Waging the Revolution in K-I2 Education: The Four Essential Facets for Emphasis

Just under two years ago, in July 2014, I began to make appearances on the second Tuesday of every month at the meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, with the purpose of exerting pressure on the superintendent and board members to recognize the problems of the school district, address those problems, and implement the academic program necessary to impel change.


I came with a style and a message never before witnessed by any of the board members or the superintendent.


I consistently and persistently advocated for subject-specific curriculum implemented grade-by-grade throughout the K-12 years. My emphasis during the K-5 years has been and is on the liberal arts subjects of mathematics, natural science, history & economics, literature & English usage, and fine arts (visual & musical). History and economics are clustered together as the subject areas of emphasis within the area typically given the amorphous appellation of “social studies”; similarly, the specification of literature and English usage replaces the less definite nomenclature of “language arts.”


I also relentlessly advocated for better teacher training. My message in this area has focused on the totally inadequate training given teachers at the K-5 (elementary) level in departments, schools, and colleges of education; on the low academic standards set for secondary teachers, who do get bachelor’s degrees in legitimate disciplines but who now almost universally proceed to master’s degrees in education rather than in subject-specific fields.


In my inaugural issues (July and August 2014) of Journal of the K-5 Revolution: Articles and Essays from Minneapolis, Minnesota (launched as part of a multimedia campaign to exert maximum pressure on the education establishment), I detailed the necessary advances in curricular and teacher quality.


The curriculum that I detail in the first issue results in students graduating from Grade 5 possessing great knowledge in the five areas of liberal arts emphasis; from Grade 8 having the skill and knowledge sets that now typify high school graduates; and from Grade 12 having received the kind of academic, technological, and vocational training that give students the knowledge and skills conventionally attained during two years of an academic college course of study and two years descriptive of technical college training.


As the months ensued, I also advocated for more aggressive, cohesive, and effective tutoring for students languishing below grade level; and for much better outreach to the families and communities of students so as to reach young people right where they live.


Thus, as I tap out this communication in June 2016, the message that I am hammering home focuses on these four items as paramount:


I. Curriculum


II. Teachers


III. Tutoring


IV. Family and Community Outreach      


Tellingly, in specifying these essential elements for making the Minneapolis Public Schools a model for K-12 excellence, I am bringing attention to members of the school board, administration, and teachers a clarity of focus that they have never before demonstrated, much less conveyed:


So low are the goals set for attaining quality education that the chief aim seems to be closing the vaunted achievement gap, endeavoring to ensure that students of all demographic descriptors are achieving grade level performance for reading and math.


I approach all matters, most passionately those relevant to the attainment of K-12 excellence, with unrelenting logic. I believe in properly sequencing goals, laying necessary foundations, and ascending in aspiration and implementation from that foundation. Thus, in my four-point emphasis for change, I assert the necessity of


1) having a comprehensive and logically sequenced curriculum in place;


2) training teachers of necessary quality to deliver that curriculum;


3) aggressively tutoring students who have not achieved grade level competence as required by the curriculum, in all subjects, with math and reading as foundational; and


4) establishing relationships with families right where they live so as to understand the issues that individual students bring with them to school.


My own goal, then, for achieving excellence in K-12 education is to facilitate the rise of students through the K-12 years to the high academic level that I identified in my first issue of Journal of the K-5 Revolution: Articles and Essays from Minneapolis, Minnesota. The goal of ensuring that all students attaining grade level performance in mathematics and reading should be viewed as an embarrassing redress of past systemic failures, not an ultimate goal.  Similarly, making sure that all students graduate from high school should be an assumed goal, not a proud achievement.


We must not be satisfied with the recovery of foundational skills for all students:


We must set our goals much higher as we target a comprehensive knowledge-intensive education in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts for K-12 students of all demographic descriptors.


In Journal of the K-5 Revolution: Articles and Essays from Minneapolis, Minnesota, in articles posted on this blog, on my television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, Wednesdays at 6:00 PM, Channel 17, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN]), and at numerous speaking venues, including second-Tuesday monthly appearances at meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education); I give ongoing commentary flowing from my four key points of emphasis.


I powerfully buttress these verbal expressions with action, teaching as I do students from a network that now rises to 125 people in seven-day weeks of small group academic sessions and the Tuesday Tutoring Program, both programs part of the New Salem Educational Initiative, a program of New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, the physical building of which at 2507 Bryant Avenue North in Minneapolis contains the classrooms where most of my weekly 17 small-group academic sessions and instruction in the Tuesday program are conducted.


The principles that I apply in superintending the programs of the New Salem Educational Initiative constitute a model to which decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education should refer in overhauling K-12 education at the level of the central school district.


In many articles previously posted on blog I give exposition of these principles.  I will be reviewing these principles again in articles soon to come.