Both Parties in Current Contract Negotiations Are Steeped in Intellectual Corruption >>>>> The Damage Wrought by Education Professors on the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and the Ed Graff Administration at the Minneapolis Public Schools

Both parties in current negotiations for a new Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) contract are deeply steeped in intellectual corruption.   Both the administration of Superintendent Ed Graff and the MFT bear the damage done by those campus low-lifers known as education professors.

 

The Ed Graff administration submitted as its response to Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) World’s Best Workforce (WBWF) regulations the following programs for academic year 2017-2018, with number of students served given in parentheses:

 

WBWF Program

 

(to prepare children to enter school, third graders to read, students of all ethnicities and at all economic levels to meet grade level standards, all students for career and college, and all students to graduate from high school)

 

(Number of participating students in parenthesis)

 

AVID [Advancement Via Individual Determination]  (1,921)

Check and Connect  (616)

Ethnic Studies & Social Justice Fellows  (544)

Fast Track Scholars (189)

GEMS & GiSE  (4,221)

                [Girls in Engineering, Mathematics, and Science;

                  Guys in Science and Engineering]

Grow Your Own Teacher Residency (3,394)

Jobs for America’s Graduates (167)

MTSS/ Multicultural Materials (6,984)

LearningWorks at Blake (91)

Office of Black Male Achievement (348)

Project SUCCESS (15,229)

RIS (Racially Identifiable Schools) Direct Support  (10,537)

Spring and Winter Academy  (5,220)

Urban Debate League  (394)

 

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Total Number of Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools:   36,961

 

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These programs come with significant outlays in the MPS budget but are also heavily subsidized by the provider organizations, making the programs appealing.  But despite the appealing appellations, most of these programs serve only a scant fraction of students enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools and not one of them is capable of raising achievement levels across the K-12 years.  Most of these programs have been around for many years;  fewer than 25% of African American, American Indian (Native American), Hispanic, Hmong, and Somali students are meeting grade level standards in reading and math.

 

Thus, these seductively labeled and heavily subsidized programs offer an attractive screen for presentation to the MDE for working to promote academic achievement, but there is nothing behind that screen that offers hope for raising achievement rates.

 

Beyond these programs, the Ed Graff administration offers Social and Emotional Learning and a new PK-5 reading curriculum, the former of which can never be more than an adjunct to explicitly academic initiatives, the latter of which is limited to reading.  That new Benchmark Literacy Program is sound in approach but prospects for success will be constricted by the mediocrity of K-5 teachers and the weakness of literature and English language usage programming in grades 6-12.

 

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As to the MFT, the ten-point program offered by the union as a basis for current contract negotiations is as follows:

 

1)   Beyond Academics:  Educating the Whole Child

2)   Smaller Class Sizes

3)   Students are More Than a Test Score

4)   Support, Don’t Punish:  Restorative Practices

5)   Clean and Healthy Buildings

6)   Full Service Community Schools

7)   Quality Education for All:  Inclusion and Equity

8)   Invest in Public Schools

9)   $15 an Hour for All MPS Employees

10)  Recess

 

The last seven points to the MFT negotiating platform are unobjectionable, calling for humane approaches to student discipline, proper building maintenance, health and welfare services to students from struggling families, education delivered equitably to a multi-ethnic student population, proper funding for programming and staff,  including the provision of a $15 minimum age, and recess time at K-5.

But the second point is highly debatable:  Many students in the history of the United States and in the contemporary world have been excellently educated in large classes.

And the first and third points contain the jargon of the education professor, establishing that same sort of screen erected by the Graff administration, behind which lies little substance as to knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education, delivered by knowledgeable teachers and measured by objective assessments.

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Thus, do current negotiations between the administration of MPS Superintendent Ed Graff and the MFT leadership contain particularistic differences depending on exact position in the hierarchy of the education establishment.  Graff and Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) staff must protect their own prerogatives and high salaries, and they must be attentive to budgetary limitations.  Teachers are out to secure their own best advantage as to wages and working conditions.

But philosophically the two sides in the negotiations are of a single kind.  They have both been trained by those lowest status occupants of the professorial role on any college or university campus:  the education professor.  Bearing so little of that knowledge possessed by professors of mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, economics, literature, art and music;  the education professor makes a place for herself or himself by devaluing knowledge impartation and exalting pedagogies delivered by facilitators rather than true teachers, who somehow are to instill critical thinking skills and a propensity toward lifelong learning in students to whom they provide limited knowledge for conducting critical analysis of complex topics and who depart their classrooms having learned so little.

This is a cruel hoax perpetrated upon our students by both sides in the current contract negotiations.

The hoax must cease.

We must set about providing our precious posterity with the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education toward fulfilment of the purposes of an excellent education:   to send young people forth to lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.