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.


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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.


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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.