To my readers >>>>> All five articles in this new series, The Knowledge-Poverty of Citizens in the United States--- and Rectification Via the K-12 Revolution,
are now (Friday, 30 September) posted as a complete unit.
The five articles are now sequentially placed in order from Article #1 through Article #5 as you scroll down. The three interior articles (Article #2, Article #3, and Article #4) are new posts. Article #1 and Article #5 had been recently posted, on 28 September and 29 September respectively.
All articles in this series are updated and extended versions of previously posted material assembled and presented so as to detail the lack of knowledge prevailing among United States citizens as an outcome of our terrible system of K-12 education--- and with firm indication as to how we will rectify this knowledge-poverty via the knowledge-intensive K-12 revolution that I advocate in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Sep 29, 2016
Article #1 >>>>> The Knowledge-Poor United States of America
In his book, Just How Stupid Are We? (New York: Basic Books, 2008), George Mason University Professor Rick Shenkman summarizes scientific survey and polling data in revealing the extraordinary level of American ignorance.
Included in his account are the following examples, given for citizens 18 years of age or older, except where noted for particular age groups: Just 25% of American adults can name more than one of the fundamental First Amendment freedoms (speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition for redress of grievances). Only 30% of adult citizens know that Roe v. Wade (1973) was the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal. Just 25% know that the length of term for Senators is six years, and only 20% know that each state has two senators for a total of 100 members of the upper chamber of the United States Congress. Fewer than half (40%) can name the three branches of the federal government (executive, judicial, and legislative). And, remarkably, a mere 49% of American adults know that the United States was the nation whose pilots dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In an assessment of basic knowledge of civics administered to 14,000 college students by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2007, over half of these test-takers scored fewer than 55 correctly out of a total 100 questions. Fewer than half knew that the Battle of Yorktown (1781) ended the fighting between the American colonists and the British in the American Revolution.
Other instruments reveal that just 34% of American adults know that Congress is the federal governmental body with the constitutional right to declare war; 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto. Sixty percent of adult citizens think that the President can appoint federal judges without Senatorial approve--- which must have created confusion in such folk when President Obama appointed Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia amid the controversial refusal of Mitch McConnell and the Republican congressional leadership to bring the nomination before the Senate.
Forty-five percent of American adults think that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution. Only 5% of respondents to one survey could answer 75% of fundamental economics questions correctly; comparable figures for percentage of respondents making 75% correct responses on matters pertinent to domestic issues was 11%; foreign affairs, 14%; and geography, 10%.
A Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad declared in 2003 that American ignorance of the outside world constitutes a threat to national security.
The susceptibility of so many uninformed people to the demagoguery of Donald Trump should make that admonition very tangible.
........................................................................
Most likely against the common perception, young people 18 to 24 years of age are the least informed of all, despite their constant punching of smart phones and other technological devices. Young people as a group rate only above those confined to nursing homes in level of general knowledge. Only 23% of young people use the internet to access information pertinent to issues of national or international importance.
Young people do very little reading. As revealed in a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts as cited by Shenkman in his book, only 43% of those in the 18 to 24 age group read literature (down from 60% in 1982). Over 50% do not read newspapers (either physical or online), fiction, poetry, or drama. But few older adults in the United States do much serious reading, either; and in the United States Congress, members regularly cast votes on bills that they have not read.
Rick Shenkman warns his own readers not to mistake access to factual knowledge with consumption thereof:
This, of course, goes to the core of the erroneous approach to K-12 education espoused by education professors and other members of the education establishment. I have detailed in other articles the responses that I have gotten from members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education and officials in the central offices of that school district that reveal their lack of focus on knowledge acquisition as central to K-12 education. They are much under the influence of that falsely labeled “progressive” approach to education that purports to teach students how to think critically and prepare for lifelong learning without having any knowledge base upon which critical analysis must proceed--- and without having learned very much in the first place.
Thus it is that the condition of intellectual laziness and the terrible knowledge base that teachers and other members of the education establishment have as a result of their experience in wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education motivates them to conceal their own ignorance by devaluing knowledge with the claim that facts can always be looked up as necessary. This is all the more true, they claim, now that the internet and myriad electronic devices provide so much access to ready information.
But the danger is that the typical American shows little interest in knowledge, and never gets around to looking up facts of any relevance to serious national or international issues. Given so little knowledge acquired during the thirteen years spent in the terrible K-12 public schools of the United States, Americans never learn to respect knowledge and never become the lifelong learners and critical thinkers that the education establishment deceitfully claims they are producing.
The entity known as the Minneapolis Public Schools is a salient example of the locally centralized school district of the United States that sends graduates across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only.
Citizens in Minnesota and the United States are ignoramuses.
And, given their knowledge-poor approach to K-12 education, officials in the Minneapolis Public Schools implicitly intend to keep them that way.
Included in his account are the following examples, given for citizens 18 years of age or older, except where noted for particular age groups: Just 25% of American adults can name more than one of the fundamental First Amendment freedoms (speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition for redress of grievances). Only 30% of adult citizens know that Roe v. Wade (1973) was the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal. Just 25% know that the length of term for Senators is six years, and only 20% know that each state has two senators for a total of 100 members of the upper chamber of the United States Congress. Fewer than half (40%) can name the three branches of the federal government (executive, judicial, and legislative). And, remarkably, a mere 49% of American adults know that the United States was the nation whose pilots dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In an assessment of basic knowledge of civics administered to 14,000 college students by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2007, over half of these test-takers scored fewer than 55 correctly out of a total 100 questions. Fewer than half knew that the Battle of Yorktown (1781) ended the fighting between the American colonists and the British in the American Revolution.
Other instruments reveal that just 34% of American adults know that Congress is the federal governmental body with the constitutional right to declare war; 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto. Sixty percent of adult citizens think that the President can appoint federal judges without Senatorial approve--- which must have created confusion in such folk when President Obama appointed Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia amid the controversial refusal of Mitch McConnell and the Republican congressional leadership to bring the nomination before the Senate.
Forty-five percent of American adults think that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution. Only 5% of respondents to one survey could answer 75% of fundamental economics questions correctly; comparable figures for percentage of respondents making 75% correct responses on matters pertinent to domestic issues was 11%; foreign affairs, 14%; and geography, 10%.
A Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad declared in 2003 that American ignorance of the outside world constitutes a threat to national security.
The susceptibility of so many uninformed people to the demagoguery of Donald Trump should make that admonition very tangible.
........................................................................
Most likely against the common perception, young people 18 to 24 years of age are the least informed of all, despite their constant punching of smart phones and other technological devices. Young people as a group rate only above those confined to nursing homes in level of general knowledge. Only 23% of young people use the internet to access information pertinent to issues of national or international importance.
Young people do very little reading. As revealed in a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts as cited by Shenkman in his book, only 43% of those in the 18 to 24 age group read literature (down from 60% in 1982). Over 50% do not read newspapers (either physical or online), fiction, poetry, or drama. But few older adults in the United States do much serious reading, either; and in the United States Congress, members regularly cast votes on bills that they have not read.
Rick Shenkman warns his own readers not to mistake access to factual knowledge with consumption thereof:
This, of course, goes to the core of the erroneous approach to K-12 education espoused by education professors and other members of the education establishment. I have detailed in other articles the responses that I have gotten from members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education and officials in the central offices of that school district that reveal their lack of focus on knowledge acquisition as central to K-12 education. They are much under the influence of that falsely labeled “progressive” approach to education that purports to teach students how to think critically and prepare for lifelong learning without having any knowledge base upon which critical analysis must proceed--- and without having learned very much in the first place.
Thus it is that the condition of intellectual laziness and the terrible knowledge base that teachers and other members of the education establishment have as a result of their experience in wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education motivates them to conceal their own ignorance by devaluing knowledge with the claim that facts can always be looked up as necessary. This is all the more true, they claim, now that the internet and myriad electronic devices provide so much access to ready information.
But the danger is that the typical American shows little interest in knowledge, and never gets around to looking up facts of any relevance to serious national or international issues. Given so little knowledge acquired during the thirteen years spent in the terrible K-12 public schools of the United States, Americans never learn to respect knowledge and never become the lifelong learners and critical thinkers that the education establishment deceitfully claims they are producing.
The entity known as the Minneapolis Public Schools is a salient example of the locally centralized school district of the United States that sends graduates across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only.
Citizens in Minnesota and the United States are ignoramuses.
And, given their knowledge-poor approach to K-12 education, officials in the Minneapolis Public Schools implicitly intend to keep them that way.
Article #2 >>>>> The Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education's Knowledge-Poor Concept of K-12 Education
The contempt for knowledge prevalent among those responsible for the lives of our young people is deeply troubling.
Witness through my lens a disturbing event held in the early evening of Thursday, 10 March 2016"
On this evening, the League of Women Voters held a forum for members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education at Bryn Mawr K-5 in the residential area of the same name. School board members Jenny Arneson, Kim Ellison, Rebecca Gagnon, Don Samuels, and Nelson Inz sat left to right as the audience peered at their table; Carla Bates and Josh Reimnitz were not in attendance, and Tracine Asberry was at another meeting and did not make an appearance until the event was almost over.
The school board members each introduced themselves and explained what had impelled them to run for a position on the board. Recent student representative Noah Branch (term ended in January 2016) and Tracine's daughter (Dominica Asberry-Lindquist) made some stand-in comments for her but then sat back down in the audience for the remainder of the event.
When the time came for questions, I went first, with the following question, led by an introductory reference:
"In 1996, E. D. Hirsch published a book entitled, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them; in 1999, Alfie Kohn published a reply to the Hirsch work entitled The Schools Our Children Deserve. Those books convey very different philosophies of education. Please tell me whether you think that an excellent education is a matter of knowledge-intensity, imparted by teachers who have a great deal of subject area knowledge; or a matter, touted by education professors as 'progressive,' of emphasizing critical thinking and lifelong learning, with classroom presences in the role of facilitator. Please don't succumb to the temptation to try to muddle in between those two definitions. Make a decision for one or the other."
The school board members, moving left to right, then each answered my question. Quite bracingly if not astonishingly, they all favored the second of the two options, emphasizing in their answers the critical thinking component. The summary of their essential replies is as follows:
Jenny Arneson said that she is not an educator but as a mother of children in the Minneapolis Public Schools she did care about the subject area content in their classes; she thought, however, that critical thinking was most important.
Kim Ellison said that the question was not a matter of either-or. I interrupted to say that yes, as a matter of philosophical commitment, it is. She then continued, saying that in her own teaching in an alternative school setting, she had developed the belief that critical thinking was most important.
Rebecca Gagnon, who was the only one who had shaken her head affirmatively as if aware of both the Hirsch and Kohn books, said that technology had rendered knowledge-based education an emphasis of the past. She said that people can always access any factual knowledge that they need, and that she does so all the time. Critical thinking and lifelong learning should be emphasized in our schools.
Don Samuels said that in Jamaica he had been given an education of the knowledge-intensive type, and that he understood that approach. But he also said that as a creative person he did not always do all that well under the knowledge-intensive approach and would come down on the side of critical thinking and lifelong learning.
Nelson Inz, like Samuels, seemed uncomfortable in having to make the decision but he, too, sided with critical thinking and lifelong learning. He took my question very seriously and came back to the topic in comments at the close of the event, in the aggregate saying that as a Montessori-trained guide to student learning he emphasized critical thinking and lifelong learning. As a high school social studies teacher, he often gets students who tell him that they would like more information about events such as World War II; he explains to them that he sees his role as giving his students the skills that they need to find out more about World War II and other events and topics on their own.
I was more disturbed by these answers than I have been by any comments theretofore made by school board members at what was at that point in March 2016 my 20 months of regular attendance and Public Comment.
That each of these members of the board devalues knowledge as the core of education is deeply troubling.
I now know how much work is ahead of me, how vital is my modeling of the knowledge-intensive approach in the 17 weekly academic sessions that I conduct for my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, and how important are the various venues (television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison [6:00 PM Wednesdays, MTN Channel 17]; this academic periodical that 4 you dear subscribers are reading, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; blog at http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com; and book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education) that I have created as components of a structure running parallel to the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Within the structure that I have created, I support the Minneapolis Public Schools while demonstrating principles and approaches for extrapolation.
In doing this, I assert the power of knowledge as the only genuine focus of education.
Witness through my lens a disturbing event held in the early evening of Thursday, 10 March 2016"
On this evening, the League of Women Voters held a forum for members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education at Bryn Mawr K-5 in the residential area of the same name. School board members Jenny Arneson, Kim Ellison, Rebecca Gagnon, Don Samuels, and Nelson Inz sat left to right as the audience peered at their table; Carla Bates and Josh Reimnitz were not in attendance, and Tracine Asberry was at another meeting and did not make an appearance until the event was almost over.
The school board members each introduced themselves and explained what had impelled them to run for a position on the board. Recent student representative Noah Branch (term ended in January 2016) and Tracine's daughter (Dominica Asberry-Lindquist) made some stand-in comments for her but then sat back down in the audience for the remainder of the event.
When the time came for questions, I went first, with the following question, led by an introductory reference:
"In 1996, E. D. Hirsch published a book entitled, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them; in 1999, Alfie Kohn published a reply to the Hirsch work entitled The Schools Our Children Deserve. Those books convey very different philosophies of education. Please tell me whether you think that an excellent education is a matter of knowledge-intensity, imparted by teachers who have a great deal of subject area knowledge; or a matter, touted by education professors as 'progressive,' of emphasizing critical thinking and lifelong learning, with classroom presences in the role of facilitator. Please don't succumb to the temptation to try to muddle in between those two definitions. Make a decision for one or the other."
The school board members, moving left to right, then each answered my question. Quite bracingly if not astonishingly, they all favored the second of the two options, emphasizing in their answers the critical thinking component. The summary of their essential replies is as follows:
Jenny Arneson said that she is not an educator but as a mother of children in the Minneapolis Public Schools she did care about the subject area content in their classes; she thought, however, that critical thinking was most important.
Kim Ellison said that the question was not a matter of either-or. I interrupted to say that yes, as a matter of philosophical commitment, it is. She then continued, saying that in her own teaching in an alternative school setting, she had developed the belief that critical thinking was most important.
Rebecca Gagnon, who was the only one who had shaken her head affirmatively as if aware of both the Hirsch and Kohn books, said that technology had rendered knowledge-based education an emphasis of the past. She said that people can always access any factual knowledge that they need, and that she does so all the time. Critical thinking and lifelong learning should be emphasized in our schools.
Don Samuels said that in Jamaica he had been given an education of the knowledge-intensive type, and that he understood that approach. But he also said that as a creative person he did not always do all that well under the knowledge-intensive approach and would come down on the side of critical thinking and lifelong learning.
Nelson Inz, like Samuels, seemed uncomfortable in having to make the decision but he, too, sided with critical thinking and lifelong learning. He took my question very seriously and came back to the topic in comments at the close of the event, in the aggregate saying that as a Montessori-trained guide to student learning he emphasized critical thinking and lifelong learning. As a high school social studies teacher, he often gets students who tell him that they would like more information about events such as World War II; he explains to them that he sees his role as giving his students the skills that they need to find out more about World War II and other events and topics on their own.
I was more disturbed by these answers than I have been by any comments theretofore made by school board members at what was at that point in March 2016 my 20 months of regular attendance and Public Comment.
That each of these members of the board devalues knowledge as the core of education is deeply troubling.
I now know how much work is ahead of me, how vital is my modeling of the knowledge-intensive approach in the 17 weekly academic sessions that I conduct for my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, and how important are the various venues (television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison [6:00 PM Wednesdays, MTN Channel 17]; this academic periodical that 4 you dear subscribers are reading, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; blog at http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com; and book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education) that I have created as components of a structure running parallel to the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Within the structure that I have created, I support the Minneapolis Public Schools while demonstrating principles and approaches for extrapolation.
In doing this, I assert the power of knowledge as the only genuine focus of education.
Article #3 >>>>> Don’t Know Much About Nothin’ at All
One winter evening I sat peering into the blaze of my wood-burning stove, the route of my ruminations ultimately pointing me topically toward the knowledge-poverty endemic to the United States, and to the damage inflicted by the education establishment on our nation’s youth.
At this mental juncture, I was thinking specifically of a question that a candidate for superintendent, Jinger Gustafson, had asked members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education:
Given her turn near the end of her interview to ask a question of board members, Ms. Gustafson asked,
“What keeps you up at night?”
Board members seemed nonplused. Only two mustered some sort of answer.
Thinking about the question in the context of knowledge-poverty, I found myself singing alternative lyrics to the Sam Cooke classic, [What a] Wonderful World, penned by the soul master with Lou Adler and Herb Alpert. My version, rendered as a lament from a student of the Minneapolis Public Schools, went as follows:
Don't know much about history,
don't know much geography,
don't know much about no science book,
don't know much about the French I took.
Don't know much about no Rise and Fall;
don't know much about nothin' at all---
You ain't put much in our heads,
so all we got to do is fall into bed,
gettin' pregnant in our early years,
you left us with so many haunting fears---
So just when the sun of our youth had risen,
we hit the streets, and we were off to prison.
That must make you feel awf’ly good,
not having educated us as you should---
just sittin' there watchin' us Rise and Fall,
we don't know how you sleep at all---
You ain't put much in our heads,
so all we got to do is fall into bed,
gettin' pregnant in our early years,
you left us with so many haunting fears---
So just when the sun of our youth had risen,
we hit the streets and were off to prison.
That must make you feel awf’ly good,
not having educated us as you should.
just sittin' and watchin' us Rise and Fall,
we don't know how you sleep at all---
We don't know how you sleep at all.
But there is a better way forward, found in our sacred responsibility to provide an education of substance to our youth, our lost human treasures whom we must seek and find and embrace, and to whom we must give the knowledge for which they have been waiting a very long time.
At this mental juncture, I was thinking specifically of a question that a candidate for superintendent, Jinger Gustafson, had asked members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education:
Given her turn near the end of her interview to ask a question of board members, Ms. Gustafson asked,
“What keeps you up at night?”
Board members seemed nonplused. Only two mustered some sort of answer.
Thinking about the question in the context of knowledge-poverty, I found myself singing alternative lyrics to the Sam Cooke classic, [What a] Wonderful World, penned by the soul master with Lou Adler and Herb Alpert. My version, rendered as a lament from a student of the Minneapolis Public Schools, went as follows:
Don't know much about history,
don't know much geography,
don't know much about no science book,
don't know much about the French I took.
Don't know much about no Rise and Fall;
don't know much about nothin' at all---
You ain't put much in our heads,
so all we got to do is fall into bed,
gettin' pregnant in our early years,
you left us with so many haunting fears---
So just when the sun of our youth had risen,
we hit the streets, and we were off to prison.
That must make you feel awf’ly good,
not having educated us as you should---
just sittin' there watchin' us Rise and Fall,
we don't know how you sleep at all---
You ain't put much in our heads,
so all we got to do is fall into bed,
gettin' pregnant in our early years,
you left us with so many haunting fears---
So just when the sun of our youth had risen,
we hit the streets and were off to prison.
That must make you feel awf’ly good,
not having educated us as you should.
just sittin' and watchin' us Rise and Fall,
we don't know how you sleep at all---
We don't know how you sleep at all.
But there is a better way forward, found in our sacred responsibility to provide an education of substance to our youth, our lost human treasures whom we must seek and find and embrace, and to whom we must give the knowledge for which they have been waiting a very long time.
Article #4 >>>>> A Better Way: Toward a Knowledge-Intensive K-12 Education
Imagine the Minneapolis Public Schools improving so thoroughly as to become a model urban central school district that similar organizations in other cities can utilize as reference for their own overhaul of K-12 education at the level of the central school district.
In my new book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education [ten of fourteen chapters now complete]) focused on the subject areas of economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English usage, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics; I am providing the knowledge and skill set that would provide the essence of the curriculum productive of well-educated graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). Based on such a solid base of academic information and skills, graduates of MPS would possess knowledge that even our present version of university graduates in the United States would be happy to remember from courses in the given subject areas.
What I am doing in all aspects of the New Salem Educational Initiative--- including writing Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education; monthly production of the academic Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; hosting of the television show The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gar Marvin Davison (every Wednesday at 6:00 PM on Channel 17, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN]); personally conducting 17 small-group college preparatory academic sessions per week in a network that includes 125 students and their family members; superintending the Tuesday Tutoring program at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church; speaking at numerous public venues (including monthly appearances during Public Comment time at the convening of the MPS Board of Education); and the posting of articles approaching 300 in number on this blog--- is providing a vision for K-12 education and the future of North Minneapolis that encompasses what I am hoping to leave to the world when my own days on earth are numbered.
Imagine MPS extrapolating the principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative so as to design a locally centralized school system worthy as a model for the excellent liberal arts education that I am always advancing and that I am now detailing in the nearly completed book.
Imagine school classrooms from the K-5 level forward that are replete with academic resources of both the venerable print and the contemporary technological sort. Hold in your consciousness an image of classroom walls and hallways filled with maps of continents, nations, and ecosystems from throughout the world; and with prints of great works of art and visual representations (paintings, photographs, and sculpture) of historical personages of great thought and accomplishment. Consider the transformative lifetime impact on young people who fully function at grade level in mathematics and reading and then follow academically committed teachers on a journey through the exciting world of knowledge.
Think about the effects on the lives of our precious young people, alive in the world of knowledge and excited by the banter of teachers who truly love them and who effortlessly blend academic, comedic, and culturally attuned comments into their verbal expressions, their communications, their teaching. Imagine schools as genuine places of knowledge acquisition that welcome students, their families, and community members to the sites and into the hallways of learning and ethics. Into these hallways would come experts from the realms of academia, business, government, social service, and theology to talk to MPS students and their families in a setting alive with the love of knowledge and ethical action--- and to engage in lively intellectual encounters with teachers capable of exchanging informed views with people of enormous information bases and great expertise.
Ethics would be an important topic for discussion in the schools of the future for MPS, with powerful conversations flowing in consideration of ethical precepts from the world's great religious traditions, applied in the context of an extensive knowledge base acquired both through dedicated academic study and active engagement with the workaday world: Young people and their families would be invited to participate in discussions focused on the nature of the good, the beautiful, and the empathic--- for the express purpose of advancing human understanding and promoting peaceful, productive relationships among people.
Imagine beckoning rooms in our schools from the K-5 level forward that are packed with great classic and contemporary works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; performance stages; technological resource area; media center; kitchen for student use; along with conventional classrooms used for traditional purposes and as centers for discussion, lectures, and speeches. Imagine schools from the K-5 level forward that include spaces for instruction in the vocational and technical arts, arranged for particular students upon expressed interest, so that the transmission of liberal arts knowledge would flourish alongside instruction that could include auto repair, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and various other vocational arts.
Minneapolis in general and North Minneapolis specifically would become much better places for our young people and their families to dwell--- very much including those who are my personal passion: those who have been mired in cyclical familial poverty for generations. Schools would become tangible expressions of the joy of knowing and understanding the great world and universe, centers of information and wisdom in the midst of a community that radiates love of knowledge, ethical conduct, human beings.
I am developing the New Salem Educational Initiative as a vanguard community, formed by the 125 students and family members in my network, with the view of educating hordes of others interested in increasing their knowledge in all manner of subjects and coming to a place where ethics and moral conduct are treated as cherished guides to human action and interaction. A very definite component of my vision is the transformation of the image of the North Minneapolis community that I love, from the perception of a place of destitution and violence to the recognized center of advanced academic knowledge and elevated ethical conduct.
This can and must happen in the future overhaul of K-12 education at the level of the locally centralized school district, with the Minneapolis Public Schools serving as model to a world that must thrive on the basis of knowledge and ethics, rather than perishing for a lack thereof.
To those African American people living at the urban core, we owe this quality of education as a matter of sacred recompense.
In my new book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education [ten of fourteen chapters now complete]) focused on the subject areas of economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English usage, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics; I am providing the knowledge and skill set that would provide the essence of the curriculum productive of well-educated graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). Based on such a solid base of academic information and skills, graduates of MPS would possess knowledge that even our present version of university graduates in the United States would be happy to remember from courses in the given subject areas.
What I am doing in all aspects of the New Salem Educational Initiative--- including writing Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education; monthly production of the academic Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; hosting of the television show The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gar Marvin Davison (every Wednesday at 6:00 PM on Channel 17, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN]); personally conducting 17 small-group college preparatory academic sessions per week in a network that includes 125 students and their family members; superintending the Tuesday Tutoring program at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church; speaking at numerous public venues (including monthly appearances during Public Comment time at the convening of the MPS Board of Education); and the posting of articles approaching 300 in number on this blog--- is providing a vision for K-12 education and the future of North Minneapolis that encompasses what I am hoping to leave to the world when my own days on earth are numbered.
Imagine MPS extrapolating the principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative so as to design a locally centralized school system worthy as a model for the excellent liberal arts education that I am always advancing and that I am now detailing in the nearly completed book.
Imagine school classrooms from the K-5 level forward that are replete with academic resources of both the venerable print and the contemporary technological sort. Hold in your consciousness an image of classroom walls and hallways filled with maps of continents, nations, and ecosystems from throughout the world; and with prints of great works of art and visual representations (paintings, photographs, and sculpture) of historical personages of great thought and accomplishment. Consider the transformative lifetime impact on young people who fully function at grade level in mathematics and reading and then follow academically committed teachers on a journey through the exciting world of knowledge.
Think about the effects on the lives of our precious young people, alive in the world of knowledge and excited by the banter of teachers who truly love them and who effortlessly blend academic, comedic, and culturally attuned comments into their verbal expressions, their communications, their teaching. Imagine schools as genuine places of knowledge acquisition that welcome students, their families, and community members to the sites and into the hallways of learning and ethics. Into these hallways would come experts from the realms of academia, business, government, social service, and theology to talk to MPS students and their families in a setting alive with the love of knowledge and ethical action--- and to engage in lively intellectual encounters with teachers capable of exchanging informed views with people of enormous information bases and great expertise.
Ethics would be an important topic for discussion in the schools of the future for MPS, with powerful conversations flowing in consideration of ethical precepts from the world's great religious traditions, applied in the context of an extensive knowledge base acquired both through dedicated academic study and active engagement with the workaday world: Young people and their families would be invited to participate in discussions focused on the nature of the good, the beautiful, and the empathic--- for the express purpose of advancing human understanding and promoting peaceful, productive relationships among people.
Imagine beckoning rooms in our schools from the K-5 level forward that are packed with great classic and contemporary works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; performance stages; technological resource area; media center; kitchen for student use; along with conventional classrooms used for traditional purposes and as centers for discussion, lectures, and speeches. Imagine schools from the K-5 level forward that include spaces for instruction in the vocational and technical arts, arranged for particular students upon expressed interest, so that the transmission of liberal arts knowledge would flourish alongside instruction that could include auto repair, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and various other vocational arts.
Minneapolis in general and North Minneapolis specifically would become much better places for our young people and their families to dwell--- very much including those who are my personal passion: those who have been mired in cyclical familial poverty for generations. Schools would become tangible expressions of the joy of knowing and understanding the great world and universe, centers of information and wisdom in the midst of a community that radiates love of knowledge, ethical conduct, human beings.
I am developing the New Salem Educational Initiative as a vanguard community, formed by the 125 students and family members in my network, with the view of educating hordes of others interested in increasing their knowledge in all manner of subjects and coming to a place where ethics and moral conduct are treated as cherished guides to human action and interaction. A very definite component of my vision is the transformation of the image of the North Minneapolis community that I love, from the perception of a place of destitution and violence to the recognized center of advanced academic knowledge and elevated ethical conduct.
This can and must happen in the future overhaul of K-12 education at the level of the locally centralized school district, with the Minneapolis Public Schools serving as model to a world that must thrive on the basis of knowledge and ethics, rather than perishing for a lack thereof.
To those African American people living at the urban core, we owe this quality of education as a matter of sacred recompense.
Article #5 >>>>> Apology and Recompense Via the Power of K-12 Education
As a matter of long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core, we will demonstrate that we truly understand that Black Lives Matter by overhauling K-12 education.
The education establishment of the United States has never properly educated the great majority of African American people, and in the broader sense K-12 public education in this nation has never offered academic instruction of excellence to most people. African Americans have been most victimized by the deficiencies of K-12 public education in the United States.
Consider the history:
Most African American slaves were denied access to literacy. When slavery ended in 1866 with the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and when the immediately succeeding 14th and 15th Amendments respectively acknowledged fundamental rights of citizenship and voting rights specifically, the pathway opened for African Americans to gain access to education. But Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877, whereby Democrats granted the contested votes in the very close 1876 presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for withdrawal of federal troops from the South. This left innervated the guarantees of the Reconstruction amendments and created conditions for the rise of hate groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, Midnight Raiders, and Ku Klux Klan; the advent of Jim Crow; and the “separate but equal” abomination in the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Segregation, violence, and the sharecropping system sent multitudes of African Americans scrambling on a Great Northern Migration.
But in the urban North black people found restrictive housing covenants that directed them to certain parts of the city where, as in the case of African Americans settling in alongside the Jewish population of North Minneapolis, they joined other ethnic groups who also bore the burden of hateful treatment. The Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, decision of the Supreme Court formally ended segregation in 1954, and the Civil Rights victories manifested in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; in combination with fair housing and employment laws in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s; opened a pathway for African Americans positioned to grab for the middle class American Dream.
Ironically, though, many successful African American people joined whites fleeing the urban core. In North Minneapolis, after rioting on Plymouth Avenue in summer 1967, Jewish people left in droves for St. Louis Park and other suburbs; when many middle class African Americans did the same, this left behind--- as a general rule--- the poorest of the poor. The Minneapolis Public Schools, like all American systems of K-12 public education, never had offered a superb quality of education. Now mostly white educators were at a loss to provide high-quality education to a Northside population that increasingly included very challenged populations moving in from such places as Gary, Indiana; Southside Chicago; and Kankakee, Illinois.
And that’s where we remain today. Our locally centralized system of the Minneapolis Public Schools has never provided anything close to a decent K-12 education to African Americans living at the urban core. The time is now for us to provide knowledge-intensive K-12 education to our African American youth, and to our general populace of students of whom African American students constitute a particularly long-denied subset.
If we really believe that Black Lives Matter, then we must formulate a long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core by overhauling K-12 education in the Minneapolis Public Schools and across these not yet very United States.
There is a dominant motif in K-12 Education that has violent impact on the lives of our children, as follows:
The call for education reform is received by many as a chance to advocate for innovation that challenges the structure and the competency of the traditional school framework. But most charter schools are worse than the regular public schools, home schooling has as variable success as there is competency of parents to be teachers, and aside from putting in play the notion of increased parental options, the voucher system has gained little traction. The notion that measurable results can be achieved with a shift to smaller schools or school communities; and the idea that designing buildings for fluid spaces offering high-technology and fast-paced activities as a means for boosting student achievement; have as yet yielded no measurable results. National programs such as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race to the Top are inevitably destroyed by a combination of political forces from the political left (under the sway of teachers unions and others within the education establishment) and the political right (who object to any federal or national level policy as an assault on local control).
This dominant motif that calls for better results, gives rein to many disparate groups for the achievement of student progress, and induces federal government action with the intent to improve student performance has resulted in little progress for our students. The repetition of a whirlwind of mostly ineffective reformist action amidst competing political forces that vitiate any promising initiatives within the whirlwind--- has violent consequences for our youth and for the citizenry of United States.
................................................
We fail because very few advocating for reform have a clear conception of an excellent education and little understanding of the quality of teachers needed to impart an excellent education.
We fail because people of the United States have a fixation on local control that vitiates any national-level effort.
We fail because we have a low level of civic participation in our society, with few people involving themselves in those activities that will be necessary to overhaul K-12 education.
This failure has violent consequences:
Our young people are knowledge-starved. The result for too many of our youth is a life in which there is dysfunction at home and unsatisfactory experiences at school, which is a terrible place to be:
These prevailing circumstances lead many young people to the life of the street, teenage pregnancy, gang affiliation, violent behavior, and a fast track to prison. The American populace as a whole wanders through life on the basis of a very low cultural aesthetic and limited understanding of the ethical precepts that undergird the wisest among history’s philosophers and theologians.
Lives lived in ignorance and illusion are lives given to violent behavior in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, everywhere in these United States.
......................................................
There is a better way.
There is a better life.
There awaits for us a less violent society.
In education there is personal fulfillment.
In education there is personal control.
In education there is altruistic inclination.
We must take a stand for knowledge-intensive education imparted by intellectually astute and pedagogically skilled teachers retrained at the central school district level.
To induce central school district staff to define excellent education and train the teachers necessary to impart that education, we must act by exerting pressure on officials at the level of the locally centralized school district.
Failure to do so will leave us with the ignorant, violent, and dissatisfied society that we now have. Success in doing so will yield people who are culturally enriched, civically engaged, and professionally prepared, and who have little reason to want a violent and desultory life.
Rather, as knowledge replaces the abject ignorance of the American populace, citizens will have every reason to want to live as fulfilled individuals and community participants for whom violence is abhorrent and life is a magnificent gift to be treasured, honored, perfected.
The education establishment of the United States has never properly educated the great majority of African American people, and in the broader sense K-12 public education in this nation has never offered academic instruction of excellence to most people. African Americans have been most victimized by the deficiencies of K-12 public education in the United States.
Consider the history:
Most African American slaves were denied access to literacy. When slavery ended in 1866 with the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and when the immediately succeeding 14th and 15th Amendments respectively acknowledged fundamental rights of citizenship and voting rights specifically, the pathway opened for African Americans to gain access to education. But Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877, whereby Democrats granted the contested votes in the very close 1876 presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for withdrawal of federal troops from the South. This left innervated the guarantees of the Reconstruction amendments and created conditions for the rise of hate groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, Midnight Raiders, and Ku Klux Klan; the advent of Jim Crow; and the “separate but equal” abomination in the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Segregation, violence, and the sharecropping system sent multitudes of African Americans scrambling on a Great Northern Migration.
But in the urban North black people found restrictive housing covenants that directed them to certain parts of the city where, as in the case of African Americans settling in alongside the Jewish population of North Minneapolis, they joined other ethnic groups who also bore the burden of hateful treatment. The Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, decision of the Supreme Court formally ended segregation in 1954, and the Civil Rights victories manifested in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; in combination with fair housing and employment laws in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s; opened a pathway for African Americans positioned to grab for the middle class American Dream.
Ironically, though, many successful African American people joined whites fleeing the urban core. In North Minneapolis, after rioting on Plymouth Avenue in summer 1967, Jewish people left in droves for St. Louis Park and other suburbs; when many middle class African Americans did the same, this left behind--- as a general rule--- the poorest of the poor. The Minneapolis Public Schools, like all American systems of K-12 public education, never had offered a superb quality of education. Now mostly white educators were at a loss to provide high-quality education to a Northside population that increasingly included very challenged populations moving in from such places as Gary, Indiana; Southside Chicago; and Kankakee, Illinois.
And that’s where we remain today. Our locally centralized system of the Minneapolis Public Schools has never provided anything close to a decent K-12 education to African Americans living at the urban core. The time is now for us to provide knowledge-intensive K-12 education to our African American youth, and to our general populace of students of whom African American students constitute a particularly long-denied subset.
If we really believe that Black Lives Matter, then we must formulate a long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core by overhauling K-12 education in the Minneapolis Public Schools and across these not yet very United States.
There is a dominant motif in K-12 Education that has violent impact on the lives of our children, as follows:
The call for education reform is received by many as a chance to advocate for innovation that challenges the structure and the competency of the traditional school framework. But most charter schools are worse than the regular public schools, home schooling has as variable success as there is competency of parents to be teachers, and aside from putting in play the notion of increased parental options, the voucher system has gained little traction. The notion that measurable results can be achieved with a shift to smaller schools or school communities; and the idea that designing buildings for fluid spaces offering high-technology and fast-paced activities as a means for boosting student achievement; have as yet yielded no measurable results. National programs such as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race to the Top are inevitably destroyed by a combination of political forces from the political left (under the sway of teachers unions and others within the education establishment) and the political right (who object to any federal or national level policy as an assault on local control).
This dominant motif that calls for better results, gives rein to many disparate groups for the achievement of student progress, and induces federal government action with the intent to improve student performance has resulted in little progress for our students. The repetition of a whirlwind of mostly ineffective reformist action amidst competing political forces that vitiate any promising initiatives within the whirlwind--- has violent consequences for our youth and for the citizenry of United States.
................................................
We fail because very few advocating for reform have a clear conception of an excellent education and little understanding of the quality of teachers needed to impart an excellent education.
We fail because people of the United States have a fixation on local control that vitiates any national-level effort.
We fail because we have a low level of civic participation in our society, with few people involving themselves in those activities that will be necessary to overhaul K-12 education.
This failure has violent consequences:
Our young people are knowledge-starved. The result for too many of our youth is a life in which there is dysfunction at home and unsatisfactory experiences at school, which is a terrible place to be:
These prevailing circumstances lead many young people to the life of the street, teenage pregnancy, gang affiliation, violent behavior, and a fast track to prison. The American populace as a whole wanders through life on the basis of a very low cultural aesthetic and limited understanding of the ethical precepts that undergird the wisest among history’s philosophers and theologians.
Lives lived in ignorance and illusion are lives given to violent behavior in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, everywhere in these United States.
......................................................
There is a better way.
There is a better life.
There awaits for us a less violent society.
In education there is personal fulfillment.
In education there is personal control.
In education there is altruistic inclination.
We must take a stand for knowledge-intensive education imparted by intellectually astute and pedagogically skilled teachers retrained at the central school district level.
To induce central school district staff to define excellent education and train the teachers necessary to impart that education, we must act by exerting pressure on officials at the level of the locally centralized school district.
Failure to do so will leave us with the ignorant, violent, and dissatisfied society that we now have. Success in doing so will yield people who are culturally enriched, civically engaged, and professionally prepared, and who have little reason to want a violent and desultory life.
Rather, as knowledge replaces the abject ignorance of the American populace, citizens will have every reason to want to live as fulfilled individuals and community participants for whom violence is abhorrent and life is a magnificent gift to be treasured, honored, perfected.
Sep 5, 2016
Academic Success under Circumstances of Extreme Poverty: The Continuing Triumph of Damon Preston in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Note >>>>>
With the exception of the appellations used for my son Ryan Davison-Reed and mate Barbara Reed, the names used in this article are data privacy pseudonyms--- my practice always for participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative who gain reference in articles posted on this blog.
...........................................
The drama and ongoing triumph continue apace in the familial case of Damon Preston, the economically most impoverished student whom I have taught in my forty-five years of working with and teaching the poorest of the urban poor.
The essence of what happened in the course of the rambunctious months of August 2015 to the present time is as follows: Damon was a Grade 7 student at Washington Magnet School in St. Paul during academic year 2015-2016--- his second year at the school. Remember that I followed Damon through three residences in Minneapolis before mother Evelyn Patterson moved the family to the eastern edge of St. Paul when she located cheaper Section 8 housing at that location. When I had the time, I brought Damon back to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in North Minneapolis for our academic sessions, but for the sake of time I sometimes worked with Damon, and typically did so with half-brother Javon, in the hallway outside their apartment, which was too spare of furniture and devoid of lighting to do our academic work inside.
Damon had his ups and downs during the school year. He struggled with a science teacher who seemed to lose track of assignments and whose determination of grades was erratic and mercurial. But Damon’s grades in mathematics were consistently excellent, and his marks were good over all; furthermore, happily, by the end of academic year 2015-2016 he had pulled his science grade up to a “B” and attained an overall 3.4 GPA.
Javon, whom I have known since he came into the world and whose academic talent I had carefully nurtured in kindergarten, in Grade 1 performed at levels in both math and reading typically associated with the fully achieving Grade 3 student. Javon is truly precocious. But circumstances at home have led to behavioral struggles, both in class and on the bus, so this became one kind of metaphorical fire that I was continually putting out.
Home life was rough and got rougher as academic year 2015-2016 moved forward. Evelyn struggled mightily against worsening domestic conditions. Her significant other Marcel Gifford was less frequently employed than had been the case in some years. A talented cook whose culinary inspirations can rise to professional chef quality, Marcel has had difficulty meeting the demands of the workaday world and at best in recent months has had seasonal employment for athletic events and concerts at Xcel Center. Hitting his 40th birthday under the limited achievement scenario of his life hit hammer-hard at Marcel’s psyche. He took his life frustrations out physically on Evelyn and Damon (not on Javon, who kept his distance and suffered mentally rather than bodily).
As Evelyn confronted reality and talked ever more persistently of splitting, Marcel ramped up his outbursts of anger. He began to think nostalgically about his life as a gangbanger in Chicago, saying that by now he could have been a “general” had he stuck to his formal affiliation. As Marcel observed Evelyn exploring options for moving the family again, he said that he was just going to give up any attempt at a conventionally successful life, that he was just going to let himself go crazy, and that perhaps a return to the South Chicago ‘hood was the most appealing option. Many times I got calls from Evelyn appealing for my mediation.
In time, Damon started emulating Marcel’s behavior and became obstinate with his mom, even exerting low-level violence. At one point, after I had talked Damon into a better frame of consciousness and sought to ease his way back into Evelyn’s good graces, the latter accused me of thinking that Damon was an angel and that she was a no-good mother. At one cliff-edge juncture, Evelyn told me that she didn’t want me to tutor her or the boys any more.
Damon’s behavior and this attitudinal outburst from Evelyn (who had always been effusive in her gratitude toward me) were startling new developments. With great care and patience, I counseled Evelyn that my love for her family was eternal and equal from one family member to the other, that my love was unconditional, that we would find a way through the family’s struggles. Evelyn responded positively, apologizing and saying that she had been crazy with stress and that she had been erratic in taking her medications.
……………………………………………
Things got better: Damon and Javon found in me a sanctuary from the storm. I got them up and over to New Salem at least once and sometimes twice a week. With Javon, I joked in my usual way with the young ones, and with him in particular, issuing a steady stream of malapropisms, telling him, “You did a good snob” (“job, man--- JOB --- he would reply) and perpetually mispronouncing his name as “Mayvius” so that he could giggle and correct me, the teacher and the adult.
Evelyn located an apartment in a duplex on a quiet street in Coon Rapids. She and the boys will stay at this residence essentially rent-free: The abode is of a kind granted to enrollees in a program for people with significant disabilities (Evelyn, who has various allergies, high blood pressure, and other physical maladies; who suffers from a mild but at times daunting form of agoraphobia, from stress levels well above the norm, and from other psychological conditions; only recently confided in me that she has also been HIV positive and taken pertinent medications for a decade).
Evelyn went online and came up with job possibilities for Marcel and urged him to move in with a friend of his near the eastside St. Paul apartment. The split was looming, but Evelyn was exuding great love and concern for her partner of nine years.
Evelyn and the boys all took roles in my compressed version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that we rehearsed for the banquet. Evelyn was one of the fickle citizens who is first on the side of Brutus and then aligns with the camp of Antony. Damon took the major role of Brutus and knocked it out of the park at the Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet in early June 2016; Javon played Strato, the attendant who holds the sword upon which Brutus runs when the battle seems lost.
Damon also gave a speech delivered by Frederick Douglas in 1882, in the context of the disappointing decline of the immediate post-slavery era known as Reconstruction. He and I had worked on that one and studied the historical context for two academic years. Damon was so proud to give eloquent evidence of all that preparation.
At the banquet, I gave Damon the most prestigious, Student of the Year award--- richly deserved for being the most frequent student guest on my television show, for reading (at only Grade 7) two chapters (Economics and Psychology) of my new 14-chapter college preparatory Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, and for the dedicated preparation that led to roles as Brutus and Frederick Douglas.
I gave Evelyn the Caring and Loving Mother award and Javon the Precocious Young Student award.
In order for them to attend the banquet, for the third year in a row, I paid bus fare for Damon, Evelyn, and Javon; I also gave fare for Marcel, but he did not attend.
I gave this particularly economically challenged family all of the leftover food from the banquet (that I catered myself)--- two kinds of chicken, spaghetti, lasagna, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and salad. They had no money and the cupboard was bare when they arrived at the banquet, but they left in spirits welled with pride and stomachs that would not do any hunger-howling for at least two weeks.
…………………………………………………
During the summer of 2016, Damon traveled with me and two other students for our annual foray to Winona for the Great River Shakespeare Festival, this year to see that super-talented ensemble’s production of Julius Caesar. Damon smiled as if from ocean to ocean when I nudged him and told him to observe if the professional actor who performed the Brutus part was as good as he. I know Artistic Director Doug Scholz-Carlson and introduced him and some members of the cast to Davon and the others, who then went to my home (son Ryan Davison-Reed [who was a regular for such occasions during his years in Minnesota] lives in Burlington, Vermont, with an inclination toward Montreal, Quebec, Canada; but wife Barbara Reed was in attendance) for a Chinese meal of my preparation.
In the meantime, Evelyn had not had anywhere close to the $200 needed to make the move to Coon Rapids, so I moved the familial belongings in two trips via my Toyota Matrix, gratis, naturally, as with all of my responses of both personal and academic sort.
I just checked in yesterday (as I write this on 1 September 2016) with the family. Evelyn and the boys are doing well in their new home in Coon Rapids. Damon and Evelyn are getting along amicably. Damon, ever the old soul and mature in many ways beyond his years, is working hard to be respectful and helpful to his mom. Javon is not acting out with his former frequency. Marcel comes around every so often and has been a source of irritation--- but will soon be working as a cook in a mid-range quality restaurant and is looking for greater stability--- far away from Southside Chicago.
Evelyn and I talked a long while. I complimented her for how neatly she is keeping the new place, which is much better appointed than the apartment in eastern St. Paul (her key social worker in the program in which she is enrolled helped her secure some quite decent furniture and lighting for the new residence). I told her that she looked good (she had dropped a few of the many extra pounds that she carries for her average frame and height) and seemed in fine spirits.
She said, “Thank you, Mr. Gary [Note: I always encourage students and family members to call me ‘Gary,’ but often the ‘Mr.’ is appended in observance of a cultural custom of respect for elders]. And thank you for all that you have done. Thank you for not turning away when I said all that crazy stuff. My boys and I just would not be where we are now without your help.”
I just replied: “It’s all been my pleasure, and your efforts to gain your current situation are all that I need for thanks. I love you and the boys and will always be here for you, whatever you need.”
Evelyn's eyes teared up behind an expression of relief and joy. I hugged her, Damon, and Javon and then departed with a share in that joy.
Evelyn, Damon, and Javon are looking forward to the coming academic year, during which they will continue their pathways to futures that will hold better fortune for Evelyn and for the boys can be descriptive of lives generally attained most readily by children of upper middle class parentage.
…………………………………………………
The above account of student success amidst circumstances of extreme poverty and familial malfunction is of the kind common in my network of 125 students and family members in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
The principles in action via the New Salem Educational Initiative impel my efforts to overhaul the delivery of K-12 education at the level of the locally centralized school district with the Minneapolis Public Schools as focus.
If officials at that school district were to streamline the public school bureaucracy for full focus on the delivery of a knowledge-rich education to students of all demographic descriptors, all of our precious children would have maximal opportunity for lives of cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction.
I am intent on impelling the transformation that will produce this outcome.
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