Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Superintendent Ed Graff and the MPS Board of Education are about to make a wasteful trip to Chicago at a time when our students are deprived of a knowledge-intensive education and when the MPS budget is at $28 million.
Consider the following to understand precisely why this trip is ethically askew:
Over the last four decades, many pedagogical emphases of the moment have emanated from departments, colleges, and schools of education. These programs include group learning, inquiry learning, service learning, and experiential learning.
Consider the following to understand precisely why this trip is ethically askew:
Over the last four decades, many pedagogical emphases of the moment have emanated from departments, colleges, and schools of education. These programs include group learning, inquiry learning, service learning, and experiential learning.
None of these pedagogies include the supposition that a well-established body of knowledge is necessary to guide group work on a topic, to inform the inquiry, to give and get benefit from service rendered, or to maximize value for the student’s experience. None of these pedagogies seek to add to an incrementally accumulated body of knowledge. None of these pedagogies seek directly to impart the full array of skills that will allow students to demonstrate grade level performance in reading and math.
Such approaches to K-12 education have had disastrous consequences for students in the locally centralized school districts of the United States, including our salient representative of the Minneapolis Public Schools. Among the many important components of the human cultural legacy that my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative lack when they first seek instruction in my program of total academic support are the following:
>>>>> any understanding of the 13.8 billion-year age of the universe or the 4.5 billion-year age of planet earth
>>>>> the importance and defining characteristics of the East African hominids Australopithecus, homo habilis, and homo erectus--- and how these hominids both differed from and are linked in evolutionary sequence to homo sapiens
>>>>> the similarities and differences among the First Peoples of Australia, Asia, and the Americas
>>>>> within upper North America, the differences and similarities among such First Nations (Native Americans, American Indian) groups as the Aleut, Cheyenne, Hopi, Inuit, Delaware, Iroquois, or Seminole
>>>>> the anthropological distinction between culture and civilization; examples of the first of both
>>>>> the importance of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and of such luminaries as Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato; and Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Justinian
>>>>> the importance of the lives of Confucius, Laozi, Siddhartha Gautama, Muhammad, Abraham, and Jesus (the latter, even among Christian students, when the reference is to historical context and teachings by comparison with great figures of other belief systems)
>>>>> distinction between Roman Catholics and Protestants; and Shi’ites and Sunnis
>>>>> key scientific contributions of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein
>>>>> differences among the psychologists Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Abraham Maslow
>>>>> any notion of GDP, fiscal policy, monetary policy, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes
>>>>> electoral college, strict constructionist versus liberal interpretations of the Constitution, the various meanings of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism and--- I kid you not--- even capitalism and democracy
>>>>> ability to identify how century configurations work (14th century [1301-1400] as essentially the 1300s rather than 1400s, 19th century [1801-1900] as essentially the 1800s rather than the 1900s)
>>>>> West African empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhai
>>>>> African slave-trading nations of Ashanti and the Dajomey; key European slave trading nations; Middle Passage
>>>>> 13th, 14th , and 15th Amendments to the U. S. Constitution; Compromise of 1877, Plessy v. Ferguson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall , Brown v. Board of Education, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
>>>>> differences among comets, asteroids, planets
>>>>> neurons, synapses, central nervous system, hippocampus, corpus callosum, cerebellum, cerebral cortex
And so it goes.
Our students are knowledge-deprived.
Not only do they not get a knowledge-intensive education that prepares them for lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction, large swaths of our students of color and students on free and reduced price lunch do not even get the intensive skill instruction and outreach to families necessary for them to record grade level performances in mathematics and reading.
In 2016 fewer than 20% of American Indian and African American males in the Minneapolis Public Schools recorded grade level performance in mathematics and reading; fewer than 28% of all African American, American Indian, and Hispanic students demonstrated grade level performance in either of those key skills.
………………………………………………………………….
Given this abysmal academic performance; and a budget deficit of $28 million that will necessitate 12.5% in combined central office and site-based budget cuts; the looming trip is for Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Superintendent Ed Graff and the MPS Board of Education is an abomination.
Consider the following itinerary:
2017 Education Idea Exchange Chicago, Illinois
Sunday, March 19th
12:30 p.m. Travel from Minneapolis to Chicago
5:30 p.m. National Museum of Mexican Art
—dinner presentation
Monday, March 20th
7:30 a.m. Gleacher Center
Univ. of Chicago Urban Education
Institute (UEI) panel discussion
CASEL/Chicago Public Schools
panel discussion
12:30 p.m. UEI selected school tours
6:00 p.m. Dinner, remarks from CEO of
The Chicago Community Trust
Tuesday, March 21st
7:30 Breakfast, remarks former
U.S. Education Secretary
8:30 CASEL school tours
12:00 p.m. Lunch debriefing
1:30 p.m. Travel from Chicago to
Minneapolis
The organization CASEL is in elongated form the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, a body that advocates “social and emotional learning” upon the notion that a student who possesses firm self-esteem and respect for other human beings will be well-prepared to succeed in academics.
The trip to Chicago is motivated by Graff’s emphasis on “social and emotional learning” as his main new contribution to academic programing and teacher professional development at the Minneapolis Public Schools. This is really just a retread of the education professor notion of “constructivism,” which holds that curriculum should build on the individual experiences of each student. According to this dogma, an established body of sequentially acquired knowledge is not necessary.
Don’t be fooled by facile reasoning rooted in the approaches of education professors.
Understand that Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann still call from their graves that a successful democracy must be founded on citizens who share common knowledge.
Read the speeches of African American titans Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Martin Luther King, and you’ll discern that they knew that knowledge is power; their exercise of the kind of citizenship envisioned by Jefferson and Mann enabled them to overcome great obstacles to create a pathway toward freedom.
The “progressive” and “constructivist” disregard for commonly shared knowledge has had very unprogressive and unconstructive consequences for our students.
They have had deleterious effects on you. They have given us a United States president whose political trump was a fearful and ignorant electorate.
You should ask hard questions about the Graff and school board trip to Chicago and voluminously voice your vexation concerning the vapidity of social and emotional learning as the prime curricular and pedagogical emphasis of Graff.
Then you should join me in advocating for the knowledge-intensive education that conveys the fullness of the human legacy to all of our precious students, of all demographic descriptors.
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