Update on My Two Nearly-Complete Books, Revealing the Inner Workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools; and Providing a Comprehensive Liberal Arts Curriculum for Students and Intellectually Engaged Adults

I am now continuing to move ever closer toward completion of a final draft for one of my two new books, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

 

The other book is a one-volume complete curriculum for advanced high school students, university students, and intellectually ambitious adults seeking to learn for the first time, review, or extend what they learned, should have learned, or want to learn pertinent to subject area information from a high school and college or university experience.  I had completed eleven of fourteen chapters of this book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, when I set it aside for a time to assemble the mass of information that I had been accumulating for the book on the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS).

 

I am in the process of scheduling a final round of interviews and conducting site visits as I assemble the last components of Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.  Questions that I have posed to MPS personnel are important, both for the responses I get and what lack of response will say about those people who make no or insufficient responses.

 

As you scroll on down this blog, you will find snippets from this book on the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Lately these have especially concerned certain questions that I have posed to MPS staff members at the Davis Center (central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools, 1250 West Broadway).  You will also find snippets from the other book, pertinent to key subject areas in the complete liberal arts curriculum.

 

I can anticipate with little difficulty that many of the staff members at the Davis Center are at a loss as to how to respond to my questions, because they have never given thought of any depth to the matters of philosophic importance that I pose.  I want to give them the chance to defy my expectations, but in the absence of such a response, I will be free to interpret their lack of response for what such a pose conveys about their inadequacy to the task at hand.

 

I have also collected enormous amounts of data and am anticipating responses from a final round of requests for MPS information that as a matter of law are in the public domain.  These include, for example, questions that I have tendered to Terry Henry at the Department of College and Career Readiness concerning numerical student participation in programs such as AVID, Check and Connect, GEAR UP, JAG, We Want You Back, and Project Lead the Way;  and questions that I have directed to Scott Weber at MPS Human Resources, similar to those that he has answered many times before, concerning current staff list, by position and salary, at the Davis Center of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

I intend to hand the completed manuscript for Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect to a publisher no later than 1 April 2017.  This will be a major reference work for the community of people served by the Minneapolis Public Schools, and as a seminal study of the inner workings of a locally centralized school district.

 

Once this book is complete, I will take the next two or three months to complete the three remaining chapters for my fourteen-chapter Fundamentals of An Excellent Liberal Arts Education

 

With these two books complete, I will have an even more solid foundation for waging my campaign for the transformation of the Minneapolis Public Schools into a model for all locally centralized school districts---  so that our nation can achieve in reality the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.