Brutal Reality as to the Quality of K-12 Education Imparted by the Minneapolis Pubic Schools

Even for those of you who know that things are bad at the Minneapolis Public Schools, be assured that matters are much worse than you think.

 

This is a system, salient representative of the locally centralized school district, that is mired in dysfunction, inflicted with an impoverished philosophy, and burdened with careerist central office staff more concerned with their own advancement than they are with the academic and therefore life prospects of the children whom they should be serving.

 

The members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education (KerryJo Felder, Don Samuels, Siad Ali, Kim Ellison, Nelson Inz, Jenny Arneson, Rebecca Gagnon, Ira Jourdain, and Bob Walser) are variously clueless or conniving.  Many are more concerned with their own professional and political prospects than they are with the children of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Rebecca Gagnon and Nelson Inz in particular are political hacks who helped to oust change advocates Tracine Asberry and Josh Reimnitz in the election of November 2016;  but all eight of the members other than Don Samuels have close ties to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT), and Samuels regrettably has been a failure as a board member.

 

Superintendent Ed Graff is disastrously  in over his head in the role of leader for a district serving a plurality of African American students.  He is not comfortable in an inner city, urban environment, and has little grasp of the program needed to deliver knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to students of all demographic descriptors, including those from challenging circumstances of family finances and functionality.  Graff has a public demeanor of cool reserve, but in private he has moments of astonishing petty and mean-spirited conduct.  He was a failure at his last post in Anchorage, Alaska, serving at the behest of a board that ultimately declined to renew his contract.  He is degreed and certified via insubstantial programs in education, manifesting no notable academic credentials or intellectually astute characteristics of the sort needed to advance a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum.  Academic achievement rates in Anchorage were no better, and in some categories worse, than those that have persisted under his now nearly two years of leadership of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

You would never know any of this from the articles that you read in the Star Tribune, decision-making editorial and feature staff at which give appearance of caring more about provoking responses and building readership via the presentation of articles concerned with matters tangential to the delivery of excellent public education than they do in pursuing issues at the core of the K-12 dliemma.

 

Reviewed below are the actual external and internal reasons for the low quality of education at the Minneapolis Public Schools as salient representative of the locally centralized K-12 school district.  The first set of reasons concerns the larger context within which the locally centralized school district dwells;  the second set of reasons concerns the elements within the locally centralized school district itself that promote the impartation of such wretched education.         

 

My investigation into the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), detailed in my substantially complete book (Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect) on course for presentation of final draft in May 2018, reveals these external and internal reasons for the abominable quality of education delivered by this salient representative of the locally centralized school district.

 

Now please consider:

External Reasons for the Abominable Quality of Education at the Minneapolis Public Schools

 

1)  Personnel at colleges and universities do not care about K-12 education;  they are content to make money off the lives of young people while sustaining the careers of themselves and their fellow staff members.  Education professors are the least regarded of the professorial presences at any college or university;  post-secondary administrators and professors have at least a remote understanding of the philosophical corruption of those who train K-12 bureaucrats and teachers, yet they accept and sustain their presence on campus.  Furthermore, since teacher training programs are cash cows that generate huge revenue for colleges and universities, administrators in those settings reap material benefit.  As for professors in legitimate academic departments, they like to complain with an air of superiority about the wretched knowledge and skill sets of students sent forth to them from K-12 systems, but they are content to perch in their sinecures without taking any action.  And pressed, very few professors have any cogent philosophy of education, content as they are to retreat to the comfort of “my field.”

     

2)  Most putative reformers have grave flaws.  They tend to emphasize matters such as alternative licensure, school choice, charter schools, vouchers, and legislative initiatives.  None of these emphases accomplish any change at the level of the locally centralized school district.  Teachers unions (e. g., Education Minnesota and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers [MFT]) wield enormous power;  they purchase the support of Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) politicians and give Republican legislators a well-deserved cold shoulder.  Teachers unions always go into motion to defeat or sabotage any reform initiative;  they must be taken on courageously at the local level, because given the penchant for control in the United States any substantive and enduring change will occur in K-12 education at the level of the locally centralized school district.

 

3)  The public is variously clueless or indifferent about K-12 education.  Citizens mostly do not embrace the responsibility for citizenship;  they are ill-informed and frequently misguided.  With regard to matters pertinent to K-12 education, the public apparently trusts that there is something called the education professional who understands how to superintend school district and K-12 education;  but there is no such entity as the education professional, in the sense that there are professional physicians and attorneys.  Administrators and teachers at the K-a2 level have all been trained in abysmal departments, colleges, and schools of education;  they are not academicians or scholars, and they do not believe in knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.  In this context, the harm inflicted by public ignorance and apathy about those who oversee wretched systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools is magnified.

 

4)  Reporting on K-12 education at newspapers such as the Star Tribune ranges from mediocre to abysmal.   Steve Brandt, Alejandro Matos, Beena Raghavendran, and Anthony Lonetree have all written articles that are at best serviceable;  at times, their articles betray their misinformation and naivete.  Writers Mila Koupilova, Maryjo Webster, and Faiza  Mahamud have recently written articles of like mediocrity and ingenuousness.

Internal Reasons for the Abominable Quality of Education at the Minneapolis Public Schools, with an Indication As to What Must Be Done to Create Bright Future Prospects

 

1)  Those making key decisions regarding curriculum are not dedicated to a knowledge-intensive, skill replete education.  Ed Graff, Michael Thomas, Cecilia Saddler, Naomi Taylor, and Carey Seeley have all trained under education professors who devalue knowledge as the key pursuit of K-12 education.  Only Michael Thomas gives compelling evidence as an educator with the capacity to serve as the change agent needed to overhaul the processes at the Minneapolis Public Schools for the delivery of an excellent, knowledge-intensive, skill-replete quality of K-12 education.

 

2)  Curriculum at the Minneapolis Public Schools is extraordinarily weak:  Students at K-5 learn very little regarding the key subject areas of biology, chemistry, physics, history, geography, economics, and the fine arts,  and they read very little challenging, high-quality literature;  students at grades 6-8 fare little better; and high school curriculum is bolstered only by the presence of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses, for which too few knowledgeable teachers are available.

 

3)  Teachers come to their positions ill-prepared;  those at K-5 have endured the weakest program on any college or university campus;  those at grades 6-8 and 9-12 may be certified even with lackluster performance in their subject area undergraduate programs, and they rarely pursue advanced degrees in any programs other than education.

 

4)  There is no district-wide, coherent tutoring program to assist struggling students.

 

5)  Efforts to reach out to families struggling with poverty and dysfunction are few and ineffective.

 

6)  Central bureaucracy staffing is bloated and staff is overpaid, with 68 staff members (of a total 444) receiving salaries in excess of $100,000.

 

7)  The guiding Strategic Plan Acceleration 2020 is a mere exercise in setting goals for student achievement, none of which have been reached;  the plan offers no viable means for boosting student performance and errantly identifies the school as the unit of change, rather than correctly designating the district as a whole for transformation.

 

8)  The district’s Educational Equity Framework is a jargon-infested document that typifies the tendency of district decision-makers and members of the MPS Board of Education to profess concern for student outcomes and equity in the abstract while offering no plan for moving verbal proclamation to action.

 

9)  The fourteen programs identified for meeting Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) World’s Best Workforce r(WBWF) regulations for closing racial achievement gaps or boosting academic performance for impoverished students have no prospects success;  they serve too few students and have too little academic focus.

 

10)  Members of the MPS Board of Education, individually and collectively, have no guiding educational philosophy;  they ask few discerning questions regarding academic programming and have no committee dedicated to advancing the academic program of the district.

 

11)  The teacher’s union, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT), resists objective measurement of student performance and the establishment of knowledge-intensive curriculum;  eight of the nine MPS Board of Education members have strong ties to this politically powerful union.

 

12)  Disciplinary policies in MPS schools are weak:  Many teachers have so little control over their  classes that very little learning occurs;  cases at Folwell K-8, Justice Page (formerly Ramsay) K-8, and North High School have come to my attention as particularly eggregious.

 

13)  Building principals are so weak as to engender an extra layer of bureaucracy occupied by associate superintendents (four in number);  with weak academic training themselves, Ron Wagner, Laura Cavender, Lucilla Davila, and Carla Steinbach are paid $144,333 per annum to try to improve site level leadership.

 

14)  Students are not prepared well for either the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) or the ACT college readiness exam;  teachers resist the former, which has been vitiated by opt-out tactics, and few teachers are academically competent enough to prepare students for the latter.

 

15)  Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning Michael Thomas has potential for articulating a better academic program;  Chief of Research, innovation, Assessment, and Accountability Eric Moore is a talented statistician;  and Finance Chief Ibrahima is a person of enormous integrity and considerable talent;  but on the whole performance of staff members at the Davis Center ranges from wretched to merely acceptable, and high salaries promote the comfort of sinecure rather than courageous calls for change.

 

This is a school district long mired in trouble.

 

This is a school district that must be dismantled and reconstructed with dedication to knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education for students of all demographic descriptors.        

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Consider, then, my readers, the need for your own commitment to change at the Minneapolis Public Schools, salient representative of the locally centralized school district, the level at which the needed overhaul must occur in Minneapolis and throughout the United States. 

In view of the external and internal situation given above, staff at postsecondary institutions, ill-focused and in some cases ill-intentioned reformers, journalists, and the general public provide a framework within which K-12 administrators and teachers inflict such an abominable quality of education upon our precious young people.

 

With this realization, activists operating at the level of the locally centralized school district must pursue tactics and strategies for overhauling K-12 education.