May 2, 2017

Message to Those Organizing the Community Café on Equity This Evening (2 May 2017, 6:00-8:30 PM) at the Davis Center (1250 West Broadway, Central Offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools) >>>>> Your Meeting is a Sham, and You Shouldn’t Be Having to Inquire About This, But Know That Equity Will Become Reality with the Impartation of a Knowledge-Intensive Curriculum to Students of All Demographic Descriptors

There will be an event this evening at the Minneapolis Public Schools that promises to be as much of a sham as was the World Café event held a few weeks back at Southwest High School.  At these meetings, the school administrators of Minnesota are under the banner of Reimagine Minnesota pretending to seek community views as to how to achieve equity in the public schools.  This is mere persiflage on the part of the education establishment, the staging of exercises in which community opinion is sought in a highly controlled format of small-group discussions and guided in such a way as to enable those responsible for our terrible public schools to claim that they have backing for policies that they already intend to pursue.

 

If these were true professionals, they would be vigorously asserting an equitable program of academic excellence in which equity is firmly embedded.  But, as I have detailed in many articles on this blog, administrators and school board members of the Minneapolis Public Schools have no clearly stated or viable philosophical principles.  What must pass for some approximation of such principles comes out in the form of such education professor shibboleths as “critical thinking,” “lifelong learning,” and “social and emotional learning” that are mere smoke-screens behind which administrators, teachers unions, and school board members hide while rendering a skill-devoid, knowledge-poor quality of education that mocks the very meaning of education.  Meanwhile, the education establishment does not welcome true “critical thinking” on the part of opponents and gives very little evidence of “lifelong learning”  toward improving upon the poor knowledge base with which those trained in departments, colleges, and schools of education emerge.  Vapid testimonies to the importance of “social and emotional learning” enable administrators to pretend that programs based on values that should be assumed in the delivery of knowledge-intensive education will lead to improved educational outcomes, when in fact such schemes become a diversion from the awful academic performance of students in the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized school districts.

 

But, as long as public school officials are pretending to inquire as to how we are to achieve equity, understand the following:

 

>>>>>

 

Equity in the Minneapolis Public Schools will become reality with the impartation of a knowledge-intensive curriculum to students of all demographic descriptors.  This will only be achieved when the curriculum is thoroughly redesigned, teachers are trained to deliver such a curriculum, a coherent program of remedial instruction is articulated and implemented, services are delivered directly and by referral to families facing challenges of poverty and functionality, and expenditure for the central bureaucracy at the Davis Center is greatly reduced so as to shift resources to the four priorities just mentioned. 

                                                                                         

Not one of these tenets of a uniformly excellent curriculum is currently part of the program of the Minneapolis Public Schools:

 

Time at the K-5 level is mostly wasted due to curricular weakness in natural science, history, government, economics, literature, and the fine arts   Middle school curriculum is also weak;  even in classes that bear titles similar to, or include these, subjects, the knowledge base of teachers is limited, there is an overreliance on worksheets and packets, class discussion is minimal or absent entirely, and homework is often given in the absence of explanation or necessary background information to contextualize the material to be learned.  Only at the high school level in Advanced Placement (AP) classes do students gain access to a knowledge-intensive curriculum;  but many students who take AP classes are unprepared by the weakness of their prior educational experiences to succeed in rigorous courses, and many teachers do not have the knowledge base or the pedagogical ability to impart information at this level.  

 

Teacher training in departments, schools, and colleges of education is abysmal, so that teachers arrive woefully unprepared to teach the classes to which they have been assigned.  This is particularly true for teachers at the K-5 level, who earn their degrees in the weakest major on any university campus.  Middle school and high school teachers are also undertrained for the delivery of information with the necessary breadth and depth.  Masters degrees are pursued in education departments and do not strengthen the teacher’s subject area expertise.  And students do not receive training placing them on the ground, in the homes, in the communities that constitute the environments of students living at the urban core.

 

In the Minneapolis Public Schools, there is little outreach to students whose families face challenges of poverty and dysfunction.  The slimly staffed Department of Student, Family, and Community Engagement is ineffective.  For the achievement of equity, we need a large contingent of staff members who are comfortable on the streets and in the homes of our most challenged student populations, connecting with them in conversation and organized for the provision of direct services and resource referral.

 

The Minneapolis Public Schools has no cohesive tutoring program designed to get students lagging disastrously behind academically up to grade level.  Equity can only be achieved when a large tutoring force is trained and used to render the remedial instruction necessary to prepare all students for a rigorous, skill-replete, knowledge-intensive education.

 

And if officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools are serious about achieving equity they will greatly reduce the central bureaucracy at the Davis Center, which has re-staffed and is more bloated now than was the case when Interim Superintendent Michael Goar oversaw a reduction back in spring 2015.

 

With the program of curricular overhaul, teacher training, academic remediation, family outreach, and bureaucratic paring, the officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools would achieve the equity that they purportedly seek.

 

Since these officials will not truly be seeking community opinion in this evening’s sham of a meeting, it is all the more imperative that we call their bluff by providing them with a vision for equity that they themselves have not articulated as true professionals would.

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