Advanced Draft Ready for New Book, >Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect<

As I conveyed to members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education at their monthly meeting last evening (15 November 2016), I have completed an advanced draft for a new book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

At present, this book runs to 314 pages in the single-spaced with space between paragraphs style familiar to you subscribers to my academic journal, Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.  If I were to go to press with this amount of material, the book would run about 500 pages in the format used by publishers of my other eight books.


For about two more months I will be gathering additional material and honing the text for maximum comprehensiveness and effectiveness.  The book is organized into three parts, each with about five chapters for a total of approximately fifteen chapters.  The major parts are as follows:


Part One            Bureaucratic Organization


Part Two            Critical Analysis and Evaluation of the Minneapolis Public Schools


Part Three         Philosophical Underpinnings for Excellent Education at the Minneapolis
                            Public Schools 


Part One features a minutely thorough, objective presentation of the organizational structure of the Minneapolis Public Schools, department by department, office by office, and with abundant attention to documents such as the Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan, Educational Equity Framework, District Report Card (emphasizing MCA [Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment]results), and the MMR (Multiple Measurement Rating), a system that includes measures of student progress along with status as to grade level performance. I discuss key personnel, including those at the upper echelons of leadership but also many others in less conspicuous roles whose actions have particular impact on the lives of children.  I give all of the schools of the district, principals and other administrative figures within the schools, and an account of the defining characteristics of each school.  I examine the sources of funding for the Minneapolis Public Schools as emanating from federal and state sources, as well as from levy referenda.  And I give an account of budgetary allocations made on the basis of this funding and the propensities of decision-makers.


Part Two features a critical examination of all major aspects of the Minneapolis Public Schools, with particular attention to the Office of Academic Affairs, the Department of Teaching and Learning, the Department of College and Career Readiness, the Office of Black Male Achievement, and the Department of Indian Education that bear most heavily on the academic program delivered to students.


Part Three features a very full exposition of my own philosophical convictions pertinent to K-12 education, a vigorous assertion of the importance of knowledge-intensive K-12 education, and the transformation that must be accomplished in order to advance my five-point program emphasizing curriculum, teacher training, coherent and well-articulated remedial instruction, outreach to our most challenged students and their families, and bureaucratic paring.


Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect all of a sudden began to fall into place on the basis of my investigation into the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools over the course of the last 28 months---  and my 45 years of experience working with urban youth, 25 of those years in North Minneapolis.


This book, then, will appear about the same time as my Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education (with eleven of fourteen chapters already complete), snippets from which appear at many entries on this blog.  These two books are very much in thematic synchrony:  Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect  examines the delivery system of K-12 Education as it is;  Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education offers a complete set of 14 compact courses that give the essence of the quality of education that all high school and university graduates should want to have.


As always, readers of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota will get a chance to read chapters of these books in advance and will eventually receive free copies of the completed works.  Readers of the blog will be able to continue to read snippets from the chapters of both books.


Then, as these books go to press, readers across Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota, and throughout the many places of the world that my blog now reaches, will receive a powerful message for K-12 transformation, considering all the while how we can make of our nation the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.