In the days, weeks, and months to come, I will be advocating even more persistently that all members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education and members of the public become intensely familiar with the vital matters of curriculum and teacher quality.
As I will soon be fully revealing in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect, the nature of the training that prospective superintendents, academic officers, and teachers receive in departments, schools, and colleges of education is so abysmal and follows such a misguided philosophy of education that others from outside this strange universe are going to have to become more engaged. Members of the school board and members of the public are going to have to pressure educators to study such approaches as the Core Knowledge curriculum of E. D. Hirsch for the design and implementation of an incrementally sequenced, grade-by-grade knowledge-intensive K-12 education.
Hirsch’s curriculum is most fully developed for students in grade pre-kindergarten through grade 6; the Core Knowledge Foundation also provides curriculum for grade 7 and grade 8. In my other nearly complete book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, I provide such a knowledge-intensive curriculum to upper level high school students, university students, and intellectually ambitious adults.
My regular readers have seen many articles posted on this blog concerning the ineptitude of those at the Minneapolis Public Schools making academic decisions, those pertinent to the very most important matters of curriculum and teacher quality. Readers of my academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, launched in July 2014) have read even longer analytical articles on the subject. I recently addressed relevant issues in an opinion piece for the Star Tribune (Saturday, 28 January 2017, “Some Educators Promote a Badly Flawed Ideology").
And I have addressed this issue many times in my Public Comments at the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
We are accustomed to observing at least minimal competence in most professionals from the spheres of medicine and law. We would like to think that professionals in the sphere of education have something approaching that level of competence. But they do not. Thus it is that members of the Board of Education and the general public put a faith in staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools who are not now positioned by the nature of their misguided training to fulfill.
Very notably at the Minneapolis Public Schools, staff members who are responsible for nonacademic matters, people such as Jennifer Lindquist and Jesse Winkler who provide professional support to the school board; Department of Communications Executive Director Gail Plewacki; the superlatively talented Eric Moore (Chief of Research, Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability); and the brilliant Chief Financial Officer Ibrahima Diop; who are trained in fields other than those in that strange world of education professors; are immensely more competent than are staff such as Superintendent Ed Graff, Deputy Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin, and Department of Teaching and Learning Executive Director Macarre Traynham, all of whom have been trained by education professors.
Spotlighting this problem of staff quality at the Minneapolis Public Schools with regard to those making decisions on the central matters of curriculum and teacher development will be a tough task and require reams of courage.
Citizens must educate themselves on these issues and then take action.
The same is true in confronting the fact that too many mediocre teachers inhabit the classrooms of this and most other school districts.
But being specific as to the problems faced and acting in ways to impel change toward upgrading curriculum and teacher quality in our public schools represent the paramount task in transforming K-12 education at this stage of the Civil Rights Movement .
And only by promoting truly excellent K-12 education for all of our precious young people can we become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
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