If Change is to Come in K-12 Education, You Must Have the Courage to Act: An Introduction to a Multi-Article Series on the Ineffective Personnel and Programs of the Minneapolis Public Schools

If we hope to transform our K-12 systems so as to deliver an education of excellence to all of our precious children, we must first understand the need for transformation and what needs to change.


That is to convey, we must first get the fundamental principles right.


We must first comprehend the reality that no one is right when almost everybody’s wrong.


First, those who inhabit the halls of our locally centralized school districts are wrong. They do not grasp the need for fundamental change, but as cover from attacks all around they are forever engaging in diversionary tactics. In the Minneapolis Public Schools the production of such diversion has taken the forms of the 2020 Acceleration Plan (mere goal-setting parading as a program for change), the Educational Equity Framework (a pretension to care about equity, deceptive surrogate for providing excellent education as the only real vehicle for equity), and Community Partnership Schools (pseudo-charter schools to which are lofted metaphorical “Hail Mary” passes to staff at local school sites, in the hopes that someone can get this thing called education right).


Second, most of those calling for change are wrong as to the most important features of the needed K-12 Revolution. Michelle Rhee’s seemingly promising StudentsFirst organization is effectively moribund, having withered on a vine that tried to grow into state capitals on the misguided conviction that change at that level could foment the needed revolution. This observation holds, too, for such weak reform efforts represented by 50CAN, of which our state’s MinnCAN iteration is a part. This will most likely be true now of Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice. The leaders of such organizations have erroneously gone forth on the assumption that efforts at the state level most importantly entails advocacy for changing teacher tenure laws, the institution of teacher evaluations, the opening of pathways to alternative teacher certification, the promotion of charter schools as alternatives to failing school districts, and vouchers extended upon the same principle of school choice.


No one is right as to the fundamentals in either the education establishment or those seeking change.


As I have detailed in many articles on this blog, we must first understand that excellent education is a a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive curriculum in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts to all students; and that an excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge, with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.


With those definitions firmly guiding our pathway to excellence, we must redesign curriculum in grade by grade sequence for the provision of clearly specified knowledge and skill sets; retrain our current teachers for the delivery of such knowledge-intensive curriculum; provide aggressive remedial instruction (tutoring) in a highly intentional and cohesive manner; prioritize outreach to families of impoverished students, variously providing direct services or connecting them to resources for addressing their most critical problems; and greatly streamline the prevailing central school district bureaucracy so as to marshal resources for the first four prioritized items given above in this paragraph.


By doing these things we circumvent the ever ephemeral policy shifts at the state and national levels, moving forward so as to achieve change at the level of the locally centralized school district, where our mantra of local control can become reality rather than shibboleth.


If we are to achieve the five-point program that I have summarized above and detailed in many articles on this blog, we must emphasize hard work over proclamation.


We must focus on those people and those programs that are currently disserving our students and vitiating our societal present and future.


In the Minneapolis Public Schools we must begin by examining the performances of Ed Graff, Susanne Griffin, Michael Thomas, Stephen Flisk, Macarre Traynham, Tina Platt, Terry Henry, Michael Walker, and Anna Ross--- and the departments and bureaucratic sinecures that they represent.


As a foreshadowing of my book, now at advanced draft stage, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect --- I detail in the following multi-article series as you scroll down on this blog the individuals and the programs that must change or be jettisoned.


Please pay attention and go forth to act.


You cannot depend on the most high-profile education reformers to do this work for you.


If change is to come in K-12 education, you must have the courage to act.