Failure to Grasp the Key Issue of Academic Quality Was Evident On Both Sides of the Dispute Over School Resource Officers at the 8 August Meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education

Neither decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) nor their detractors over such matters as the placement of School Resource Officers (SROs) in the institutions of the district give evidence of grasping the key issue underlying all vexing dilemmas pertinent to this iteration of the locally centralized school district.

 

The underlying issue is academic quality. 

 

All other concerns are peripheral. 

 

Failure to provide an education of excellence gives rise to all other problems, which will never be addressed until knowledge-intensive curriculum, teachers trained to impart that curriculum, and students properly prepared to receive that curriculum become the key factors and actors in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Excellent education consists of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete  curriculum in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts in grade by grade sequence 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.  Knowledge-intensity in the liberal arts should emphasize mathematics, natural science (especially biology, chemistry, and physics), history, government, economics, psychology, literature, and the fine arts.  By grade 5, students should have a firm grasp of the fundamentals in all areas of the liberal arts;  then, as they move through the middle school (grades 6-8) and high school (grades 9-12) years, students should be given an increasingly sophisticated education in the subjects of the liberal arts with an accompanying excellence of education in the technological and vocational arts.

 

The public schools of Minneapolis do not impart such an education. 

 

The Minneapolis Public Schools lack both the curriculum and the teachers to impart such an education.

 

Lacking an excellent education, students who have been subjected to the lousy public schools of Minneapolis typically go on to live wandering lives. 

 

Thirty-eight percent (38%) of those students do not graduate in four years;  most of those never do graduate.  Those who do graduate move across the stage at their convocation to claim a piece of paper that is a degree in name only.  Approximately one-third of these students need remedial education when they matriculate on college and university campuses.  Failure to complete a college education once matriculating is an endemic condition for students of color and those from challenging home economies.

 

In the absence of education, people flounder. 

 

Floundering people often fall victim to the life of the street. 

 

The life of the street often leads to prison or early death.

 

The racist historical and current conditions that have led to this situation, especially for students of color living at the urban core, sustains cycles of poverty and promotes continuing strained relations between communities of color and poverty on  one side of an angry divide and police officers on the other.

 

The current issue of immediate importance to many young African Americans is brutal treatment at the hands of police. 

 

They are right about the grave injustices perpetrated by police forces in Minneapolis and throughout the nation.

 

But the more serious underlying dilemma is the failure of locally centralized school districts, of which the Minneapolis Public Schools is a salient iteration, to impart an education of excellence that would send students forth to lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.

 

With those three great purposes unfulfilled, the streets remain dangerous traps, prisons get fuller, and lives continue to wander.

 

Misdeeds of police on the streets and the unwelcome presence of the police subsets called School Resource Officers (SROs) give rise to the understandable anger expressed by many young people, especially African Americans, at the 8 August meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.

 

But the real problem is lousy public education.

 

Superintendent Ed Graff, other decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools, and the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education lack any understanding of the meaning of an excellent education or the defining qualities of the excellent teacher:

 

Thus, they sustain poor teaching in wretched schools.

 

When young people and adults who truly care about them understand that this condition of abominable public education is the underlying problem degrading the communities that comprise our society as a whole, they will have a better focal point for their anger:

 

Many police are culprits and a very visible manifestation of the larger problem.

 

But terrible public education is the gravest dilemma undergirding all of our most vexing domestic issues.