Understanding the Minneapolis Public
Schools: Current Condition, Future
Prospect
Introduction
Part One:
Taking Adult Responsibility for Imparting the Cultural Inheritance for Which
Students of all Demographic Descriptors Yearn
I wanted
someone else to research and to write this book.
This is the sort of endeavor that comes easily to me. My enthusiasm for research and writing produced
a doctoral dissertation, three books focused on Taiwan (Culture and Customs of Taiwan [with
Barbara Reed, 1998], A Short History of Taiwan: The
Case for Independence Taiwan [2003], and Tales from the Taiwanese [2004]);
two for the Minneapolis Urban League (The
State of African Americans in Minnesota 2004 and The State of African Americans in
Minnesota 2008); and a work on African
American history (A Concise History of African America [2004]).
But I wanted someone else first of all to wage the K-12
revolution.
I put some hope in Michelle Rhee, but her efforts to
establish her StudentsFirst initiative
as a force to counter the political clout of teachers unions foundered on
organizational flaws and misguided focus on state level governance as the locus
for effecting change.
Within Minnesota, I put some faith in Kathy Saltzman’s
activities as Rhee’s point person in the state, but her endeavors waned for the
reasons suggested with regard to the Rhee approach; and those efforts subsided altogether when Rhee pulled StudentsFirst out of Minnesota.
I was
intrigued when I learned of the education reform organization MinnCAN, but former leader Daniel
Sellars has gone on to another organization that has the same flawed agenda and
locus of action as is the case for MinnCAN
and StudentsFirst. Similarly, Crystal Brakke is long gone from
education change efforts waged as head of Teach
for America, and in any case that organization works to get astute young teachers
in the classroom, not as an agent for comprehensive change.
Scott
Gillespie and Doug Tice of the Star Tribune editorial staff affect
some interest in education change, but they ingenuously placed faith in R. T.
Rybak and gave very favorable press to his Generation
Next, which spent an outlandish amount of time (and probably donor dollars)
to conclude that students need to be reading at level of school enrollment by
Grade 3 and should have tutorial assistance if they are not. Meanwhile, Rybak, who had claimed to be a
born again believer in the importance of K-12 education after doing very little
for twelve years to establish an environment for education change, moved on to
higher pay and profile as head of the Minneapolis
Foundation.
Rybak’s most
recent and his most misguided attempt to promote an education agenda was to
facilitate Minnesota Foundation funding
for Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff, other
high-in-the-hierarchy MPS officials, and members of the Minneapolis Public
Schools Board of Education to travel to Chicago, that hotbed of education
change and quality public education (so says the Bard via the agency of the Fool),
to learn all about social and emotional learning and how to make young people
succeed academically by feeling good about themselves and treating others with
respect (even if one-third of MPS graduates will still, on the basis of the philosophical corruption endemic to the
MPS Department of Teaching and Learning, need remedial instruction when the 64%
of them who manage to gather up their diplomas-in-name-only venture forth
to college and university campuses).
Wait neither
for Betsy Hodges as Minneapolis mayor to be the education change agent that she
said she’d be; nor for Mark Dayton to be
the education governor: I told you via
many blog articles and a number of opinion pieces for the Star Tribune that these
two would not make good on their vows, could not make good on their promises
even if they so wanted, given the implausible perches (mayoral and
gubernatorial) from which they projected their promises. And now you know.
Long gone on
the Minneapolis scene is a Rybak predecessor, Sandra Vargas, at the city’s
namesake foundation, who pledged to RESET Education in Minnesota but didn’t.
And never
put any faith at all in gadflies such as Ted Kolderie, Jay Haugen, Jeff Ronneberg, Lisa Snyder, Les Fujitake, Lars
Esdal; and those putative professionals at
the Minnesota Association of School Administrators; to innovate their way to better
education: They cannot do so on the
basis of their flimsy faith in market principles in application to education of
the young--- even if they have entranced
the Bush Foundation with their mysticism.
Much
more than we need to pursue that amorphous and slippery shibboleth of innovation,
we need to cogitate, ratiocinate, and then advocate for the knowledge-intensive
education that would be the gift of adults to our young people. You’ll find no such capable adults in the aforementioned
group of facile postulators.
Having
witnessed so many would-be change agents come and go, dither and dissemble, I
have taken upon myself the duty of researching and writing this book on one of
those iterations of the locally centralized school district that must train the
teachers to implement the knowledge-intensive curriculum that adults must
bestow upon our precious young people, who have been waiting a very long time
to claim the cultural inheritance that we as a plebiscite have been too ignorant,
too intellectually vacuous, too irresolute to provide.
What
I do on a daily basis in the New Salem Educational Initiative, imparting to the
most impoverished young people and families in our city knowledge-intensive
education, dispensed with such towering heaps of love as to make those hippy-dippy
proponents of social and emotional learning blush--- I now insist that staff at the Minneapolis
Public Schools so dispense, and so love.
For those who take umbrage at my candor, brace yourselves: I am about to unleash upon you fact after fact undergirding the most damning tale that you will ever read.
Then I will offer you hope.
……………………………………………………………………………………….
No comments:
Post a Comment