Introduction to a Five-Part Series on Multi-Culpability for the State of K-12 Education in Minnesota and the United States

Public K-12 education in the United States is wretched. 

The public schools of Minnesota constitute a subset of the public schools of the United States.  The school district of the Minneapolis Public Schools is a salient representative of the locally centralized school district in a nation that extols local control.  Change in K-12 public schools must in the United States come at the level of the locally centralized school district and must include the following definitions and features.

 

An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive curriculum in the liberal, vocational, and technological arts, with grade by grade specificity to students of all demographic descriptors. 

 

An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.

 

The purpose of K-12 education is to send forth citizens who are culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied.

 

The unit of change in education must be the locally centralized school district and must proceed on the basis of an overhaul of curriculum, teacher training, academic remediation, family outreach, and the central office bureaucracy.

 

There was a time when I assumed that there were others who must be operating from such definitions, upon the principles embedded in the purpose, with an understanding of the nature of the K-12 dilemma and the ability to conduct thorough investigation into the inner workings of at least one locally centralized school district.

 

I now have no such faith.

 

For years I have observed and had conversations with good hearted philanthropists and others of the upper middle and upper classes who express interest in the public schools while sending their own children to private schools.

 

I have interacted extensively and intensively with decision-makers and personnel at colleges and universities who should but do not have a vision of excellence of education or integrity in training teachers.

 

I have read, heard, and seen the work of print, radio, and television journalists who address K-12 issues.

 

I have written books for the Minneapolis Urban League, studied the history and met local leaders of the NAACP, worked with members of the American Indian community and acquired considerable knowledge of Native American history, talked with people working to provide education to Native American youth, and considered with great care the education of students of color.

 

And I have interacted often with others who share with me the conviction that we must change K-12 education as conducted in the United States and in Minnesota.

 

But after many such interactions and having at times placed considerable hope in representatives from each of these categories, I have found all of them to lack an understanding of educational excellence and the overhaul necessary to achieve excellence, all of them culpable for the wretched state of education in the United States.

 

The articles in this series as you scroll on down this blog explain this conclusion and the nature of the culpability.   

Multi-Culpability in K-12 Education >>>>> Most Education Change Advocates (Fifth of a Five-part Series)

Next up for designation as culprits in the K-12 dilemma of the United States are most advocates for education change.

 

Sometimes these are collectively dubbed the “education change community,” but part of their culpability is that they are in no sense a community.  A community connotes people living in close proximity who share common concerns and pledge mutual support.  Those advocating education change form neither a coherent community nor are they collectively committed to an organized movement.  They are disparate players each seeking to advance their own ideas for education change.

 

In Minnesota, advocates for education change include MinnCAN, Teach for America, the Center of the American Experiment, Put Students First Minneapolis, charter school advocacy groups such as the Center for School Change, Education Evolving, and various advocates for innovation of the type advocated by Ted Kolderie during his tenure at the latter organization.  Michelle Rhee’s enormously well-funded national group, StudentsFirst, for a half-decade had a chapter led by Kathy Saltzman;  but the national organization is reeling and Minnesota was among those states wherein Rhee in the course of the last two years shut down operations.  

 

MinnCAN, led for a few years by Daniel Sellars (who previously had headed Teach for America),  advocates for state-level policy changes topically focused on alternative licensure, a role for Teach for America in the provision of classroom teachers, merit-based hiring over tenure considerations, and school choice, generally involving public school options (including charter schools, which receive public funding) rather than vouchers.  This organization seems to be struggling.  The current website is skeletal and lists no staff.

 

Teach for America (TFA) was founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 after her graduation from Princeton University.  The organization intensively trains graduates from top-tier universities over a five-week period;   TFA teachers commit to teach in challenging urban situations for a period of two years. 

Wendy Kopp still sits on the TFA board but otherwise now confines her leadership to Teach for All, an international organization that she also founded that takes a similar approach to that of Teach for America.  Kopp commands a salary of more than $400,000.  The organization is now led by Elisa Villanueva Beard.  Teach for America now sends 53,000 teachers into classrooms across the nation, but TFA has struggled to get a firm foundation in Minnesota due to the opposition of Governor Mark Dayton and other DFL politicians to whom the teachers union Education Minnesota contributes heavily.

 

The Center of the American Experiment was founded by Mitch Pearlstein, whose main mantra is, “Fix the family or no reform effort will be possible.”  Otherwise, officials at the Center for American Experiment argue for school choice, with a heavy emphasis on vouchers.

 

Put Students First Minneapolis is a very informal organization that is mainly the effort of Lynnell Mickelson.   Mickelson keeps careful track of Minneapolis Federation of Teacher contract negotiations and data pertinent to education in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) and the state of Minnesota.  She makes occasional appearances at meetings of the MPS Board of Education to offer her insights into issues of teacher quality, superintendent selection, and other matters.

 

The Center for School Change came into being as an effort on the part of Joe Nathan, who was heavily involved in getting the system for initiating, certifying, evaluating, and increasing the number of charter schools in the state of Minnesota, helping to make Minnesota the first state to approve charter schools in the early 1990s.

 

Education Evolving, Kolderie, and the innovation crowd place much faith on freedom to innovate and assume that innovation will result in better approaches to K-12 education.  Kolderie and his acolytes oppose universal standards, standardized testing, and the prevailing model of grade level categorization---  advocating for a more individualized, technology-driven model of education.

 

None of these education change advocates address the problems that have resulted in the wretched education as delivered by locally centralized school districts:

 

MinnCAN and StudentsFirst (when the latter operated in Minnesota) have placed a misguided faith in change at the state level;  neither has any ongoing presence at the Minneapolis Public Schools or other iterations of the locally centralized school district, where the vital changes must be made.

 

Teach for America has had considerable success nationwide but has limited presence in Minnesota;  TFA addresses only the problem of teacher quality and has nothing to offer on matters of curriculum, family outreach, or central office bureaucratic paring.  

 

The Center of the American Experiment values private over public schools, accordingly favoring vouchers, while harboring doubts that economically challenged students can succeed until we somehow create well-functioning families.

 

Put Students First Minneapolis has an admiral advocate in Lynnell Mickelsen, but her efforts are limited and focused primarily on teacher quality.

 

The Center for School Change has been most effective in creating and sustaining the charter school concept in Minnesota.

 

Education Evolving and other innovation advocates places outsized faith that many people trying an array of approaches, preferably incorporating individualized instruction and technology, will bring greater success to students;  knowledge and skill bases resulting from such approaches are likely to be limited and very difficult to measure.

 

………………………………………………………………………….

 

An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive curriculum in the liberal, vocational, and technological arts, with grade by grade specificity to students of all demographic descriptors. 

 

An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.

 

The three major purposes of K-12 education are to send forth citizens who are culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied.

 

The unit of change in education must be the locally centralized school district and must proceed on the basis of an overhaul of curriculum, teacher training, academic remediation, family outreach, and reduction of the central office bureaucracy.

 

None of the most active advocates for education change discussed above include these definitions and programmatic features as matters of focus.  They do not even offer their own definitions and are vague as to their programmatic vision.  They do not investigate the specific programs, the personnel, or the guiding philosophy of the Minneapolis Public Schools or any other central school district

 

Thus, the efforts of education change advocates as saliently represented by those discussed in this article offer inadequate direction for the overhaul of K-12 education that we must have so as to serve all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.

 

And they are therefore culpable for the wretched quality of education in the K-12 public schools of Minnesota and across the United States.   

 

Multi-Culpability in K-12 Education >>>>> The Complicity of the Minneapolis Urban League, NAACP, American Indian Movement (AIM), Tribal Organizations, and Other Representatives of Groups Particularly Affected by the Wretched Quality of K-12 Education (Fourth in a Series)

Thus far in this series I have exposed the culpability of major societal entities that are complicit in the lousy quality of K-12 education in the United States.  These include members of the upper middle and wealthy classes such as those who live in the neighborhood north of West Franklin and South Girard in the Lowry Hill area of Minneapolis;  administrators, professors, and teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities;  and the print, radio, television, and internet media.

 

In this article I shake things up a bit more by exposing the culpability of those who make their livelihood at, and in many cases receive great remuneration for inhabiting the offices of, entities such as the NAACP, the (National and Minneapolis) Urban League, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Native American tribal organizations, and other groups affected by the wretched quality of K-12 education in the United States. 

 

The former two organizations came into being in 1910, during the worst post-slavery period of United States history for African Americans, the Jim Crow era of deprived citizenship and horrific lynching scenarios numbering over two thousand.  The NAACP was formed by leaders of the Niagara Movement, including W. E. B.  Dubois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and St. Paul’s own Frederick McGee;  these leaders embraced the “talented tenth” ideas of Dubois whereby an intellectual elite of African Americans would advocate for full citizenship rights for African  Americans, in contradistinction to the vocation-first, citizenship-later approach of Booker T. Washington.  The heyday of the NAACP was during  the first half of the 20^th century, a time when highly adroit strategizing first achieved successes such as the desegregation lawsuit that brought the first African Americans to the University of Missouri by beating advocates of “separate but equal” at their own game;  then Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP attorneys went on to attain greatest success in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case that aimed directly and adroitly at the “separate but equal” doctrine, overturning the constitutional corruption that undergirded the lamentable Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case.

 

The NAACP has never again achieved that level of success.

 

The National Urban League came into being as an advocate for African American labor, those who trekked to urban centers at trail’s end of the Great Northern Migration during that same first half of the 20^th century.  In the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis Urban League affiliate was from 1948 and through the 1950s led by Cecil Newman, the founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman (now Spokesman Recorder from the originally separate Minneapolis Spokesman and St. Paul Recorder).  Newman joined Nellie Stone Johnson and other African American activists to achieve major advancements in employment housing, and education.

 

But this, too, was the halcyon period for the Minneapolis Urban League as a catalyst for change.

 

The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in 1968 In Minneapolis, led by Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, and Vernon Bellecourt, with  participation also from George Mitchell, George Mellessey, Herb Powless, Harold Goodsky, and Eddie Benton-Banai.  Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota, was an early leader in 1970s protests, including the standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973.  The American Indian Movement was successful in ending the 1950s era of termination, during which the federal government ceased to recognize Native American tribes as legal entities and withdrew from responsibility for the health, education, and welfare of Native American people.  The American Indian Movement was via dramatic occupations and protests able to reverse that policy, asserting the legal status of American Indian tribes, seeking and often securing recovery of treaty rights and lost land, acting to promote Native American culture, and pursuing a policy that asserted great independence for Native American people living on reservations while also demanding health, education, and economic development services from the United States federal government.

 

But the most vigorous assertion of basic principles by AIM came in the 1970s.

 

Past that decade, the leaders of AIM have continued to notch successes with regard to land rights, and they have effectively applied pressure for the creation and implementation of federal government programs addressing health and welfare issues.  But conditions on many reservations sustain a culture of drug use, alcoholism, violence, poverty, and low educational attainment.  There has been little clear thinking on matters pertinent to K-12 education:  While there is greater presence of Native American culture in the curriculum, achievement in reading, mathematics, and subject areas across the liberal, vocational, and technological arts has languished.

 

Leaders of the Minneapolis Urban League, the NAACP, AIM, and the Native American tribes have offered little that would address the achievement of their constituencies in either tribal reservation or public school settings:

 

The leadership of the Minneapolis Urban League has failed miserably in that organization’s own schools to provide alternative educational experiences of acceptable academic quality.  The NAACP has gone to court to secure the right of African American and other students of color to attend suburban schools when achievement levels at urban schools are inevitably low.  American Indians have been successful in gaining greater recognition for Native American culture in the curriculum.

 

But none of these actions have had enough impact to successfully address student achievement.

 

Leaders of these organizations have been just as desultory in defining the meaning and purpose of K-12 education as have other culpable parties in our K-12 dilemma.

 

Thus are entities such as the NAACP, the (National and Minneapolis) Urban League, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Native American tribal organizations, and other groups representing the constituencies of these organizations deeply complicit in the system that produces such wretched quality of K-12 education in the United States. 

Multi-Culpability in K-12 Education >>>>> Print, Radio, and Television Journalists (Third in a Series)

Included in the complicit multitude, culpable for the state of K-12 education in the United States, are journalists working in print, aural, or visual media.

 

In Minnesota, this includes those working at the Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Minneapolis Public Radio (MPR), and various local television stations.  The complicity includes major personalities such as MPR’s Keri Miller and Tom Weber.  Nationally, culprits churn out facile reports for publications and venues as august as the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the various news shows of national network television. 

 

What journalists have in common is a propensity to let the education establishment and high-profile figures wag them like a dog wags its tail.  Very little attention is given to independent voices, except as conveniently packaged by the big-splash personality, as was the case for a while with Michelle Rhee, who purported to be taking her reformist zeal displayed during four years as Chancellor of Washington, D. C. public schools into the formation of the now effectively moribund StudentsFirst.

 

On the local level, one rarely observes large amounts of print space or much on-air play given to leaders of organizations such as MinnCAN , Teach for America, or the smaller reform and dissident groups and individuals who show up with varying degrees of frequency to articulate viewpoints at school board meetings.  Even a well-funded and locally influential organization such as the Minneapolis Foundation got little notice for the RESET Education campaign waged under the leadership of former president/ CEO Sandy Vargas a few years back.  Vargas did get one article published on the back page of the Business Section of the Star Tribune, but over the course of a four-lecture series that included rhythm and blues heart-throb singer John Legend (who financially supports a network of charter schools for economically challenged young people in New York) not a single story pertinent to RESET events ran in the  Star Tribune.

 

In the case of decision-makers at the Star Tribune in response to the Vargas-led effort, the snub was notable given their enthusiasm for R. T. Rybak and his erstwhile leadership at Generation Next, a well-funded organization that took two years to make the astonishing recommendations that children should be reading by the age of three and that well-directed tutoring helps.  Rybak is one of those types to whom journalists gravitate for their name recognition and often self-cultivated reputation as the go-to reformer.  In Rybak’s case, the enthusiasm on the part of Star Tribune editors for his potential as an education advocate was either cynical or ingenuous:   After twelve years as mayor, Rybak expressed regret that he had not committed more energy to education issues, vowing to redress that neglect as head of Generation Next;  he is now, with multiple ironies, serving in the higher profile and better paid position formerly occupied by Vargas at the Minneapolis Foundation.

 

A similar phenomenon may be witnessed in the case of Diane Ravitch, who gets a lot of play as the go-to education commentator at the national level.  If one carefully examines her 180-degree transformation in the course of the first decade of the new millennium, though, symbolized in her books Left Back and Reign of Error, the examiner becomes witness to a vacillating prevaricator seemingly willing to assume the position of those who currently sign her paycheck or provide backing for her campaign to stay in public profile.  Time after time, otherwise adept journalists and moderators such as NPR The Takeaway host John Hockenberry fall for the Ravitch ruse, turning to her views on education, whether she is posing as No Child Left Behind program advocate while serving in the George W. Bush administration or denigrator of standardized testing now under the sway of the National Education Association (NEA). 

 

In the Twin Cities, decision-makers at the Star Tribune are deeply capable for the space that they give to the latest news to emanate from establishment leadership at the public schools of Minneapolis and St. Paul while failing to probe very deeply into the miscues of such leadership, whether yet another failed effort on the part of a superintendent or the foibles of the latest iteration of a school board bought and paid for by local teachers unions (Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, St. Paul Federation of Teachers, both tied to Education Minnesota, the state hybrid organization affiliated with both the NEA and the AFT [American Federation of Teachers]).   At the Star Tribune, education beat reporters such as Steve Brandt and Alejandra Matos come and go as mouthpieces for the education establishment before yielding to another dog-wagged tail (now Beena Raghavendran) presenting the latest flash from the ever-failing Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

The real problems that vex our public schools are found in the nature of teacher training and the approach to curriculum that begin with education professors and then become manifest in the approaches and programs of the teachers and administrators whom these incompetents produce.  The incompetence thereby is transmitted as policy and program in districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools, whose leaders are as ineffective as they are politically well-entrenched.

 
But root causes that vex public education get short shrift in Star Tribune reporting.

The propensity to let the education establishment dog wag them like a tail makes journalists among the gravest culprits in the travesty that is the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized schools districts.  Journalistic complicity, whether willing or naive,  keeps our precious young people waiting every day that their eager young feet hit the ground, in quest of an education of excellence ever sought, never received.

Beyond West Franklin and South Girard >>>>> Multi-Culpability for the Wretched Quality of K-12 Education in the United States: Administrators, Professors, and Office Personnel at Colleges and Universities (Second in a Series)

As you scroll on down this blog, you will see in the immediately succeeding article my indictment of the upper middle and wealthy classes in the United States for the major part they play in the maintenance of the wretched quality of K-12 education.  As a salient example, I especially expose the role played by people who live north of the junction of West Franklin and South Girard in the toney Lowry Hill area of Minneapolis.

 

But these folks are just one type of culprit for the state of public education in the United States.  Included in the complicit multitude are administrators, professors, and office personnel in colleges and universities across the nation.

 

In Minnesota this means all such institutions, with the various campuses of the University of Minnesota and those of Hamline, Augsburg,  St. Catherine’s,  and St. Thomas playing especially prominent roles.

 

These institutions all have teacher preparation programs that mock their very name, for they send forth teachers into the locally centralized school districts of our state of Minnesota (and others) who are woefully unprepared for the sacred responsibility to educate our precious young people.  In general, these unchallenging programs, especially those that result in certification for K-5 teachers, attract the least capable students on campus, are taught by professors held in the least esteem, and inflict on our public school students teachers with ethically negligent skill and knowledge sets. 

 

Those aspiring to teach at the grades 6-8 and 9-12 levels are usually a bit more academically astute, because according to the regulations that abide at many post-secondary institutions they must earn a degree in a field-specific subject area.  In some institutions, though, grades 6-8 and 9-12 teacher aspirants may slog their way through to a degree in non-fields such as Social Studies Education, Science Education, Mathematics Education, and the like, without acquiring much knowledge in the fields of history, government, economics, psychology, mathematics, biology, chemistry, or physics. 

 

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, is especially culpable in this academic parody by requiring that teacher aspirants waste another year beyond the four years expended in the undergraduate charade by purchasing with their own or some benefactor’s money a knowledge-deficient master’s degree.  This brings in reams of revenue for the university, maintains sinecures for personnel in the College of Education and Human Development, and for the graduate justifies the expenditure with entrance at a higher position on the step and lane system that remunerates teachers for the number of years that they drag their knowledge-poor brains into the classroom and the amount of university-based education (or crude approximation thereof) they have acquired in this debased systemic ruse.

 

Knowing that teacher training programs are cash cows, administrators keep the funds rolling in that help mightily to pay for their own six-figure incomes.  In doing so, they play their own highly significant role in sustaining the wretched K-12 system in the United States.  They either do not care or do not understand the meaning of excellence in education.  The latter is entirely possible, for graduates from colleges and universities in the United States are also knowledge-deficient, graduating with perhaps enough information flowing along their neural pathways to ply a trade or practice a profession but having little broad or deep knowledge in history, government, economics, psychology, literature, English usage, the fine arts, mathematics, or natural science.

Thus do we pay for citizen knowledge-deficiency with presidential ignoramuses, congressional incompetents, and civic incompetence.

 

Professors in all fields at these colleges and universities are also deeply culpable for the state of K-12 education.   They typically complain about the knowledge sets that students bring to their introductory courses, but they themselves do not think very deeply about K-12 education, are hard-pressed to define an excellent education, have murky notions about the purpose of education, and superciliously consider themselves superior to those to whom they refer pejoratively as “school teachers.”

 

Office personnel at colleges and universities typically cling to their jobs while doing their own part in maintaining the wretched system of K-12 education, as well as the inadequate education rendered by these post-secondary institutions for which they toil.  In so doing, they are similar to people in many quarters of the United States who sustain insidious systems for need of a job or laziness in seeking or creating more meaningful work.

 

Administrators, professors, and office personnel in colleges and universities across the nation are among the many culprits responsible for the state of public education in the United States.  Recognition of such culprits is essential for anyone aspiring to overhaul any locally centralized school district, the unit of change in a nation that extols local control.

 

For a discussion of the other major culprits, be alert to forthcoming articles posted on this blog---  and do be sure that you have read the immediately following article in which I indict the upper middle and wealthy classes in the United States for the major part they play in the maintenance of the wretched quality of K-12 education and cite the salient example of people who live north of the junction of West Franklin and South Girard in the toney Lowry Hill area of Minneapolis.

The Crisis of Conscience at West Franklin and South Girard >>>>> The Comfortably Complicit Culpability of the Upper Middle and Wealthy Classes for the State of K-12 Education

North of the junction of West Franklin and South Girard in the toney Lowry Hill area of Minneapolis, there resides a neighborhood of good-hearted hippy-dippy liberals who live with a gnawing crisis of conscience in their comfortably complicit culpability for the state of K-12 education.

 

In this neighborhood there resides one of the foremost bundlers of donations in Minnesota, those people capable of getting on the phone and raising money in an instant for any cause deemed worthy.  Nearby lives the beneficiary of a large family inheritance who is known for promoting numerous worthy causes, most especially those pertinent to climate change. 

 

And so it goes along this stretch of South Girard north of West Franklin, with many personal and familial stories different in detail, similar in theme. 

 

Some of these people send their children to those public schools of Minneapolis that yield the best test scores and ultimately send the most students to college;  the schools are no better than those on the Northside, and in many cases not as good as Patrick Henry Senior High School in far North Minneapolis, but the demographic indicators accurately predict better MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment) and ACT scores;  despite serving the poorest students no better than do the more challenged schools of the Northside, these schools of Lowry Hill and Linden Hills get the reputation for better academic results.  Such schools are adequate for the aspirations of the upper middle class and wealthy classes, providing some foundation upon which training under private tutors or around the dinner table of university graduate parentage can produce those results likely to abet attendance at first-tier colleges and universities.  

 

But many of these people residing in the neighborhood north of the West Franklin-South Girard junction pay lip service in support of the public schools while sending their children to the private schools Blake, Breck, and St. Paul Academy.  Many of these people are good hippy-dippy liberals who voted for Betsy  

Hodges or her opponent Mark Andrew in the last mayoral election, who dutifully send Mark Dayton and DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) members to important political positions, and as strong supporters of Education Minnesota and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers fancy themselves advocates for public education.

 

Thus do those near West Franklin and South Girard manifest their shallow understanding of K-12 education:

 

The DFL and the national Democratic Party are no better than the Republican Party on issues of public education.  Democrats are bought and paid for by teachers’ unions and the Republicans place a forlorn faith in local control and school choice.  Neither Democrats nor Republicans tackle---  and may not have the wit to tackle---  the core problems vexing public education:  abominable teacher training, an abased education professor ideology, and the resulting knowledge-poor curriculum and mediocre teacher quality.

 

Yet on the upper middle classes surge with their hippy-dippy liberal lives, voting for progressive candidates, raising funds for good causes, mugging for photo shots at socialite fundraisers, doing the occasional stint in a food line, or even going off to New Orleans, Haiti, or Central America as two-week saviors of the masses---  all while maintaining their fondness for imposing homes and a plethora of material trinkets.

 

So it is that they continue sending their children to private schools and hiring private tutors while professing support for public education, posing as defenders of the teaching establishment, and dutifully voting for those liberal Democrats who are better (from my perspective as a leftist revolutionary) on most issues than Republicans.  But with each vote for a DFL candidate, each production of a governor such as Dayton, for every instance of faith placed in the frivolous promises of a Betsy Hodges, each hope that R. T. Rybak will do what he never did as mayor, the scions of the upper middle and wealthy classes demonstrate their cluelessness on K-12 issues.

 

Scions of the upper middle and wealthy classes have absolutely no experience with what it means to awake to shots in the night, police and fire trucks racing nightly down one’s residential street, the need to constantly dodge creditors, the imperative to seek constantly for cheaper housing, the thin line between survival and doom, the forces of history that have carved out the urban ghetto.

 

There are many culprits who are complicit in maintaining the state of public education as manifested in our local iteration, the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Deep in the thought processes of the morally sensitive but ingenuous folk who reside north of the West Franklin and South Girard junction there is a crisis of conscience rooted in their comfortably complicit culpability for the state of public education.

A resolution of that crisis would abet the cause of community-based activists who understand the nature of the dilemma in K-12 education and are prepared to commit their lives to the cause.  In the absence of any epitome leading to such a resolution, we activists will do what we need to do on our own: 

not just talk or vote or volunteer in do-gooder

fashion but to act to induce fundamental change.

 

The Three Great Purposes of an Excellent K-12 Education That Must Be Clearly Understood in Overhauling Curriculum and Teaching at the Minneapolis Pubic Schools

Verbiage traverses the ether these days in pursuit of valuation for higher education.

 

The verbiage and the valuation most often travel along a philistine course understandable in the context of our crass society but lamentable with regard to life’s meaning and the pursuit of happiness.

 

Understand, then, that the three great purposes of an excellent education, beginning at K-12 and extending to the collegiate and university levels, are cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

 

The meaning of life is to render service to other human beings.

 

Happiness flows from living meaningfully as one ascends the hierarchy of biological imperatives, personal security, and higher-order concerns. 

 

Once one is thriving in a personal universe that includes loving relationships and a strong spiritual core, she or he moves confidently in the world, attentive to those higher-order concerns that yield meaning.

 

Service to other human beings is an ongoing commitment that crosses into many realms of human experience.  Fully rendered service necessitates response to many people, practical circumstances, and cultural contexts.  Service rendered in all situations for which opportunity exists necessitates broad and deep knowledge of history, economics, psychology, religion, literature, fine arts, mathematics, natural science, technology, and the manual arts.

 

Knowledge necessary for wide-ranging service to others also abets the cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that provide maximum personal fulfillment on this one earthly sojourn.  With broad and deep knowledge, one moves confidently in any situation, converses easily on many topics, interacts sensitively with people of many ethnicities, and experiences the joy of high-quality art, music, and literature of many genres and styles.  Knowledge is in constant dialectic with meaning and happiness:   Knowledge, meaning, and happiness assume, suffuse, and enrich each other.

 

Education is vital to this dialectic.

 

We have only one earthly sojourn as far as we know or, following Buddhists and Hindus and Jains, hope that this earthly sojourn finds us at the height of our humanity on the last turn of the Wheel of Existence.  From either perspective, we should want to be at our best, to live life at its fullest---  culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied.  

 

Education, then, is of value far beyond any economic yield.  The economic yield is likely;  professional satisfaction is one of the purposes.  The knowledge-intensity that defines an excellent education maximizes the likelihood of professional satisfaction and results concomitantly in the culturally enriched life positioned to be of maximum service to other citizens.

 

Thus, knowledge participates in another dialectic, assuming, suffusing, and enriching the cultural, civic, and professional life of one who is inexorably gaining new higher-order knowledge.

 

Enlightened cost-benefit analysis of a college education depends on a consideration of cultural, civic, and professional benefits and considers the cost of failing to provide an excellent education.  If only professional benefit is considered, the analysis is limited by the crass values that presently pervade our society.   

 

The impartation of a knowledge-intensive education to people of all demographic descriptors is the foundation for true democracy and enlightened society.

 

The three great purposes of a knowledge intensive education of excellence are cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

 

My daily effort is to model the impartation of such an education and to induce decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools to extrapolate the modeled principles for application to the overhaul of  curriculum and teaching in this iteration of the local school district.

How to Live a Happy Life

In the current state of our system of K-12 education, those who are professionally responsible for the lives of our children are derelict in their duties as adults.  They impart to our students neither the knowledge-intensive education nor the moral instruction that young people look to their elders to provide.  

 

I have in many places on this blog explained how those who purport to be professionals in the field of education are not anywhere close to being professionals of the caliber that we expect from doctors and lawyers, and how the field of education as presented in departments, schools, and colleges of education on university campuses is a sham---  the weakest academic component of any university organization, dominated by professors who promote a debased ideology while revealing themselves to be the least philosophically astute of anyone occupying the professorial role in the university departmental scheme.

 

Thus we have systems of K-12 education that fail to impart the knowledge and skill sets that define excellence in education.

 

Then, as to the matter of morality, the culprits lie in the general public of a society that proceeds on the basis of largely immoral and dissolute behavior, in the absence of any understanding the meaning of life.

 

Unhappy adults cannot present to young people any vision of happiness.

 

Elders who lack any grasp of the meaning of life cannot convey a sense of meaning to the children who look to them for guidance.

 

Young people are never the problem.

 

Adults are the problem.

 

The result is the current state of our society---  to be sure, in the form of leadership all the way to the apex of the presidency---   but with the society itself being that from which such leadership springs.

 

We must go to the root and rethink everything.

 

This will not require a lot of verbiage.  People tend to talk important matters into obscure and remote corners, in a process of obfuscation over clarity, pretending that solutions are difficult to find.  Actually, solutions are often easily identified and readily apparent;  it is the doing on the basis of essential principles that is difficult.

 

Isaac Newton defined succinctly his three laws of motion. 

 

Einstein aimed for elegant simplicity in his formulation of energy as equaling mass times the velocity of light squared.

 

The simplicity of elegantly presented first principles must abide in our definitions of educational excellence, happiness, and meaning.

 

Consider below the essentials of meaning and the fundamentals of the happiness that results when meaning is understood:

 

…………………………………………………………..

 

The meaning of life is the rendering of loving service to others.

 

Abraham Maslow, in his own simply elegant formulation, conveyed that human beings seek first to fulfill their biological needs, attain a sense of security, feel loved, and gain self-esteem---  before then becoming self-actualized in living life at the highest level.

 

Through my own filter, this means that we acknowledge that to establish the mental space for contemplating higher-order concerns, we feel well-fed and physically safe.  But even the third and fourth aspects of the Maslow formulation (love and self-esteem) at any satisfying level of fulfillment depend on the identification of higher-order concerns---  called “self-actualization” by Maslow and according to my own view clearly identified with meaning and happiness.

 

Albert Schweitzer observed, in a conveyance of wisdom to young people:  “I know not what your future will be, but one thing I know:  The only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who have sought, and found, how to serve.”

 

The meaning of life is the rendering of loving service to others.

 

……………………………………………………………………..

 

Happiness is living in accordance with the meaning of life.

 

To move to the highest realms where happiness is possible, once must first fulfill fundamental biological needs and feel safe in the world, according to the Maslow formulation, following also the Freudian concept of id and the (B.F.) Skinnerian construct of primary reinforcers.

 

Through my filter, this means the following:

 

To attain happiness, one must first live healthily, with a respect for one’s body:

 

This means eating a diet dominated by fresh fruits, vegetables, fiber-rich foods, and sufficient protein; exercising vigorously enough to build a strong cardiovascular system;  and getting adequate sleep.

 

One must then dedicate one’s life to the service of others from a spiritual center that values meaning over triviality.  This may be done in fulfillment of the beneficent principles of any major faith or belief system, in the context of any honorable profession, upon the assumption of material sufficiency.  Material sufficiency may include the sort of abundance that comes with extraordinary material success.  But happiness resides in the service to others.

 

When one is dedicated to the service of others at the core of one’s spiritual center, then empathic and altruistic values abound.

 

………………………………………………………………………….

 

Understand, then, that adults must first gain an understanding of life’s meaning, the practical preparatory elements for happiness, and the happiness that flows from meaning upon those preconditions.

 

Adults must then live their lives in accordance with meaning and the principles of happiness.   

 

They must then be adults in the proper sense and instruct young people according to their wisdom.

 

Young people expect to receive knowledge and ethics from adults.

 

Excellent education and an ethically thriving society depend upon providing knowledge and ethics to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.

      

Please Be Aware of My Television Show, >The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison<, Airing Tonight and All Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on MTN Channel 17

Some of you on the ever-ascending readership of this blog may know that for two and one-half years now I have had a television show, The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, airing every Wednesday from 6:00 until 7:00 PM.  The show runs on Minneapolis Telecommunications Network (MTN) and many be seen either on Channel 17 in Minneapolis or streaming in real time at the Minneapolis Telecommunications website.


The show features variously


1)  interviews that I have conducted with education policymakers or others with an interest in and particular relevance to K-12 education;


2)  academic sessions conducted by me for one or a group of my 125 participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative;  or


3) my commentary on the state of the Minneapolis Public Schools and a myriad of facts, analysis, and philosophical presentation on matters pertinent to K-12 education.


During this academic year of 2016-2017, I have heavily emphasized commentary, revealing along the way important aspects of my nearly complete new books, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect;  and  Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, the latter a 14-chapter work that provides full curriculum in economics, psychology, political science, world religions, world history, American history, African American history. literature, English language usage, fine arts (visual and musical), mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics.


This blog, the television show, the books, my monthly academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota), and public appearances that include monthly Public Comment at meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education are all part of an intensified effort that I have exerted beginning three years ago to induce decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools to define and impart an education of genuine excellence to students of all demographic descriptors.


Thus, is my revolutionary dedication of two thrusts:


1) to model the impartation of excellent education in the New Salem Educational Initiative to students from the most challenging circumstances in Minnesota;  and


2) to induce the needed overhaul at the Minneapolis Public Schools that will transform that iteration of the locally centralized school district to serve as a model for other school districts nationwide.


Please view the television show this evening at the indicated time to avail yourself of one of these venues for the conveyance of my message.

A Tale of Two Girards >>>>> The Story Continues >>>>> Part Two

A Tale of Two Girards  >>>>>  The Story Continues  >>>>>  Part Two

                                                                                    Gary Marvin Davison

Degree from Yale in hand,

she stares out the window

of her New Haven apartment,

wondering about the next step: 

off to law school at Harvard,

seems the right sort of thing to do.

 

At her North Minneapolis hovel,

she assesses the natural power

in her brain,

and chafes at its

confinement

to tending

child number three.

 

Graduating from Breck,

The world is full of hope,

many

places to

play his violin,

speak his Chinese,

parlay his perfect score

on the ACT.

 

There he rests in a pauper's grave,

life snuffed out at just eleven:

some say he’s better off in heaven,

for his earthly life

never ascended from

hell.

 

The law?  But why?

She says to no one in particular

on the New Haven streets below.

She likes politics and the verbal

arts better than natural science,

Mom and Dad approve,

and that’s really all she knows.

 

Maybe courses at North Hennepin,

she ponders and opines,

silently,

forlornly,

for she has witnessed so many

failures,

among those harboring

such aspirations,

but lacking 

preparation,

quality education

never imparted by those

mediocre teachers

at

Jenny Lind K-5,

Olson Middle,

North High.   

 

He’s off to Harvard,

quite sure what to expect:

Professor Daddy attended

as an undergraduate,

Doctor Momma obtained

her medical degree

at same.

 

And there he lies,

in a grave graced

only

with weeds---

quite short of Harvard,

bullet still lodged

in his skull,

potential still

unfulfilled,

life partially given,

death come early,

an eternity now to ask

simply,

“Why?”

 

And there we have the

continuing saga

of the

Two Girards---

 

Hope for some,

little for others,

happiness guaranteed

to none.