Educational Psychology, Diversity and Education, Theory to Practice, Schools and Society, and Exceptionality. Teachers aspiring to teach Grades K-5 additionally take courses in Teaching Social Studies [Mathematics, Science] in the Elementary School.
In the other institutions, any route similar to the one pursued at Hamline would come through the attainment of a double major, but this is not required. With regard to education courses, though, there is great similarity in the various teacher training programs:
Grades K-5 teacher aspirants at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development, for example, take courses called Social Studies [Language Arts, Mathematics, Science] Instruction in the Elementary Grades that parallel those given for Hamline. Courses at the University of Minnesota also include Schools and Society and those that incorporate matters of educational psychology, exceptionality [individual differences], and diversity. Teaching aspirants for Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12 both observe a semester of required student teaching, and in the course of their programs they spend additional hours in the field, visiting and assisting in classrooms.
Students at the University of Minnesota who aspire to teach, both at Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12, must get a master’s degree. Students in the college of education typically do their coursework during the summer and fall terms; they student teach in the spring, also taking two education courses online. The route to the Masters of Education degree takes just three semesters.
Once the college or university certification program is complete, prospective teachers must take exams that include a basic skills exam, a content-focused pedagogic exam, and a mathematics exam. Upon passing these exams, licensure is granted. The license is permanent, given the teacher’s ongoing demonstration of professional development through certified participation in teacher-in-service days, workshops, conferences, and the like; and with the option to pursue an advanced degree, typically a Masters of Education in teaching elementary education (remembering that a master’s degree is embedded in the program leading to teacher certification via the schedule of courses at the University of Minnesota.
Nothing in this training is designed to prepare scholars with a broad and deep knowledge of substantial liberal arts content matter in the subjects of mathematics, natural science, history, literature, and the fine arts. Education professors cling to the constructivist creed that includes the notion of teacher as “facilitator.” They also spout slogans such as “lifelong learning” and “critical thinking” that are consistent with the notion that education is about inspiring a student to engage in personal exploration, reflecting and commenting critically on select topics, and settling in for a lifetime in which any desired factual information can be looked up as the occasion requires.
This is vapid training of the worst sort, a smokescreen for intellectual laziness and professional procrastination. Teachers rarely follow up in challenging students to “think critically.” Indeed, students are hard-pressed to think critically when they have such a slim knowledge base on which to analyze subjects and engage in robust discussion. And there is little to suggest that students in our current K-5 schools have much ambition for lifelong learning when they haven’t been taught to respect knowledge, and when their fundamental skills are so underdeveloped. Teachers maintain an illusion of themselves as “facilitators” when in fact they facilitate very little except the maintenance of a status quo that gives our students very little to show for thirteen (13) years in the classroom.
We know from the ambitious and advanced curriculum presented in Volume I, No. 2, August 2014 of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, that there is a vastly better approach to curriculum than the one taken at the K-5 level now.
And so there is also a better approach to training the K-5 teacher. This is given in detail in Volume I, No. 3, September 2014 of this Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota and summarized below:
The Program for Training of Teachers for Grades K-5
Given the abysmal teacher training provided for prospective teachers at grades K-5, decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools must provide for the training of their own teachers. Decision-makers at the district should do the following
>>>>> First, assess the academic worthiness of prospective teachers, based on an academic history recorded in SAT or ACT scores and on all available high school and university transcripts.
>>>>> Second, request that all prospective teachers take the GRE to assess readiness for graduate study.
>>>>> Third, explain to prospective that the Minneapolis Public Schools will provide an in-house Masters of Liberal Arts program, taught by university professors and other highly qualified academic specialists, to include the following course of study:
>>>>> Mathematics (10 weeks)
This will be an intensive ten-week course of study that will include basic math, algebra, geometry, functions, statistics, trigonometry, and calculus.
>>>>> Natural Science (6 weeks)
This will be an intensive six-week course of study that will include biology, chemistry, and physics.
>>>>> History (8 weeks)
This will be an intensive eight-week course of study that will include six weeks of training in world history and two weeks of training in American history.
>>>>> Language Arts (6 weeks)
This will be an intensive six-week course of study that will include five weeks of training in great literature of classical, contemporary, and multi-ethnic content; and one week of training in English composition.
>>>>> Fine Arts (4 weeks)
This will be an intensive four-week course of study that will include three weeks of training in the visual arts from across the ages of humanity and the places of human inhabitation; and one week of training in the musical arts of all major genres: European romantic, baroque, classical; classical and contemporary forms from across Asia, Africa, and Central and South America; and North American music, including popular music from across the decades, the work songs of the slaves, blues, jazz, country, rock, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop.
Thus, over the course of 34 weeks, essentially the equivalent of one academic year, prospective K-5 teachers will receive training of breadth and depth across a challenging liberal arts curriculum.
Prospective K-5 teachers will then have two more steps to complete:
>>>>> Master’s Thesis In the course of the summer following their intensive 34-week of training during the academic year, prospective K-5 teachers will complete a master’s thesis under the guidance of one of the experts who provided instruction at the master’s level, as appropriate for the topic selected.
>>>>> One-Year Internship
Over course of a full academic year, the prospective K-5 teacher will serve as an intern, including a component comparable to student teaching, working under the best teacher currently teaching who can be located.
With this level of training, including the four-year undergraduate degree with which the prospective K-5 teacher came to the Minneapolis Public Schools; the program of teacher training and master’s degree; and the year of internship; the teacher will have that level of training comparable to those in the true professions.
Such teachers should then be remunerated at a truly professional level, with a high level of knowledge-intensive instruction to our K-5 students becoming the professional expectation for evaluation.
There is a rough similarity among the major teacher preparation programs offered by colleges and universities in the Twin Cities:
Programs that train large contingents of prospective teachers include the University of Minnesota/ Twin Cities, Augsburg College, and the Universities of Concordia, Hamline, St. Catherine, and St. Thomas. At most of these institutions, prospective Grades K-5 teachers major in elementary education.
Hamline is unique among the metro area institutions offering teacher preparation programs in requiring its aspiring Grades K-5 teachers to get a degree in a discipline other than education. At Hamline, both prospective Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12 teachers get majors in subjects such as economics, psychology, chemistry, math, or English literature while also getting a co-major in education. Required education courses for Grades K-5 teachers at Hamline include Educational Psychology, Diversity and Education, Theory to Practice, Schools and Society, and Exceptionality. Teachers aspiring to teach Grades K-5 additionally take courses in Teaching Social Studies [Mathematics, Science] in the Elementary School.
In the other institutions, any route similar to the one pursued at Hamline would come through the attainment of a double major, but this is not required. With regard to education courses, though, there is great similarity in the various teacher training programs:
Grades K-5 teacher aspirants at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development, for example, take courses called Social Studies [Language Arts, Mathematics, Science] Instruction in the Elementary Grades that parallel those given for Hamline. Courses at the University of Minnesota also include Schools and Society and those that incorporate matters of educational psychology, exceptionality [individual differences], and diversity. Teaching aspirants for Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12 both observe a semester of required student teaching, and in the course of their programs they spend additional hours in the field, visiting and assisting in classrooms.
Students at the University of Minnesota who aspire to teach, both at Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12, must get a master’s degree. Students in the college of education typically do their coursework during the summer and fall terms; they student teach in the spring, also taking two education courses online. The route to the Masters of Education degree takes just three semesters.
Once the college or university certification program is complete, prospective teachers must take exams that include a basic skills exam, a content-focused pedagogic exam, and a mathematics exam. Upon passing these exams, licensure is granted. The license is permanent, given the teacher’s ongoing demonstration of professional development through certified participation in teacher-in-service days, workshops, conferences, and the like; and with the option to pursue an advanced degree, typically a Masters of Education in teaching elementary education (remembering that a master’s degree is embedded in the program leading to teacher certification via the schedule of courses at the University of Minnesota.
Nothing in this training is designed to prepare scholars with a broad and deep knowledge of substantial liberal arts content matter in the subjects of mathematics, natural science, history, literature, and the fine arts. Education professors cling to the constructivist creed that includes the notion of teacher as “facilitator.” They also spout slogans such as “lifelong learning” and “critical thinking” that are consistent with the notion that education is about inspiring a student to engage in personal exploration, reflecting and commenting critically on select topics, and settling in for a lifetime in which any desired factual information can be looked up as the occasion requires.
This is vapid training of the worst sort, a smokescreen for intellectual laziness and professional procrastination. Teachers rarely follow up in challenging students to “think critically.” Indeed, students are hard-pressed to think critically when they have such a slim knowledge base on which to analyze subjects and engage in robust discussion. And there is little to suggest that students in our current K-5 schools have much ambition for lifelong learning when they haven’t been taught to respect knowledge, and when their fundamental skills are so underdeveloped. Teachers maintain an illusion of themselves as “facilitators” when in fact they facilitate very little except the maintenance of a status quo that gives our students very little to show for thirteen (13) years in the classroom.
We know from the ambitious and advanced curriculum presented in Volume I, No. 2, August 2014 of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, that there is a vastly better approach to curriculum than the one taken at the K-5 level now.
And so there is also a better approach to training the K-5 teacher. This is given in detail in Volume I, No. 3, September 2014 of this Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota and summarized below:
The Program for Training of Teachers for Grades K-5
Given the abysmal teacher training provided for prospective teachers at grades K-5, decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools must provide for the training of their own teachers. Decision-makers at the district should do the following
>>>>> First, assess the academic worthiness of prospective teachers, based on an academic history recorded in SAT or ACT scores and on all available high school and university transcripts.
>>>>> Second, request that all prospective teachers take the GRE to assess readiness for graduate study.
>>>>> Third, explain to prospective that the Minneapolis Public Schools will provide an in-house Masters of Liberal Arts program, taught by university professors and other highly qualified academic specialists, to include the following course of study:
>>>>> Mathematics (10 weeks)
This will be an intensive ten-week course of study that will include basic math, algebra, geometry, functions, statistics, trigonometry, and calculus.
>>>>> Natural Science (6 weeks)
This will be an intensive six-week course of study that will include biology, chemistry, and physics.
>>>>> History (8 weeks)
This will be an intensive eight-week course of study that will include six weeks of training in world history and two weeks of training in American history.
>>>>> Language Arts (6 weeks)
This will be an intensive six-week course of study that will include five weeks of training in great literature of classical, contemporary, and multi-ethnic content; and one week of training in English composition.
>>>>> Fine Arts (4 weeks)
This will be an intensive four-week course of study that will include three weeks of training in the visual arts from across the ages of humanity and the places of human inhabitation; and one week of training in the musical arts of all major genres: European romantic, baroque, classical; classical and contemporary forms from across Asia, Africa, and Central and South America; and North American music, including popular music from across the decades, the work songs of the slaves, blues, jazz, country, rock, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop.
Thus, over the course of 34 weeks, essentially the equivalent of one academic year, prospective K-5 teachers will receive training of breadth and depth across a challenging liberal arts curriculum.
Prospective K-5 teachers will then have two more steps to complete:
>>>>> Master’s Thesis In the course of the summer following their intensive 34-week of training during the academic year, prospective K-5 teachers will complete a master’s thesis under the guidance of one of the experts who provided instruction at the master’s level, as appropriate for the topic selected.
>>>>> One-Year Internship
Over course of a full academic year, the prospective K-5 teacher will serve as an intern, including a component comparable to student teaching, working under the best teacher currently teaching who can be located.
With this level of training, including the four-year undergraduate degree with which the prospective K-5 teacher came to the Minneapolis Public Schools; the program of teacher training and master’s degree; and the year of internship; the teacher will have that level of training comparable to those in the true professions.
Such teachers should then be remunerated at a truly professional level, with a high level of knowledge-intensive instruction to our K-5 students becoming the professional expectation for evaluation.
Sep 29, 2015
A Communication of Great Importance as We Look Toward the Meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education on 13 October 2015
As we look toward the meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, 13 October 2015, I urge Interim Superintendent Goar, all administrators at MPS, and all members of the school board to consider very carefully the following actions necessary in any program of effective education for all of your students--- and what I intent to do if you do not take those actions:
First >>>>> Recognize the weakness of your curriculum and begin working immediately to define a logical grade-by-grade knowledge-intensive sequence.
Scroll on down to other articles on my blog for details of the weakness of your curriculum, how I observe the consequences for your students when I am training them to take the ACT and to read serious academic material with genuine comprehension, and why I am writing a new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, to atone for the deficiencies in your K-12 curriculum.
The level of knowledge that your students possess as they move across the stage at graduation--- if they graduate at all--- is unacceptable and must change. Revive Focused Instruction and proceed to define the necessary logically sequenced skill and knowledge base that your students must receive as their right to an excellent education.
Second >>>>> Know also that you must assume responsibility for training the teachers capable of delivering such a knowledge-intensive curriculum.
As I have also detailed in past editions of my academic journal, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, the knowledge level of your current teaching staff is inadequate for delivering the knowledge-intensive curriculum that your students must have to be the beneficiaries of an excellent K-12 education. They came to you undertrained, because of the abysmal nature of the training that all prospective teachers receive in departments, schools, and colleges of education.
Your K-5 teachers are particularly knowledge deficient: This is the reason why I can ask any student who comes to me after having spent six years in your schools and find them unable to answer any questions of substance in matters pertinent to history, government, natural science, fine arts, literature, or English usage.
You should be ashamed, and you must recognize that you must thoroughly retrain your teachers at all levels, most particularly your K-5 teachers, if you are going to succeed in sending forth students possessing the high level of knowledge that they must have as they move across the stage at graduation and into the world of postsecondary education.
I can imagine that most of you have not taken advantage of my journal, my various articles, or the instruction that I offer on my television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, 6:00 PM, Channel 17, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN] every Wednesday--- and on YouTube at Holly4Grace)--- in order to understand the training that you must provide for your teachers, so I will in the coming days offer you a summary of my recommended program.
Third >>>>> Eschew false steps and misguided policies--- and know what I am going to do to maximize your chances of getting things right.
Because you, Interim Superintendent Goar and others at MPS with the futures of our young people in your hands, have no firm idea of the constituents of an excellent K-12 education, you are forever making distracting and ineffective motions of activity with no positive result.
Quit throwing “Hail Mary” passes to Community Partnership Schools, creating task forces to study problems to which you should already know the solutions, and saying that you are going to get things right this time when you have never demonstrated an ability to get things right.
I am going to continue the investigation of your processes at Minneapolis Public Schools, reminding you that your salaries are paid by the public, and that you must respond to your students, families, and their advocates with humility, respect, and effective action.
I will support those of you who respond positively to your students and those close to them, and those of you who set about doing what is necessary to provide the young people at your schools the excellent education that they must have.
For those of you who don’t, I will be advocating your removal from your current positions in my publications and my media resources, and organizing community efforts aimed at getting the curriculum and the people we need to organize and deliver knowledge-intensive education.
I will proceed as I have already begun--- with huge nods to my models in the work of Saul Alinsky, Mao Zedong, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Gloria Steinhem--- patiently, persistently, with the goal of transformation of hearts and the conversion to just action, as well as victory.
The time is now. You must respond.
First >>>>> Recognize the weakness of your curriculum and begin working immediately to define a logical grade-by-grade knowledge-intensive sequence.
Scroll on down to other articles on my blog for details of the weakness of your curriculum, how I observe the consequences for your students when I am training them to take the ACT and to read serious academic material with genuine comprehension, and why I am writing a new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, to atone for the deficiencies in your K-12 curriculum.
The level of knowledge that your students possess as they move across the stage at graduation--- if they graduate at all--- is unacceptable and must change. Revive Focused Instruction and proceed to define the necessary logically sequenced skill and knowledge base that your students must receive as their right to an excellent education.
Second >>>>> Know also that you must assume responsibility for training the teachers capable of delivering such a knowledge-intensive curriculum.
As I have also detailed in past editions of my academic journal, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, the knowledge level of your current teaching staff is inadequate for delivering the knowledge-intensive curriculum that your students must have to be the beneficiaries of an excellent K-12 education. They came to you undertrained, because of the abysmal nature of the training that all prospective teachers receive in departments, schools, and colleges of education.
Your K-5 teachers are particularly knowledge deficient: This is the reason why I can ask any student who comes to me after having spent six years in your schools and find them unable to answer any questions of substance in matters pertinent to history, government, natural science, fine arts, literature, or English usage.
You should be ashamed, and you must recognize that you must thoroughly retrain your teachers at all levels, most particularly your K-5 teachers, if you are going to succeed in sending forth students possessing the high level of knowledge that they must have as they move across the stage at graduation and into the world of postsecondary education.
I can imagine that most of you have not taken advantage of my journal, my various articles, or the instruction that I offer on my television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, 6:00 PM, Channel 17, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN] every Wednesday--- and on YouTube at Holly4Grace)--- in order to understand the training that you must provide for your teachers, so I will in the coming days offer you a summary of my recommended program.
Third >>>>> Eschew false steps and misguided policies--- and know what I am going to do to maximize your chances of getting things right.
Because you, Interim Superintendent Goar and others at MPS with the futures of our young people in your hands, have no firm idea of the constituents of an excellent K-12 education, you are forever making distracting and ineffective motions of activity with no positive result.
Quit throwing “Hail Mary” passes to Community Partnership Schools, creating task forces to study problems to which you should already know the solutions, and saying that you are going to get things right this time when you have never demonstrated an ability to get things right.
I am going to continue the investigation of your processes at Minneapolis Public Schools, reminding you that your salaries are paid by the public, and that you must respond to your students, families, and their advocates with humility, respect, and effective action.
I will support those of you who respond positively to your students and those close to them, and those of you who set about doing what is necessary to provide the young people at your schools the excellent education that they must have.
For those of you who don’t, I will be advocating your removal from your current positions in my publications and my media resources, and organizing community efforts aimed at getting the curriculum and the people we need to organize and deliver knowledge-intensive education.
I will proceed as I have already begun--- with huge nods to my models in the work of Saul Alinsky, Mao Zedong, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Gloria Steinhem--- patiently, persistently, with the goal of transformation of hearts and the conversion to just action, as well as victory.
The time is now. You must respond.
Sep 28, 2015
Seventh Snippet from >Fundmentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education >>>>> Living Lives of Accomplishment in the Face of Injustice
This snippet from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, is from Chapter Seven, African American History. The section given as the snippet here is entitled, "Living Lives of Accomplishment in the Face of Injustice."
The section given comes after a section describing the slave trade and slavery and before another on the Civil War and Reconstruction. I particularly like this section for the astounding accomplishments that are described for both slaves and free blacks, who typically studied under self-education scenarios and succeeded at the highest levels prevailing in their fields, often recording achievements far beyond those of white members of their communities who started life with far more advantages.
After you read this snippet, scroll on down to the next article (actually posted earlier) for the fullest explanation that I have given to date with regard to my motivation for writing Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
And then, as you scroll on down through my blog, you'll find the six other snippets posted thus far, posted amidst other articles that I trust will be of keen interest, as well.
Here is the snippet from Chapter Seven:
Although the life of the slave was laborious and the working hours long, there was some time left over for recreation, amusement, and personal accomplishment. Many slaves became superb hunters and fishers, planted masterful gardens, and played tunes on homemade instruments that would prove to be the progenitors of the blues and jazz genres that are at the soul of American music. Some resourceful slaves cultivated reputations for good behavior that won them off-plantation passes from lenient masters; given access to a wider circle of associations, some slaves learned how to read and write. This knowledge might also come from a comparatively compassionate member of the master’s family, either with or without the master’s permission.
Free blacks also often reached out to their fellow African Americans by providing instruction in reading, writing, and subjects for which those skills served as gateway. African Americans of free status occasionally founded schools, as did those among the white population who opposed slavery and sought to elevate the educational and cultural level of slaves and former slaves. A free black by the name of Elias Neua, who had been born in France, operated a school for African Americans by 1704. Records indicate that a couple of slaves whose given names were Harry and Andrew (surnames unknown) ran a school for basic reading and writing instruction in South Carolina during the early 18th century. For a period beginning in 1751, missionary and teacher Joseph Ottolenghi taught slaves in Georgia at the behest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Quaker Anthony Benezet ran an evening school for African Americans out of his home during 1750-1760; a group of Quakers also came together in 1774 to run a school for African Americans in Philadelphia. And in 1787, the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves established the New York African Free School, generally credited as the first full-curriculum school for African Americans. Most African Americans eventually became Christians, although some, especially at first, incorporated animistic beliefs into their new faith. They also very notably drew upon African music to enliven standard Christian hymns and to create spirituals unique to African American people. From the African American Christian tradition came much of the impetus for blues and jazz motifs that in turn shaped all music that is American in origin.
For a mostly enslaved people, contributions in many fields were mighty:
In 1721, a Massachusetts slave named Oneissimus taught the famous religious leader Cotton Mather how to inject a patient with a small amount of the small pox virus to create a vaccine effect. A South Carolina slave named Caesar developed antidotes to rattlesnake venom. Also in South Carolina, the slave Wilcie Elfe gained medical knowledge from an owner-doctor, opened a successful pharmaceutical practice in Charleston, patented effective medicines, and sold his curatives throughout the state. Similarly, the slave James Derham studied under owner Dr. Robert Dove, from whom he purchased his freedom and then set up his own medical practice. During the 18th century, former slave David K. McDonough gained fame for his skill as a vision and hearing specialist, displayed at his own Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York.
According to the census of 1860, there were 488,070 free blacks in a total African American population of 4,441,770 (with the slave population, therefore, at 3,953,700 [having grown from 697,897 since 1790]). Hence, free blacks constituted about 11% of the total African American population in the United States just prior to the Civil War. Over half of these free African Americans lived in the South.
Freedom had come in a variety of ways. Some white masters freed offspring that resulted from intercourse with black slaves, thus hoping to avoid social censure. Once in a great while, a slave was so enterprising as to secure off-plantation wage labor, in addition to her or his toil as human chattel, and make enough money to purchase freedom from masters implicitly more lenient and empathetic than most. As the abolitionist movement gained momentum, some southerners felt the tweak of conscience that could give a slave her or his freedom, as reward for faithful service, or just because it seemed the right thing to do. Other slaves were freed by the terms of wills. Some survived the mad dash for freedom, moving across fields and through woods just ahead of sniffing dogs and scurrying agents of the master, against the intent of the fugitive property provisions of the United States Constitution and statutory law.
Some free African Americans themselves owned slaves. Some of these were carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors who bought slaves and made them apprentices. The 1830 census recorded 753 slaveholding African Americans. The 1850 census recorded that 19% of black tailors in Charleston, South Carolina, owned slaves. Slaves worked for free blacks as maids or day laborers and, in a few cases, they worked the fields picking cotton or harvesting, much as they did for white slave owners. William Johnson, a freed slave living in Natchez, Mississippi, became a multi-business entrepreneur, running barbershops, purchasing and renting out property, and superintending a money-lending business; hiring managers to run businesses selling toys, wallpaper, coal, and sand; renting carts and other vehicles; offering a service watering down the streets of the hot southern city of Natchez; and accumulating 350 acres of land on which he put fifteen slaves to work chopping down timber and farming the fields. New Orleans merchant Cecee McCarty trained slaves as salespeople who peddled imported dry goods across the state of Louisiana; in time, she amassed a fortune.
But black slave owners were a tiny portion of the free African American population. Most free African Americans worked as laborers or skilled crafts people; some entered the professions or started businesses.
Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) operated a thriving shipbuilding business in Connecticut, gained great wealth, and trained other African Americans to start businesses of their own. James Forten (1766-1842) also made a fortune in the maritime industry, inventing a device to handle sails more efficiently and launching a company that employed a total of 40 employees, including on his payroll both African American and white workers. At mid-19th century, William Whipper of Pennsylvania began his entrepreneurial career as a clothes cleaner, became an expert in steam scouring, and prospered so greatly as to pour investments into multiple successful business ventures. Tax records from the mid-19th century indicate that there were 21 African American entrepreneurs in New York City making over $100,000 per year, thus earning what for that era was a huge amount of money.
African Americans of the pre-Civil War era made huge contributions with their scientific inventions. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) compiled The Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris, published annually from 1791 to 1802; he also served on the commission that planned the construction of a new capital at Washington, D. C., in 1789, then from 1790 was among those commissioned to survey the site for the future capital. Henry Blair received a patent for a unique seed planter in 1834. Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) received a patent in 1846 for a vacuum evaporator that produced white sugar crystals from sugarcane juice and proved also to have utility in the production of soap, gelatin, and glue. Lewis Temple (1800-1854) invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry, given the enhanced effectiveness of his invention for hunting the huge oceangoing mammals whose bodies were used for the production of many commercially lucrative goods; Temple, though, never gained much from the commerce induced by his invention: he never was able to gain a patent and died penniless in the very city of Bedford, Massachusetts, whose economy had boomed on the strength of his invention.
The entrepreneurial success and inventiveness of African Americans in the early 19th century was not rewarded with citizenship, which was obviously denied to slaves but also withheld from free blacks. Free blacks in Maryland and North Carolina had to have special licenses to sell corn, wheat, or tobacco. In most states of both the North and the South, free blacks could not vote, hold public office, or testify in courts against whites. African Americans could not carry weapons in this era of commonplace white gun-wielding. Failure to pay off debts or remit tax payments resulted in fine or imprisonment for free blacks of the North; in the South, such a debtor or tax offender could be sold into slavery as means to collect the sums owed.
African American artisans, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists, and professionals formed a small but energetic black middle class that grew restive with the conditions of American life, at the same time that their success provided powerful arguments against the racist pronouncements and assumptions that pervaded white-dominated society. African Americans were in large measure responsible for establishing the economy and physical infrastructure of the United States. They designed and constructed churches, mansions, public buildings, and private plantations.
John Hemings is famous for his role in producing articles and fixtures for the Monticello, the plantation of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. Hemings was a slave at Monticello, but he was no field hand. He was a joiner by trade and a genius who created numerous exquisite pieces of furniture in the woodworking shop that he ran on Jefferson’s plantation. Following Jefferson’s sketches, Hemings turned out chairs, tables, benches, fine railings, arches, and window shutters.
African Americans in the growing urban centers of the North generally faced prospects of inadequate public education facilities, inferior housing, and lack of legal protections that white citizens held as a matter of birth. And they faced numerous challenges beyond the strictly legal: A white mob attacked a community of predominately African American residents in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829; similar incidents occurred in a number of northern cities where newly arrived black immigrants competed with workers for jobs. During the decade after the riot in Cincinnati, most southern and some northern states limited or banned the immigration of free blacks.
In this context of the sheer cruelty perpetuated against slaves and the vexing legal injustices inflicted against free blacks, an inexorable momentum built for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of full citizenship rights for all African Americans.
The section given comes after a section describing the slave trade and slavery and before another on the Civil War and Reconstruction. I particularly like this section for the astounding accomplishments that are described for both slaves and free blacks, who typically studied under self-education scenarios and succeeded at the highest levels prevailing in their fields, often recording achievements far beyond those of white members of their communities who started life with far more advantages.
After you read this snippet, scroll on down to the next article (actually posted earlier) for the fullest explanation that I have given to date with regard to my motivation for writing Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
And then, as you scroll on down through my blog, you'll find the six other snippets posted thus far, posted amidst other articles that I trust will be of keen interest, as well.
Here is the snippet from Chapter Seven:
Although the life of the slave was laborious and the working hours long, there was some time left over for recreation, amusement, and personal accomplishment. Many slaves became superb hunters and fishers, planted masterful gardens, and played tunes on homemade instruments that would prove to be the progenitors of the blues and jazz genres that are at the soul of American music. Some resourceful slaves cultivated reputations for good behavior that won them off-plantation passes from lenient masters; given access to a wider circle of associations, some slaves learned how to read and write. This knowledge might also come from a comparatively compassionate member of the master’s family, either with or without the master’s permission.
Free blacks also often reached out to their fellow African Americans by providing instruction in reading, writing, and subjects for which those skills served as gateway. African Americans of free status occasionally founded schools, as did those among the white population who opposed slavery and sought to elevate the educational and cultural level of slaves and former slaves. A free black by the name of Elias Neua, who had been born in France, operated a school for African Americans by 1704. Records indicate that a couple of slaves whose given names were Harry and Andrew (surnames unknown) ran a school for basic reading and writing instruction in South Carolina during the early 18th century. For a period beginning in 1751, missionary and teacher Joseph Ottolenghi taught slaves in Georgia at the behest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Quaker Anthony Benezet ran an evening school for African Americans out of his home during 1750-1760; a group of Quakers also came together in 1774 to run a school for African Americans in Philadelphia. And in 1787, the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves established the New York African Free School, generally credited as the first full-curriculum school for African Americans. Most African Americans eventually became Christians, although some, especially at first, incorporated animistic beliefs into their new faith. They also very notably drew upon African music to enliven standard Christian hymns and to create spirituals unique to African American people. From the African American Christian tradition came much of the impetus for blues and jazz motifs that in turn shaped all music that is American in origin.
For a mostly enslaved people, contributions in many fields were mighty:
In 1721, a Massachusetts slave named Oneissimus taught the famous religious leader Cotton Mather how to inject a patient with a small amount of the small pox virus to create a vaccine effect. A South Carolina slave named Caesar developed antidotes to rattlesnake venom. Also in South Carolina, the slave Wilcie Elfe gained medical knowledge from an owner-doctor, opened a successful pharmaceutical practice in Charleston, patented effective medicines, and sold his curatives throughout the state. Similarly, the slave James Derham studied under owner Dr. Robert Dove, from whom he purchased his freedom and then set up his own medical practice. During the 18th century, former slave David K. McDonough gained fame for his skill as a vision and hearing specialist, displayed at his own Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York.
According to the census of 1860, there were 488,070 free blacks in a total African American population of 4,441,770 (with the slave population, therefore, at 3,953,700 [having grown from 697,897 since 1790]). Hence, free blacks constituted about 11% of the total African American population in the United States just prior to the Civil War. Over half of these free African Americans lived in the South.
Freedom had come in a variety of ways. Some white masters freed offspring that resulted from intercourse with black slaves, thus hoping to avoid social censure. Once in a great while, a slave was so enterprising as to secure off-plantation wage labor, in addition to her or his toil as human chattel, and make enough money to purchase freedom from masters implicitly more lenient and empathetic than most. As the abolitionist movement gained momentum, some southerners felt the tweak of conscience that could give a slave her or his freedom, as reward for faithful service, or just because it seemed the right thing to do. Other slaves were freed by the terms of wills. Some survived the mad dash for freedom, moving across fields and through woods just ahead of sniffing dogs and scurrying agents of the master, against the intent of the fugitive property provisions of the United States Constitution and statutory law.
Some free African Americans themselves owned slaves. Some of these were carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors who bought slaves and made them apprentices. The 1830 census recorded 753 slaveholding African Americans. The 1850 census recorded that 19% of black tailors in Charleston, South Carolina, owned slaves. Slaves worked for free blacks as maids or day laborers and, in a few cases, they worked the fields picking cotton or harvesting, much as they did for white slave owners. William Johnson, a freed slave living in Natchez, Mississippi, became a multi-business entrepreneur, running barbershops, purchasing and renting out property, and superintending a money-lending business; hiring managers to run businesses selling toys, wallpaper, coal, and sand; renting carts and other vehicles; offering a service watering down the streets of the hot southern city of Natchez; and accumulating 350 acres of land on which he put fifteen slaves to work chopping down timber and farming the fields. New Orleans merchant Cecee McCarty trained slaves as salespeople who peddled imported dry goods across the state of Louisiana; in time, she amassed a fortune.
But black slave owners were a tiny portion of the free African American population. Most free African Americans worked as laborers or skilled crafts people; some entered the professions or started businesses.
Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) operated a thriving shipbuilding business in Connecticut, gained great wealth, and trained other African Americans to start businesses of their own. James Forten (1766-1842) also made a fortune in the maritime industry, inventing a device to handle sails more efficiently and launching a company that employed a total of 40 employees, including on his payroll both African American and white workers. At mid-19th century, William Whipper of Pennsylvania began his entrepreneurial career as a clothes cleaner, became an expert in steam scouring, and prospered so greatly as to pour investments into multiple successful business ventures. Tax records from the mid-19th century indicate that there were 21 African American entrepreneurs in New York City making over $100,000 per year, thus earning what for that era was a huge amount of money.
African Americans of the pre-Civil War era made huge contributions with their scientific inventions. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) compiled The Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris, published annually from 1791 to 1802; he also served on the commission that planned the construction of a new capital at Washington, D. C., in 1789, then from 1790 was among those commissioned to survey the site for the future capital. Henry Blair received a patent for a unique seed planter in 1834. Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) received a patent in 1846 for a vacuum evaporator that produced white sugar crystals from sugarcane juice and proved also to have utility in the production of soap, gelatin, and glue. Lewis Temple (1800-1854) invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry, given the enhanced effectiveness of his invention for hunting the huge oceangoing mammals whose bodies were used for the production of many commercially lucrative goods; Temple, though, never gained much from the commerce induced by his invention: he never was able to gain a patent and died penniless in the very city of Bedford, Massachusetts, whose economy had boomed on the strength of his invention.
The entrepreneurial success and inventiveness of African Americans in the early 19th century was not rewarded with citizenship, which was obviously denied to slaves but also withheld from free blacks. Free blacks in Maryland and North Carolina had to have special licenses to sell corn, wheat, or tobacco. In most states of both the North and the South, free blacks could not vote, hold public office, or testify in courts against whites. African Americans could not carry weapons in this era of commonplace white gun-wielding. Failure to pay off debts or remit tax payments resulted in fine or imprisonment for free blacks of the North; in the South, such a debtor or tax offender could be sold into slavery as means to collect the sums owed.
African American artisans, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists, and professionals formed a small but energetic black middle class that grew restive with the conditions of American life, at the same time that their success provided powerful arguments against the racist pronouncements and assumptions that pervaded white-dominated society. African Americans were in large measure responsible for establishing the economy and physical infrastructure of the United States. They designed and constructed churches, mansions, public buildings, and private plantations.
John Hemings is famous for his role in producing articles and fixtures for the Monticello, the plantation of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. Hemings was a slave at Monticello, but he was no field hand. He was a joiner by trade and a genius who created numerous exquisite pieces of furniture in the woodworking shop that he ran on Jefferson’s plantation. Following Jefferson’s sketches, Hemings turned out chairs, tables, benches, fine railings, arches, and window shutters.
African Americans in the growing urban centers of the North generally faced prospects of inadequate public education facilities, inferior housing, and lack of legal protections that white citizens held as a matter of birth. And they faced numerous challenges beyond the strictly legal: A white mob attacked a community of predominately African American residents in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829; similar incidents occurred in a number of northern cities where newly arrived black immigrants competed with workers for jobs. During the decade after the riot in Cincinnati, most southern and some northern states limited or banned the immigration of free blacks.
In this context of the sheer cruelty perpetuated against slaves and the vexing legal injustices inflicted against free blacks, an inexorable momentum built for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of full citizenship rights for all African Americans.
Sep 27, 2015
Writing >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education< to Atone for the Miserable Education that Students Get in the Minneapolis Public Schools
Whenever I am reading a newspaper or journal article with a student, or training that person to take the SAT or ACT, I always end up giving mini-courses in economics, political science, psychology, history, literature, English usage, the fine arts, or natural science. This is in addition to teaching them most of what they know about math and the skill of reading at advanced levels of comprehension.
I give these mini-courses and teach these skills because the education that students receive in the Minneapolis Public Schools is so insubstantial. And my identification of the Minneapolis Public Schools with the rendering an insubstantial education may be taken to apply to all urban school districts. We are getting some signals of improvement from Charlotte-Mecklenburg and from Cincinnati, but we’ll have to wait for many years to see if the school districts in those urban centers realize their seeming promise. We have been disappointed so many times.
Even in the areas of math and reading, for which student assessments got so embarrassing that even the education establishment started giving belated attention, the results are not encouraging. The United States fares poorly by comparison with other nations on the highly regarded PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), a program that tests academic skills in math, reading, and science in all major industrialized nations and many developing, emerging, and newly developed nations as an activity of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [note that spelling is in the British style for an organization actually based in Paris, France]).
And for young people from economically challenged and historically abused families, the results are disastrous: Almost all young people in these familial categories score poorly on objective tests of skill and knowledge. And they either do not graduate from high school or they have to take remedial courses once in a college or university setting; moreover, graduation rates for students of economically and historically challenged circumstances from colleges and universities are very low.
When reading a substantive article from the newspaper or an ACT practice reading, all kinds of topics are likely to arise. Such topics may lead me to ask questions such as the following:
>>>>> You do know what was important about the Mayflower, right?
>>>>> You know the basic difference between a republic and a monarchy, don’t you?
>>>>> You’ve heard of Sigmund Freud, haven’t you?
>>>>> You know that Buddhism began in India but ended up gaining more followers in Southeast and East Asia, right? And do you know, then, what religion is most prevalent in India?
>>>>> You do know that Newton’s laws of motion and gravity revolutionized how we thought about the physics of planet Earth--- but that Einstein taught us that those laws are not absolute and not at all adequate when contemplating motion and gravity of the greater cosmos--- right?
I always get blank stares when I pose these questions, which arise implicitly from articles that we read, because such topics gain mention in serious reading material. So I end up taking a long time just helping students to understand subjects that they should be learning in school.
Two favorites of mine are the single words “liberal” and “communist.” Just ponder the layers and layers of difficulty in understanding the various meanings of these terms if the student is not given a full exposition that includes usages across historical and societal circumstances.
So all of this got very old.
Wanting to give my students the equivalent of a private school education and then, knowing that even the education rendered at well-regarded private institutions in the United States is overrated, wanting for them much better than that--- I decided just to haul off and write a book, to be entitled, Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
This book is now becoming the chief reading text for my students, who are successively moving through the chapters already written, those focused on economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, and African American history. I will soon have completed the chapters on literature, English usage, and fine arts (visual and musical); and then by early November will have concluded the chapters for mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics.
That will be fourteen chapters covering the subjects most important to an excellent liberal arts education, of the sort that will send students forth into the world culturally enriched, civically informed, and prepared to pursue specialized training for lives of professional satisfaction.
Readers of the whole book will gain that education that most high school and even most university graduates wish that they had received. And now my students will know the answers to the questions posed above--- and many more.
Subscribers to my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota are currently receiving three chapters at a time, per edition. Most recently they have received the first three chapters, those for Economics, Political Science, and Psychology.
Readers of the blog have received snippets that represent about 10% of the full chapters. My goal is to provide an avenue for the journey through the exciting world of knowledge, alerting readers to information that they have never before received--- or refreshing them on subjects studied long ago, awakening them anew to the excitement of knowing, understanding, and thinking deeply about matters of great importance to the fully lived life and the citizen of the world.
Our young people need such an education. They are cheated every day they set foot in the terrible institutions of the Minneapolis Public Schools--- and all other urban schools of the United States.
And well-regarded suburban and private schools are overrated, recording test scores that do not rate high on the PISA exam, not even close to providing the much higher quality education rendered to students in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, and the Scandinavian nations.
If all people, even in the comparatively superb educational systems of the European social democracies and East Asia, mastered all of the knowledge that I am providing in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, this would be a better world:
People would understand the fundamental principles by which national and international economies function; the differences in the vast array of political systems of the world; why people behave as the do; how people of all major world religions view the divine and the purpose of humanity; how world, American, and African American history have given us the world of today; the finest works of the European Old Masters, the Song Dynasty landscape artists, and the exquisite sculpture of the Ibo; the roots of hip-hop and rap in the work songs of the slaves; the meaning of a gerund and how a participle can hang; the principles of geometry and trigonometry utilized in constructing bridges that usually don’t fall--- but why they do when they do; how asexual reproduction occurs; the chemical combinations that yield favorable versus unfavorable outcomes for humanity; and why energy is equal to mass, if one takes velocity into consideration.
Knowing such things enriches life, makes this potentially wonderful world understandable, and reduces the chances that people live out this one earthly sojourn forever ignorant, always wondering but never knowing who they are and how they relate to other creations of the natural world. This is the education that our young people and all people should have but do not receive. Tired of having to provide my students this sort of education in ad hoc lectures, I have tapped out the foundations of an excellent education on my keyboard. Now my students will have the education that they should have in Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, and so will you my readers.
Then we’ll share what we know with a world in need of the healing that knowledge and understanding will provide.
I give these mini-courses and teach these skills because the education that students receive in the Minneapolis Public Schools is so insubstantial. And my identification of the Minneapolis Public Schools with the rendering an insubstantial education may be taken to apply to all urban school districts. We are getting some signals of improvement from Charlotte-Mecklenburg and from Cincinnati, but we’ll have to wait for many years to see if the school districts in those urban centers realize their seeming promise. We have been disappointed so many times.
Even in the areas of math and reading, for which student assessments got so embarrassing that even the education establishment started giving belated attention, the results are not encouraging. The United States fares poorly by comparison with other nations on the highly regarded PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), a program that tests academic skills in math, reading, and science in all major industrialized nations and many developing, emerging, and newly developed nations as an activity of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [note that spelling is in the British style for an organization actually based in Paris, France]).
And for young people from economically challenged and historically abused families, the results are disastrous: Almost all young people in these familial categories score poorly on objective tests of skill and knowledge. And they either do not graduate from high school or they have to take remedial courses once in a college or university setting; moreover, graduation rates for students of economically and historically challenged circumstances from colleges and universities are very low.
When reading a substantive article from the newspaper or an ACT practice reading, all kinds of topics are likely to arise. Such topics may lead me to ask questions such as the following:
>>>>> You do know what was important about the Mayflower, right?
>>>>> You know the basic difference between a republic and a monarchy, don’t you?
>>>>> You’ve heard of Sigmund Freud, haven’t you?
>>>>> You know that Buddhism began in India but ended up gaining more followers in Southeast and East Asia, right? And do you know, then, what religion is most prevalent in India?
>>>>> You do know that Newton’s laws of motion and gravity revolutionized how we thought about the physics of planet Earth--- but that Einstein taught us that those laws are not absolute and not at all adequate when contemplating motion and gravity of the greater cosmos--- right?
I always get blank stares when I pose these questions, which arise implicitly from articles that we read, because such topics gain mention in serious reading material. So I end up taking a long time just helping students to understand subjects that they should be learning in school.
Two favorites of mine are the single words “liberal” and “communist.” Just ponder the layers and layers of difficulty in understanding the various meanings of these terms if the student is not given a full exposition that includes usages across historical and societal circumstances.
So all of this got very old.
Wanting to give my students the equivalent of a private school education and then, knowing that even the education rendered at well-regarded private institutions in the United States is overrated, wanting for them much better than that--- I decided just to haul off and write a book, to be entitled, Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
This book is now becoming the chief reading text for my students, who are successively moving through the chapters already written, those focused on economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, and African American history. I will soon have completed the chapters on literature, English usage, and fine arts (visual and musical); and then by early November will have concluded the chapters for mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics.
That will be fourteen chapters covering the subjects most important to an excellent liberal arts education, of the sort that will send students forth into the world culturally enriched, civically informed, and prepared to pursue specialized training for lives of professional satisfaction.
Readers of the whole book will gain that education that most high school and even most university graduates wish that they had received. And now my students will know the answers to the questions posed above--- and many more.
Subscribers to my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota are currently receiving three chapters at a time, per edition. Most recently they have received the first three chapters, those for Economics, Political Science, and Psychology.
Readers of the blog have received snippets that represent about 10% of the full chapters. My goal is to provide an avenue for the journey through the exciting world of knowledge, alerting readers to information that they have never before received--- or refreshing them on subjects studied long ago, awakening them anew to the excitement of knowing, understanding, and thinking deeply about matters of great importance to the fully lived life and the citizen of the world.
Our young people need such an education. They are cheated every day they set foot in the terrible institutions of the Minneapolis Public Schools--- and all other urban schools of the United States.
And well-regarded suburban and private schools are overrated, recording test scores that do not rate high on the PISA exam, not even close to providing the much higher quality education rendered to students in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, and the Scandinavian nations.
If all people, even in the comparatively superb educational systems of the European social democracies and East Asia, mastered all of the knowledge that I am providing in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, this would be a better world:
People would understand the fundamental principles by which national and international economies function; the differences in the vast array of political systems of the world; why people behave as the do; how people of all major world religions view the divine and the purpose of humanity; how world, American, and African American history have given us the world of today; the finest works of the European Old Masters, the Song Dynasty landscape artists, and the exquisite sculpture of the Ibo; the roots of hip-hop and rap in the work songs of the slaves; the meaning of a gerund and how a participle can hang; the principles of geometry and trigonometry utilized in constructing bridges that usually don’t fall--- but why they do when they do; how asexual reproduction occurs; the chemical combinations that yield favorable versus unfavorable outcomes for humanity; and why energy is equal to mass, if one takes velocity into consideration.
Knowing such things enriches life, makes this potentially wonderful world understandable, and reduces the chances that people live out this one earthly sojourn forever ignorant, always wondering but never knowing who they are and how they relate to other creations of the natural world. This is the education that our young people and all people should have but do not receive. Tired of having to provide my students this sort of education in ad hoc lectures, I have tapped out the foundations of an excellent education on my keyboard. Now my students will have the education that they should have in Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, and so will you my readers.
Then we’ll share what we know with a world in need of the healing that knowledge and understanding will provide.
Sep 16, 2015
The Insincerity of American Society with Regard to Attaining Educational Equity, as Considered in the Demise of No Child Left Behind
When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he wanted to concentrate on a domestic agenda for which he vowed to apply conservative solutions in compassionate service to impoverished and other challenged populations often considered more politically responsive to programs of Democratic provenance:
In 2002--- as one of the few programs on the Bush domestic agenda that was not permanently deferred due to the exigencies of the 9-11 attacks--- the president oversaw bipartisan (Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Representative John Boehner helped secure support) passage of legislation on which personnel at the United States Department of Education had worked; officially a renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first issued during the presidency of President Lyndon Johnson, this legislation went by the more specific appellation of No Child Left Behind.
Consistent with President Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, the explanatory comments in the legislative document cautioned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and put forward an aggressive program to achieve educational equity by 2014. To attain such a lofty goal, the legislation mandated the construction of tests (assessments) for evaluation of grade level performance at Grades 3-8 and the concomitant generation of instruments for measuring the achievement of high school students in math, reading, and writing.
Very importantly, the data were to be disaggregated to assess achievement of students according to gender, economic level, and ethnicity, and schools were to be held responsible for grade level achievement in all demographic categories. Those schools that were found to be underserving any of the student populations were put on a five-year sequence of warning, hiring of outside tutors, and restructuring for persistent failure. Over the longer term, city, state, or private contractor control of perpetually failing schools and school districts was to be an option.
At first, Republicans were solidly behind the legislation, which conveyed a get-tough approach that made them feel that an old-school return to basics was moving forward. But within a half-decade came the conservative push-back against a federally mandated program: Republicans began repeating a refrain in favor of local control and the effective disassembling of the working framework of No Child Left Behind.
As to Democrats, they were subject to immediate pressure from the education establishment--- especially the National Education Association (NEA)and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and their local school district teacher union affiliates--- that typically contributed heavy cash to the campaigns of Democrats. By the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, most Democrats both in Congress and local legislative chambers were working to gut No Child Left Behind.
By the time George Bush left office, No Child Left Behind had been so seriously undermined as to have lost any potential for raising the performance level of all students. When President Obama took office his staff at the United States Department of Education began a new program called, “Race to the Top,’’ which mandated that states show anew how they were going to address the persistent gap in performance levels between the white and the economically well-off, on the higher performance side, and young people of color and low income, on the lower performance side.
Buying into the rhetoric and prevarication by both Democrats and Republicans, the Obama administration approved waivers from the mandates of No Child Left Behind in states that could construct and articulate the case for an alternative program for achieving educational equity.
Thus it was that one of the few promising items from the George W. Bush domestic agenda was gutted by political forces at left and right--- and how we still wring our hands over persistent demographically indicated performance levels--- having, over the course of about ten years, destroyed the most promising program in American history for addressing the issue of educational equity.
In 2002--- as one of the few programs on the Bush domestic agenda that was not permanently deferred due to the exigencies of the 9-11 attacks--- the president oversaw bipartisan (Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Representative John Boehner helped secure support) passage of legislation on which personnel at the United States Department of Education had worked; officially a renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first issued during the presidency of President Lyndon Johnson, this legislation went by the more specific appellation of No Child Left Behind.
Consistent with President Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, the explanatory comments in the legislative document cautioned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and put forward an aggressive program to achieve educational equity by 2014. To attain such a lofty goal, the legislation mandated the construction of tests (assessments) for evaluation of grade level performance at Grades 3-8 and the concomitant generation of instruments for measuring the achievement of high school students in math, reading, and writing.
Very importantly, the data were to be disaggregated to assess achievement of students according to gender, economic level, and ethnicity, and schools were to be held responsible for grade level achievement in all demographic categories. Those schools that were found to be underserving any of the student populations were put on a five-year sequence of warning, hiring of outside tutors, and restructuring for persistent failure. Over the longer term, city, state, or private contractor control of perpetually failing schools and school districts was to be an option.
At first, Republicans were solidly behind the legislation, which conveyed a get-tough approach that made them feel that an old-school return to basics was moving forward. But within a half-decade came the conservative push-back against a federally mandated program: Republicans began repeating a refrain in favor of local control and the effective disassembling of the working framework of No Child Left Behind.
As to Democrats, they were subject to immediate pressure from the education establishment--- especially the National Education Association (NEA)and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and their local school district teacher union affiliates--- that typically contributed heavy cash to the campaigns of Democrats. By the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, most Democrats both in Congress and local legislative chambers were working to gut No Child Left Behind.
By the time George Bush left office, No Child Left Behind had been so seriously undermined as to have lost any potential for raising the performance level of all students. When President Obama took office his staff at the United States Department of Education began a new program called, “Race to the Top,’’ which mandated that states show anew how they were going to address the persistent gap in performance levels between the white and the economically well-off, on the higher performance side, and young people of color and low income, on the lower performance side.
Buying into the rhetoric and prevarication by both Democrats and Republicans, the Obama administration approved waivers from the mandates of No Child Left Behind in states that could construct and articulate the case for an alternative program for achieving educational equity.
Thus it was that one of the few promising items from the George W. Bush domestic agenda was gutted by political forces at left and right--- and how we still wring our hands over persistent demographically indicated performance levels--- having, over the course of about ten years, destroyed the most promising program in American history for addressing the issue of educational equity.
Sep 4, 2015
A Portion of a Communication to One of My Students, Currently Matriculating at the University Level
As director and teacher in the New Salem Educational Initiative, the relationships that I establish with my students are forever. I follow them through their university years (after having been their teacher as early as Grade K) and beyond.
Here is a portion of a communication that I sent to one of my students currently matriculating at the university level.
The matter that I am addressing is the range of qualities evident in certain professor types--- what mix of heavyweight research, ongoing reading in the field of specialty, and pure pedagogical ability the professor manifests in the classroom particularly and in the university setting more broadly:
>>>>>
Some professors possess more knowledge than others.
In that regard, they tend to fall into three categories:
1) There are some professors who are powerhouse researchers who have done a lot of original research and written many books based on that research.
2) There are others who studied through to the Ph.D., by definition, then, having absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge; but then they tend to coast on that knowledge base without keeping up in their fields.
3) Then there are others who do not do much if any original research (like those in #2), but they do read a lot and keep up with the latest developments in their fields. Their knowledge base can be just as good as the heavyweight researchers; they just do not make as many original contributions to their fields of specialization.
The question then becomes what kinds of teachers these professors are.
Sometimes a university professor is heavy into her or his research and does not care all that much about teaching; but I have known many who both made major contributions to their fields and still were dynamite teachers.
A professor in category #2 or #3 had better be a dynamite teacher, or that professor's value to the institution is slight. If one does not emphasize research that brings the university recognition, then she or he has the very major obligation to do a super job teaching.
I know a bit about the research and publication histories of your professors, but I've never taken their classes, so you'd have to tell me how effectively they communicate what they've designated for you to learn.
So--- how are your teachers? Which one of them is the best communicator? Are they all fairly good? Is there one who is clearly not as good a pure teacher as the others?
I know that when the professor is clear that you will understand. So please ask good questions, make them be as good as they can be, and ask for additional clarification in office hours as necessary:
Sometimes one clarification can open up the breakthrough into understanding necessary to grasp an important concept, which then builds on other concepts toward a unified grasp of the topic of current emphasis.
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