Expanding Activities of the New Salem Educational Initiative: Waging the Revolution in K-12 Public Education >>>>> Creating a Model Central School District in the Minneapolis Public Schools

Over the course of the last 15 months, the activities of the New Salem Educational Initiative have expanded greatly. This is to communicate essentially that my aspirations to revolutionize K-12 education have taken on new dimensions:


I was already working 19 hours a day, conducting 17 academic sessions per week in seven-day weeks of small group (one-to-five students), superintending the New Salem Tuesday Night Tutoring Program (a more conventional, multi-student program for which I have a staff of wonderful assisting tutors at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church), responding to crisis situations in families and providing on-call academic instruction, mentoring those of my students who have gone on to colleges and universities, and handling all clerical and administrative tasks in behalf of the already multifaceted program of the New Salem Educational Initiative >>>>> curriculum writing, planning for specific academic sessions, development (fundraising), transport of students, mentoring for young people, counseling for families, and functioning as a resource referral for needed social services.


All of this was and is concerned with direct provision of academic and related services to students and families---  now totaling 125 people under my instruction and mentoring.  This was and is extraordinarily time consuming, but I decided that doing these things was not enough if I wanted to transform the academic lives and end generational poverty beyond my own students and families directly touched by my own instruction and activity.


That is to convey, I had to make every effort to revolutionize K-12 education by working to overhaul the only viable unit of delivery of K-12 education for the masses of students in our society: The locally centralized school district.


Thus, I have now increased or initiated activity in the following >>>>>


>>>>>   pounded out article after article (now totaling 205 articles) on this blog at www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com;


>>>>>  made public comment at almost all of the meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, the first Tuesday of each month at the headquarters on West Broadway;




>>>>>   inaugurated a monthly academic journal, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research From Minneapolis, Minnesota;




>>>>>   launched a new television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison (Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN], Channel 17, every Wednesday at 6:00 PM--- and available on YouTube at the site, Holly4Grace)


>>>>> made public speeches in all available venues;


>>>>> met with numerous staff members of the Minneapolis Public Schools;


>>>>> and written a now nearly-complete book entitled, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education with introductory and concluding chapters enveloping fourteen subject area chapters: Economics, Political Science, Psychology, World Religions, World History, American History, African-American History, Literature, English Usage, Fine Arts (Visual and Musical), Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.


This latter work serves as a model for the Minneapolis Public Schools in making the most of Bernadeia Johnson’s legacy in launching Focused Instruction as conduit for a knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced, grade-by-grade curriculum.


I detail the grade-by-grade sequence for delivery of this curriculum in the August 2014 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Articles from Minneapolis, Minnesota; cover training the excellent teachers who will be needed to deliver such a curriculum in the September 2014 edition of the same journal; and detail both these matters of curriculum and teacher training over several episodes of the television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, on MTN Channel 17 and Holly4Grace on YouTube.


Everything that I now do, made possible with many efficiencies that I have developed in those same 19-hour days, is meant to induce officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools to overhaul curriculum and teacher quality so as to become a model locally centralized school district capable of delivering a well-defined excellent education for students of all demographic descriptors.


There is no magic wand to make any of this happen. It takes great knowledge, enormous energy, and very hard work--- the latter of which my West Texas pappy always called “elbow grease.”


No one else can do this work.


Others have failed time and time again.


I must do this, in the spirit of, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”


And neither can you depend on anyone else:


I always tell people who complain about the government: “You’re complaining about yourself. In a democracy, you are the government.”


Similarly, don’t complain about the quality of K-12 education; rather, you must act. For systems of public K-12 education are by that very definition “public,” and you are the public.


If you truly care about public K-12 education, please take a good look in the mirror, and then get in touch with me.


I could use your help.


I am not hard to find.