Woeful World Cafe Events Indicate Reimagine Minnesota Project Insincerity and >Star Tribune< Naivete

The enthusiasm with which the Star Tribune editorial board embraced the recommendations from the action plan recently announced by the Reimagine Minnesota project (“Another push to close education gaps,” December 16, 2017) demonstrates that board’s naivete and tendency to make recommendations that are ill-researched and based on information that comes largely from the education and political establishments, even when recommendations are purportedly reformist.

 

I attended two of the World Café events staged under the banner of Reimagine Minnesota.  The first was held at Southwest High School (Minneapolis) on February 23, 2017.  The second event was staged at the Davis Center (MPS central offices) on May 2, 2017.  The audience was a mix of parents, school personnel, and community members;  but there was also a substantial contingent of students at the Davis Center event, many of them from North High School who had responded to communications from school board member KerryJo Felder, whose district geographically spans North Minneapolis.

 

On both occasions, the head of a firm hired by the Association of Metropolitan School Districts (AMSD), promoter of the Reimagine Minnesota project, posed three questions, as follows:  1) Describe your vision of an equitable, integrated, and excellent education for all students.  What does it look like and feel like?;  2)  As you think about the challenges we face in delivering an equitable, integrated, and excellent education for all students, what is at the heart of the matter for you?  3)  (Two-part question) What are the most urgent changes we need to make to be successful in our work?  What barriers do we need to move out of the way so that our work has the chance to be successful?

 

The format utilized for discussing these questions was small-group, with seven people at a table.  That format is a defining element revealing this event as a sham.  The effort in all such formats is to confine discussion to quiet corners of the room and to dilute any comments made that condemn the education establishment by asking for reportage from a leader at each table who summarizes the conversation.  There was much in the moderator’s instructions that encouraged non-confrontational discussion and much in the nature of the reportage methods stipulated by her consulting firm that produces synthetic, consensual accounts of the discussion.

 

But at the Davis Center event, reportage did not go as the moderator doing the bidding of the AMSD wished.  School Board Chair Rebecca Gagnon gave an innocuous report for her group that the AMSD would appreciate;  and Felder issued a sloganeering, standard-issue lament about systemic racism.  I then rose to give the minority plank report not encouraged by the format, a scathing assessment of the quality of education as delivered by the Minneapolis Public Schools, indicating the prevailing absence of, but critical need for, knowledge-intensive curriculum, thorough teacher retraining, tutoring for students languishing below grade level, expanded outreach to struggling families, and bureaucratic paring.  Two young African American female teachers then rose to make their own independent, powerful, personal statements about the exact nature of racism in the classroom, hallways, and offices of K-12 institutions:

 

The recommendations as given in the action plan reported by the Star Tribune editorial board was already predicted in the way that results of discussion at the World Café events were summarized by the AMSD-hired moderator.  These recommendations called for better training for educators, improved cultural understanding among teachers and students, recruiting and retaining more teachers of color, and better shaping of instruction to meet student needs and challenges.  The first recommendation gives a gentle nod to teacher retraining, and the second and third recommendations are clearly needed; but these first three were very innocuous renderings of the assessments made by the two young African American teachers and myself.  Through the filter of Edina Superintendent John Schultz and the other AMSD superintendents, the fourth recommendation as reported by their hired hands came in a form that allows them to proceed with the sort of approach to education toward which they are currently predisposed, with emphasis on individualized programming and instruction that relies heavily on technology.

 

None of the best school systems of the world, those of the nations of East Asia and of Finland, emphasize individualized instruction or rely very much on classroom technology.  Rather, the emphasis in these most successful systems is placed on rigorous national curriculum imparted to students of all economic classes and ethnicities, and on high-quality teachers trained in selective, academically challenging programs at a limited number of colleges and universities. 

 

With regard to the naïve enthusiasm of the Star Tribune editorial board for the Reimagine Minnesota recommendation, that board has once again tossed its commentary from a tower far away from the field of action and in a cultural context of American exceptionalism.  The errant enthusiasm demonstrated by that board in this case recalls the misplaced hopes its members placed on the efforts of Generation Next, the organization once led by R. T. Rybak,  who was so sincere in his dedication to K-12 change that he has now gone on to a more highly remunerative job at the Minneapolis Foundation.

 

Star Tribune readers must realize that staff at that newspaper is too reliant on establishment and high-profile political personages for information and is abominably ill-informed as to international systems that offer indication of the constituent elements of a truly excellent education.