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.
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