The Disaster That is the Minneapolis Public Schools as Observed in My Interactions with Students on Thursday, 30 November 2017

Note to My Readers     >>>>>      Names used in this article are data privacy pseudonyms, as is always the case when I mention students and family members of the New Salem Educational Initiative in articles posted on this blog.

The disaster of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS)---  a salient representative of the locally centralized school district in the United States and therefore portraying a situation that is nationally pervasive---  was manifestly apparent in my interactions with students and their families on 30 November 2017.


I had three academic sessions scheduled for that day:

For the first academic session, I drove as is typical on Thursdays to the Volunteers of America (VOA) apartment high-rise located just south of downtown Minneapolis between LaSalle and Nicollet.  Here I meet for a very intensive hour of instruction with Maya Bassett, daughter of single mother Justine Nixon.

 

Justine is a highly intelligent 36 year-old African American woman who if she had been born to middle or upper middle class circumstances would have had a chance of getting some semblance of an education, provided that she had had parents intent on angling for the best that they could wring out of our wretched system of K-12 education in the United States.  But she was herself born to a single mother lost in a world of drug addiction and unsavory relationships and the victim of historical circumstances for which we in the United States have never apologized or atoned.  Our response to the history of apartheid in the United States, with versions in both the rural South and the urban North, has been to offer schools that grew more abominable from the late 1970s forward.  Justine, one of the many victims of our historical legacy and lousy schools, was tossed around from one foster home to another and landed on the dung heap of Section 8 housing and government assistance based on health conditions all too typical for those we treat as societal refuse.

 

Thus it is that Maya has inherited this legacy of cyclical poverty and immorally terrible education.  She attends a K-8 school in south Minneapolis.  Having had a better than typical experience during her grade 3 academic year, Maya’s experience this year has not risen to that mediocre level:  Her progress this year has been curtailed, given that a minimally decent teacher is on leave and a 21 year-old substitute is serving as replacement.  The young teacher is way in over his head, having lost control of the class and retreated to an attitudinal mode that finds him yelling often and teaching very little.

 

Justine’s mother died this past October;  she was only 52 years of age, but in a typical motif for the national disgrace that is life at the urban core in the United States, her physical condition was much like an upper middle class person of 82 years of age or older.  This loss has weighed heavily on both Justine and Maya, the latter of whom was already given to acting out her life frustrations when bequeathed the incompetent classroom manager who came to her straight from the useless teacher training experience of the standard type in Minnesota and the nation generally.

 

Maya always greets me with a huge smile, ready to gain full security in her mastery of the multiplication table, learn the basics of fractions and mathematical graphs,  read challenging fictional stories and articles on American and world history, and acquire understanding of vocabulary words such as enunciate, proclamation, devastation, ebullience, and narcissism.  Maya and I work hard and with joy every week to ensure that she gets the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education that she does not receive in her grade 4 classroom of the Minneapolis Public Schools but will in her study with me send her forth to a life of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction---   our answer to the abhorrent forces of history by providing bright prospects for the future.

 

I left the VOA apartments to seek out the latest ever-shifting residence of Monica Taylor, mother of grade 8 Minneapolis Public Schools student Sabrina Benson, who also waits in vain each day for an education of substance in a South Minneapolis classroom.   Monica had called me in desperation while I was in Dallas, very anxious about Sabrina’s academic progress in absence of my academic corrective to the dissolute instruction Sabrina has received each year of her MPS enrollment.   Upon my return, we agreed to resume our regular academic sessions on Thursday.  Monica had lost her latest iteration of Section 8 housing and was encamping in the dingy house of her mother on 15^th Avenue South;  but Monica’s mother is in poor health (notice the abiding patterns)  and Monica and Sabrina were in the midst of various traumas .  I had called earlier in the day on this 30 November to verify our meeting but gotten no response, a sign that Monica had once again been unable to pay her cell phone bill.  No one was at the address of her mother when I arrived, so I’ll do my usual sleuthing as necessary and otherwise wait for a call from Monica when she is able to find a working phone among family or friends.

 

I then went over to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church to meet Antonia Marquez to help her with three tests that she did not pass in a first try for certification to teach in the state of Minnesota.

 

Now pay particularly acute attention on this one:  Anna’s situation has much to convey as to the sorry state of teacher training in Minnesota and the United States:

 

Anna graduated with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from the University of Minnesota;  the program leading to certification at the University Minnesota requires that teacher aspirants also get a master’s degree, so Anna proceeded to acquire a masters in elementary education.  Neither degree requires rigorous mastery of subject area content or indeed much acquaintance at all with mathematics, natural science, history, government, literature, or the fine arts.

 

Keep in view, then, that this is a student who possesses a master’s degree but has not yet been able to pass a mathematics content exam, a mathematics basic skills exam, or a writing test.  Anna came to me knowing that I had worked to successful effect with her younger siblings and cousins (the parents of whom moved them to similarly lousy near-suburban schools after dissatisfaction with MPS schools) and that I could help her master the knowledge and skill sets required to pass the math tests and to pen the essay that she must write to gain certification.

 

Remember, now, you’re paying careful attention:

 

Anna is very bright.  But when we went into this two-hour academic session, she did not have full mastery of the multiplication table.   She needed review on adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers and in particular needed to recover skill in borrowing (subtractive regrouping).  She needed some quick reminders as to how to do multi-digit multiplication, and she needed to learn for the first time how to do long division, which in a calculator-infested arena is a lost art among current young generations for students.  But in about forty-five minutes Anna variously recovered and learned anew the basics of whole-number multi-digit addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, so we proceeded to review and in some aspects to cover for Anna’s first time ever addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions.  She caught on with enormous alacrity.  For this evening’s finale, we reviewed place value, both for whole numbers and for the fractional components to the right of the decimal.  Next week, we’ll finish our review of grade school math and move on to those items such as linear equations and inequalities, permutations and combinations, and properties of 45-45-90 and 30-60-90 triangles for which she is responsible on the assessments leading to teacher certification.

 

Now brace yourselves: 

 

Anna is already teaching on a provisional license in a near suburb of Minneapolis.

 

She teaches second grade.  To her credit, study on her own has allowed her to get caught up on rudimentary mathematical concepts that she absolutely needs to impart to grade 2 students.  But very carefully contemplate the kind of mathematical grasp that Anna revealed to me in our first academic session together;  know that students in the United States typically score last in mathematics among economically advanced nations of the world on the instrument administered by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA);  and then do some of that critical thinking that members of the education establishment fatuously claim that they want you to do, even as they display very little talent for critical analysis themselves.

 

As Anna and I wrapped up our highly productive evening together, as she looks toward taking the writing assessment along with the math tests, I gave her an essay assignment with the following topic:

 

Would you rather live in a state with a very cold climate but an excellent system of government, or a state with a very warm climate but a corrupt system of government?

 

I might have posed this question with reference to excellent versus poor systems of K-12 education, but no state in the United States has anything remotely approaching an excellent system of K-12 education.