Understanding the Wretched Quality of the Education at the Minneapolis Public Schools for Which the Multi-Culpable are Culpable: >>>>> Part Two: Knowledge Base

Nothing could be more telling as to the atrocious quality of education abiding in the Minneapolis Public Schools than the likelihood that if 50% of students of all demographic descriptors were to demonstrate grade level performance, staff would be turning cartwheels in celebration.

 

As you scroll on down this blog you will read six enormously important articles to enhance your understanding of the societal environment in which the performance of students in districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools is recorded.  This and the immediately succeeding article highlight the terrible performance of students in the Minneapolis Pubic Schools.

 

In curricular matters, an excellent education involves two components:  skill and knowledge.

 

The next article, Part One of this series, delivers the objective indictment focused on skill sets.

 

This article, Part Two of this series, focuses on the knowledge-deplete nature of education at the Minneapolis Public Schools---  as salient representative of the locally centralized school district.

 

Consider:

 

When a student from the Minneapolis Public Schools enters my program in the New Salem Educational Initiative, I can expect that the student has poor skills and knows almost nothing.  The damning data as to skills are observable in the next article as you scroll on down this blog.

 

With regard to knowledge, among the striking facets of the situation are the following:

 

>>>>>      Students well into high school do not know how to identify centuries;  they inevitably will guess that the 1300s must refer to the 13^th rather than the 14^th century, or that the 1800s must refer to the 18^th rather than the  19^th century.

 

>>>>>      Not knowing what reference to the 19^th and 20^th centuries means is of course until clarified highly problematic when discussing United States history, since events during those two centuries represent the core existence of that entity as a nation just a bit over 200 years old.

 

>>>>>      But then of course I always have to teach those events anyway, since students come to me having abominable understanding of American and United States history;   students have no idea of the significance of the 13 colonies or whose empire controlled them, little understanding of the areas from which African slaves originated or the role of states such as the Ashanti and Dahomey in the trade, no understanding of the birth of the United States as an experiment in the Enlightenment (and what the latter as the Age of Reason even means), no grasp of the underlying or precipitating events of the Civil War, inability to even get close as to when that event occurred, and no fundamental notion of momentous events and phases such as Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, World War I, the Great Northern Migration, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the Korean War, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Vietnam War, Watergate,  stagflation, the Reagan presidency and those of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or even the specific issues during the Barack Obama administration.

 

>>>>>      Even most African American students have little familiarity with Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and even such now highly publicized authors as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and August Wilson.

 

>>>>>      Knowledge of Shakespeare and other great authors from the British and American traditions is paltry;  mention of Herman Melville, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickenson, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller inevitably draws blank stares.

 

>>>>>      Students have no idea where to find the Mediterranean Sea on a map and no sense of the historical importance of that body of water;  they struggle to identify the three large nations that make up most of North America and to properly place and identify the nations of Central America (also  formally a part of North America), to identify even one important nation of Africa (until reminded that Somali, Nigerian, and  Liberian classmates come from Africa), to distinguish between the individual nations of Asia and the continent itself (naming, for example, China as a continent or Asia as a nation), or to locate London or Paris or Amsterdam on a map. 

 

>>>>>      Students have little understanding of the periodic table of the elements, Newton’s Three Laws of Motion, the actual structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the age and formation of the universe, the evolution of life on earth, or the defining characteristics of asteroids, comets, stars, planets,  or the (earthly) moon and the sun.

 

Our students learn very little in their thirteen years (grades K-12) spent in school.

 

As you regular readers of this blog know, my two nearly complete books constitute my exhaustive effort to address the skill and knowledge deficits of students enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools, from two angles  >>>>>

 

>>>>>    Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect exposes and details the gravity of the problem.

 

>>>>>    Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education provides the curriculum that my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative receive and study---  that other students enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools do not receive.

 

Thus, readers be aware that the revolution is on and the day of reckoning is coming as I mount intense pressure on officials who every day their feet hit the ground deny our young people the education that is their cultural inheritance.