A few months
back, then Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin (she has since been demoted
to Deputy Chief Academic Officer) brought in Macarre Traynham to serve as
executive director of the Department of Teaching and Learning. Traynham’s putative expertise is in the area
of Culturally Responsive Teaching.
Culturally
responsive teaching is a practice that either a hippy-dippy liberal or a ground-based
practical revolutionary if the Saul Alinsky type could appreciate. But a capitalized Culturally Responsive
Teaching as education professor mantra so appealing to hippy-dippy liberals dims
in luster when held under the revelatory light of the ground-based
revolutionary activist.
Culturally
Responsive Teaching represents the idea that teachers should be sensitive to
the particular cultures and ethnicities in their classrooms and emphasize
curriculum that resonates with students’ cultural and ethnic contexts. The driving force behind such a curriculum is
the cultural orientation of the students;
the broader aims of a knowledge-intensive liberal arts curriculum are secondary
matters with such an approach, if indeed they matter at all.
By contrast,
culturally responsive curriculum is embedded in the Core Knowledge approach of
E. D. Hirsch; this University of
Virginia-based professor has superintended the development of a logically
sequenced, grade by grade curriculum detailed from prekindergarten through
grade 6, with a great deal of work having also been done for grades 7 and
8. I have continued this approach for
high school students, college students, and intellectually ambitious adults in
my nearly complete Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education. Knowledge-intensive curriculum brings the
full array of knowledge and skills sets pertinent to specific cultures and in
the aggregate to the race called human.
One can see
the delirious effects of the promotion of Culturally Responsive Teaching over
Core Knowledge at work in key departments of the Minneapolis Public Schools:
As Deputy Chief
of Academic Affairs, Susanne Griffin promotes Culturally Responsive Teaching as
having more importance than knowledge-intensive instruction. For the entire three and one-half years of
her tenure, Ms. Griffin has had the opportunity to promote Focused Instruction,
which has potential as a conduit of sequenced, grade by grade, knowledge-intensive
instruction of the kind developed most thoroughly by E. D. Hirsch and me. Bringing in a Culturally Responsive Teaching
practitioner over a Core Knowledge advocate was a telling decision on Ms. Griffin’s
part.
In meetings
with me, Macarre Traynham admitted no familiarity with Core Knowledge. This was true, too, of Christina (Tina)
Platt, who is the Project Manager for Focused Instruction and a staff member of
the department headed by Traynham; thus,
in the case of Platt, the absence of such familiarity represents specific
ignorance of the best curriculum for fulfillment of the purposes for which
Focused Instruction should be utilized.
The damage
that Traynham inflicts with her approach is manifest in her department and the MPS
offices and departments that should be working toward an education of
excellence. Despite the fact that Trayham
has a staff of about a dozen people working on curriculum at the elementary and
secondary levels, elementary curriculum lacks knowledge intensity, middle
school curriculum is underdeveloped, and at the high school level dedication to
commonly studied curriculum has given way to a “multiple pathway” approach in
which student goals and credit recovery as necessary are paramount.
At the
Office of Black Male Achievement, Michael Walker pursues an approach resonant
with Culturally Responsive Teaching. In the
context of a situation wherein fewer than 20% of African American males in the
Minneapolis Public Schools are proficient in math and reading, Walker and his
office of about 10 staff members have articulated a program emphasizing African
American culture; two and one-half years into the program only 175
of the approximately 7,000 black male students enrolled in the schools of the
district participate in Mr. Walker’s program.
A similar approach undergirds that taken by Anna Ross, Director of the
Department of Indian Education.
I have
written three books pertinent to African American history and culture, run an
academic support program that serves
African American and Hispanic students, and have street-level comfort communicating
with the most impoverished people of Minneapolis.
Take this,
then, very seriously: Our students must
have a knowledge-intensive curriculum that conveys the full richness of the
human experience, imparted by teachers capable of conveying the human legacy to
students of all demographic descriptors.
Our students
must, that is, experience culturally responsive teaching with academic substance
rather than Culturally Responsive Teaching as education professor shibboleth.
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