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.