MFT59
10 Point Platform
Common
Sense Bargaining for the Common Good
Beyond
Academics: Educating the Whole Child
All students deserve books in the library; instruments in the band room; supplies in the art room; equipment in the gym; vision, hearing, and dental screenings every
year. Students deserve nurses, social
workers, counselors, psychologists, and library media specialists in their
schools--- all day, every day.
Smaller
Class Sizes
All students deserve to have individual
relationships with their teachers, as strong relationships create strong
classrooms. Small class sizes allow time
for teachers to plan quality lessons, talk to families, talk to each student
every day, and give students the attention they need to learn and grow.
Students
are More Than a Test Score
All students deserve a broad, rich curriculum
including academics, arts, music, language, and trade, emphasizing engagement
and authentic learning, instead of preparation for high-stakes tests. Students deserve teachers and administrators
focused on development of quality curriculum in an educational environment that
acknowledges and respects backgrounds, perspectives, and learning styles of our
diverse communities.
Support,
Don’t Punish: Restorative Practices
All students deserve compassion, empathy, and a safe
place to learn. Students deserve
educators well-trained in restorative practices. Schools must move toward practices that build
relationships and resolve conflict. MPS
must work to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.
Clean
and Healthy Buildings
All students deserve fully staffed schools that
ensure a clean, healthy, and safe environment with soap in the bathroom, safe
drinking water, sanitary classrooms, and working air conditioning in every
school.
Full-Service
Community Schools
All students and their families deserve
community-based services. Increasing the
number of full-service community schools throughout the city would provide
school-based community access to critical services such as healthcare, childcare,
dental clinics, adult education courses, and enrichment and recreational
opportunities for children from preschool to high school.
Quality
Education for All: Inclusion and Equity
All students deserve high quality education
regardless of their special education needs, primary language, race, ethnicity,
religion, documentation status, family income, family composition, sexual
orientation, gender identity, or zip code.
Students deserve educators committed to disrupting racism and other
systems of oppression in our classrooms and schools. Our schools need to be welcoming to all our
students and their families.
Invest
in Public Schools
All students deserve a school district committed to
fully funded public schools governed by a democratically elected school board
accountable to the public. Students
deserve schools that will not close at a moment’s notice, schools that educate
all children regardless of their needs, and schools that are staffed by highly
qualified, licensed educators.
$15
an Hour for All MPS Employees
All students deserve a school district committed to
investing in all employees by paying a living wage. MPS employees include bus drivers, educators,
food servers, secretaries, and engineers who are also mentors to students; they are also our neighbors and parents to
our students.
Recess
All students deserve at least 30 minutes of play and
movement on a daily basis. Recess
promotes social and emotional learning such as working together as a team,
making friends, and deciding which game to play next.
My
Analysis
Now know this about the ten-point
program given above, taken in point-by point order in the following exposition:
“Educating the whole child” is a
phrase typically used by education professors and other members of the
education establishment to avoid emphasis on academics. Like so much from the strange world of of
education departments, colleges, and schools, the phrase has a certain facile
appeal, capable of moving anyone who claims to love children and to want to
develop them as well-rounded human beings.
But members of the education establishment are better at launching
pleasant sounding slogans into the ether than they are at providing the truly
well-round education in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts that is
the primary responsibility of K-12
teachers and administrators. In this
case, the ten-point MFT program conveys the message that decision-makers at the
Minneapolis Public Schools should make sure that students are provided with an
array of support services and adequate stocks of library books, art supplies,
and gym equipment. These items and
services are indeed important, and I have argued persistently for greatly
expanded outreach to families via the direct provision of certain services and
resource referral for others. But material
necessities and support services will go to waste in the absence of a
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.
East Asian societies (e. g., South
Korea, Taiwan, Shanghai [China], Singapore) conduct highly effective classrooms
with large class sizes, ranging to 50 students and beyond. Students in these nations; along with those
in such nations as Finland, Poland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; regularly outperform students of the United
States on the Program of International Students Assessment (PISA) designed by
Andrea Schleicher to assess ability to analyze problems and to apply knowledge
and skills creatively. Small class sizes
have intuitive appeal, and have many advantages if resources are available to
keep classes small. But class size is
much less important than curriculum and teacher quality.
“Authentic learning” is another
education establishment shibboleth. This
is code for the project and portfolio approach to education formerly taken in
the defunct Profiles of Learning of the Minnesota Department of Education
in the 1990s, now replaced by academic standards that I helped to design in the
early years of the new millennium. Standardized
tests are the most objective assessments of student knowledge and skills, the
sort of instruments represented by the college readiness measures of the ACT
and SAT and the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) for grades 3-8 math and reading, grade 10 reading,
and grade 11 math. Because students (especially
those facing challenges of familial poverty and functionality) in Minnesota
record such a lackluster performance on such tests, the teachers unions
(Education Minnesota, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers) seek escape into the
project and portfolio approach that obscures information on student ability to
perform a wide range of math skills and to read a wide swath of fiction,
nonfiction, and poetry.
Students should receive a knowledge-intensive
education in “academics, arts, music, language, and trade”; but teachers have neither the knowledge nor
the approach to curriculum that can provide such an education. And as a group, teachers are lamentably short
of the training and life experience that would truly allow them to provide
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education in the liberal, technological, and
vocational arts.
Students should be provided clean
and healthy buildings, restorative justice, and equity. But, given adequate buildings, if students
were engaged with a knowledge-intensive, skill replete curriculum delivered at
the behest of genuinely excellent teachers, the behavior problems that give
rise to the need for restorative justice would diminish drastically and equity
would be implicit. Recess, health, and
physical education are necessary parts of a fully developed curriculum--- but at present these are not generally
provided in such a way as to encourage
the good eating habits and aerobic exercise that promote quality life on this
one earthly sojourn. Varsity sports get
much more attention, again contrasting the educational programs of the United
States with those of the best school systems across the world, all of which
relegate sports activities to community programs rather than the schools.
Our schools should be properly
funded, but the most vexing dilemma is not lack of funds but rather proper
application of funds for the provision of high-quality curriculum, teachers,
academic enrichment (set-aside time for tutoring and additional academic
challenges), and outreach to families, all delivered by a greatly trimmed central
office (Davis Center) bureaucracy. All employees
should receive at least $15, after proper training and a probationary period in
which all staff members throughout the district of the Minneapolis Public
Schools demonstrate an understanding of the central mission of the locally
centralized school district to impart a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete
education.
Excellent education is the provision
of a knowledge intensive, skill-replete curriculum in the liberal, technological,
and vocational arts by excellent teachers , delivered in grade by grade
sequence throughout the K-12 years. As a
group, members of MFT59 do not believe in such a knowledge-focused education,
and the nature of their training does not prepare them to deliver such an
education.
Such a circumstance reduces the MFT
10 Point Platform to a substantively gossamer document, lacking in either
common or intellectual sense, and certainly not capable of ensuring the common
good through the impartation of an equitably excellent education to students of
all demographic descriptors
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