As is my
wont, I arrived twenty minutes early to that meeting, usually enough to
position myself in a front row seat, primed to spring to the podium to make my
first-up appearance when the Public Comment phase opens the meeting at 5:30
PM. But there was a hoard of attendees,
mostly from the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and from Lyndale K-5 school
(the latter located near the Uptown area of Minneapolis). The MFT is currently in contract negotiations; the folks from Lyndale K-5 were mostly
animated about staff losses and a curtailment of bus routes that has made
getting to the school difficult for Lyndale students who have been traveling
out of their residential zones to attend the school.
My own comments
are never particularistic in those ways, focusing instead on issues pertaining
to academic excellence and the lack thereof for the MPS program as it is. I lauded Superintendent Graff for staff cuts
reducing the Davis Center central office burden from well over 600 as late as
last spring 2017 to the current 444; and
for a commendable effort to ensure that staff members and departments that bear
responsibility for the delivery of some function are actually effective. But I took him to task for the failures that
I glean from the comments of my students on a daily basis, citing those
knowledge sets that I regularly find that my students do not have until I
impart the information that they have not been getting in their classes; I gave as examples the fact that 1877 is in
the 19th rather than the 18th century, a common mistake indicating woeful instruction at school; knowledge of African American literary and historical
figures such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Lorraine Hansberry, and August
Wilson; economics material such as the
Federal Reserve System and the difference between national deficit and national
debt; and the scientific lineage that connects
Copernicus to Kepler to Newton.
I also told
Graff to quit promulgating his shibboleth, “MPS Strong,” along with the slogan,
“Every Student College and Career Ready,” stark falsehoods given the abhorrent
education indicated by the examples above and the fact that one-third of MPS
graduates have to take remedial courses when they begin attending colleges and
universities. I then recommended to the
board and to Graff that they do some productive holiday reading to get some
inspiration for developing an actual philosophy of education. My book recommendations were E. D. Hirsch, The Schools We Need and Why We don’t Have Them; Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World
and How They Got That Way; and Diane
Ravitch, Left Back: A Hundred Years of
School Reform. I noted that Ripley
is a New
York Times reporter who wrote a highly objective account of the
best-performing educational systems in the world, having set out to get the
facts pertinent to the defining elements of those systems. I also noted that Ravitch wrote some good books
before she became a sell-out, my reference to the current eagerness of Ravitch
to pander to the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation
of Teachers (AFT), teachers unions opposed to objectively measured academic standards.
I stayed
until past 6:00 PM then had to leave to run the Tuesday Tutoring program at New
Salem Missionary Baptist Church. I returned
at 8:30 PM to find the school board members listening to Research, Assessment,
and Accountability Chief Eric Moore conveying the results from a community
survey (with online and phone call components) as to expressed priorities for
student outcomes, equity, teacher effectiveness, stewardship, and the
like. Moore stayed in place as the conversation
turned to the Pro Forma Budget for academic year 2018-2019.
At this
point the discussion descended into a mass of confusion concerning different conceptions
of what a pro forma budget actually is and how much detail should be
included before budget finalization in May.
Graff appeared to be ill-prepared for questions asked by members of the
board, and even scrambled to articulate the resolution for which he was asking
board approval on the pro forma budget. Board members, meanwhile, evidenced wide
disagreement among themselves and a propensity to get bogged down in issues
that have very little to do with the delivery of the excellent education toward
which I am working. The only comment from
a board member that approached my own concern for educational quality came from
former board chair and now finance committee chair Jenny Arneson, who expressed
a commitment to maintaining an International Baccalaureate (IB) program in all
seven high schools; Arneson and others
worked diligently a few years back to reverse a situation that had deemed only Southwest
and a few other high schools worthy of the IB program.
This meeting
of the MPS Board of Education was a tawdry show, repeating the inevitable
propensity for the school board to get lost in its own strange world that has
very little bearing on the improvement of academic programming at the school
district.
Follow-up discussions
with even the best of MPS staff members indicated to me that there may be not a
single decision-maker who grasps the importance of a knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete education advanced by Hirsch and Ravitch in her better days; and for the excellence of education associated
with the systems discussed by Ripley.
I like and
respect certain Davis Center staff members now positioned to make decisions for
the overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools into a model for the locally
centralized school district. But whether
these very talented people grasp the need for a core knowledge approach to
education is at this point for me an unanswered question.
In the
course of time, my best prediction is that we will have to replace Ed Graff, at
least seven of the current nine members of the school board, and the current decision-makers
for academic programming.
The above
comments on Graff and the board members are a given.
I hope that
I am wrong as to the Davis Center decision-makers.
But I know
for sure that I am going to find out.
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