A Note to My
Readers >>>>>
Most articles pertinent
to K-12 education published in the Star
Tribune are mediocre and of tangential importance. Very few articles broach matters of
curriculum and teacher quality that go to the core of the K-12 dilemma. No questioning of Davis Center (Minneapolis
Public Schools central offices, 1250 West Broadway) staff quality or
effectiveness gains coverage in the Star
Tribune. There is an absence of any
mention of educational philosophy or structural impediments preventing the impartation
of an excellent education. An excellent
education is not defined. Editorial
board and staff writers typically resort to generalized terminology much in the
contemporary conversational ether, mere shibboleths useful for feigning
perspicacity in the absence of any genuine understanding of K-12 education.
Those who write
opinion pieces and secure publication in the Star Tribune focus on particularistic concerns of the moment but
rarely discuss the most fundamental factors abiding in the education
establishment that impede movement toward K-12 excellence.
Because of the lack
of knowledge betrayed by both Star
Tribune staffers and most of the opinion writers whom the editorial board
opts to publish, readers must be ever attentive to subtext and the underlying
issues. This blog provides the
information that readers need to be properly informed about K-12 education
generally and the locally centralized school district represented saliently by
the Minneapolis Public Schools
specifically.
As you scroll on the
blog, you will in time come to an article written by Katherine Kersten that
drew two counterpoints published by the Star
Tribune on Tuesday, 20 March (today as I tap out this note). Before I post my own response and
interpretation of the Kersten article, please read these responses and evaluate
the arguments of writers who pose themselves against Kersten and the very
conservative Center of the American Experiment , with which she is associated..
First of the two
responses was written by Tom Connell;
this article is actually in reply to an earlier 9 March report from the Star Tribune that focused on Minnesota
state legislation backed by the Center of the American Experiment addressing
the issue of liberal bias that conservatives assert is rampant in both K-12 and
post-secondary classrooms.
As you scroll on down
this blog you will find the text of Connell’s opinion piece, originally offered
to my readers for their own evaluation and search for subtext >>>>>
Here I reproduce the
article, this time interspersed with my own comments:
Tom Connell, “Let’s
Discuss Race Issues in Schools---
Calmly: That Means the Star Tribune Must Not Be a Tool of the
Flame-Throwing Center of the American Experiment” (Star Tribune, Opinion Exchange, 20 March 2018)
Propaganda from the
Center of the American Experiment has inspired dangerous racists to threaten
several Edina teachers with physical
violence. This situation goes beyond
normal political discourse, and we ask editors of the Star Tribune to refrain from reprinting the center’s incendiary
materials without placing them in proper context.
The March 9 story,
“Bill aims to limit politics in school” focused on testimony before a state
Senate education committee regarding a bill that would prohibit teachers from
directing students to research and argue for ideas that they don’t agree with.
The bill was inspired
by the center’s irresponsible but extremely well-funded allegations of
“indoctrination” in the Edina schools.
Unfortunately, the news story didn’t mention the threats to Edina
educators that arrived after the center’s claims were picked up by a neo-Nazi
website. The news story also failed to
report on testimony exposing problems with the center’s original report.
Had these two
elements been included in the story, I hope the online version would not have
been illustrated with the cover of the center’s magazine from October. That cover showed a 1950s-style female
teacher instructing two white children.
On a blackboard behind them is the phrase, “A is for activist.” Below the children is a provocative headline
beginning, “Whose values?”
The report has a
veneer of scholarship but is full of errors and distortions. Perhaps the worst is the reference to the
book featured in the illustration. When
Newt Gingrich wrote about the center’s work in an Oct. 25 column for Fox News,
he said that “grade school-aged students in the Edina system are learning the
alphabet by reading a book called “A is for Activist.”
My Comment
>>>>>
Connell has used a number of terms in his opinion piece that
very few students sufficiently understand.
Among those terms are activist, Neo-Nazi and, implicitly, Nazi. Students may have some general knowledge of
Adolf Hitler and his regime as guilty of crimes against Jewish people; and they may know something of Nazi
persecution of homosexuals, gypsies, and the infirm. But very few could distinguish the
totalitarian right as represented by the Nazis and the totalitarian left as represented
by Josef Stalin and the Soviets.
Students rarely have much knowledge of the political continuum that
moves from left to right, including leftist revolutionaries, communists,
socialists, liberals, centrists (moderates, middle-of-the-roaders),
conservatives, and reactionaries.
Connell’s own reference to the word, “activist,” is fuzzy and suggests
that the word is a pejorative, when in fact activists of the left, center, and
right are those who energetically try to assert their beliefs in an effort to
influence the making of public policy.
Students probably also do not know the identity and ideology of Newt Gingrich.
A key subtext in this article is that social studies is
terribly taught and the impartation of subject area knowledge organized under the
social studies category is flawed. Students
would be much better informed via specific study of history, government, economics,
and psychology than they are in murky and ill-defined social studies courses
with which they are inflicted, particularly at the K-5 and frequently also the
grades 6-8 levels.
Connell continues
>>>>>
This is verifiable
nonsense. As I testified in the hearing,
there is only one copy of the book in all of the Edina Public Schools. It exists only at one elementary school, and
it has never been checked out. I presented
the media center’s records to the committee.
The center’s report
is intentionally misleading from the cover page. The sole purpose of the publication and those
that followed was to create fear and anger in our community. And that they certainly have done.
Also worth noting is
that as these mischaracterizations and distortions made their way from Fox News
to Gingrich to Breitbart to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer (all during
the two weeks before Edina’s very contentious school board election), then
intensity of the criticism and viciousness of the threats grew
exponentially. My colleagues and I now
work in a climate in which teachers have been subjected to brutal harassment
and threats of violence for teaching the official curriculum--- literally for doing our jobs. Security has been increased in our schools.
While I do believe
the center distorted our school’s work in teaching a curriculum proven to close
achievement gaps in our increasingly diverse student body, I also doubt the authors
intended for things to go this far.
Likewise, a senator’s outburst during the committee meeting at a
testifier who mentioned the Nazi website was probably a gaffe and not evidence
of darker sympathies. The newspaper’s
decision to give the center free advertising by republishing the cover of its
report presumably wasn’t designed to make a bad situation worse.
My Comment
>>>>>
The official curriculum referenced by Connell is weak and
devoid of factual content. Any narrowing
of achievement gaps has been minimal.
Social studies was an area invented by education professors during the
middle 20th century to redirect focus from history, government, and economics
toward institutions relevant to family, neighborhood, and community immediately recognized by students as within
the realm of their own experiences. This
was part of a so-called “child-centered” approach to education that devalued
knowledge and encouraged classroom adult staff to become “guides” and “facilitators”
rather than teachers, catering to the immediate interests of students in the
generation of curriculum, rather than imparting knowledge and skill sets in
careful grade by grade sequence.
This denial of the abundant vocabulary and information entailed in the study of history, government, economics, and psychology; and over the latter course of the K-12
experience the study of sociology and anthropology; is a major reason for the achievement gap: Beyond a certain level of fundamental
understanding of phonics and phonemic awareness, subject area knowledge and a
broad, comprehensive vocabulary are the most important requirements for
advanced reading capability. Students
who families face challenges of educational level, finances, and functionality
are even less likely to gain the knowledge and skill sets necessary for understanding mathematic
word problems and wide-ranging reading material than those whose families are
better educated, more economically prosperous, and viably functional.
Connell continues
>>>>>
However, giving
everyone the benefit of the doubt doesn’t change the fact that at a time of
heightened concern about violence in schools, every one of these acts increases
the scrutiny of our teachers in Edina, thus further threatening our security.
It’s time to take a
breath. The center and its national
network of allies must clearly and publicly renounce violence and
harassment. It’s time for politicians to
listen with more sympathy. And we all
need Minnesota’s newspaper of record to make more careful choices in how it
reports this story.
My Final Comment
>>>>>
Tom Connell focuses on a matter of sociological and
legislative significance, but the article is of tangential importance to
excellence of K-12 education. By virtue
of his training under education professors in order to gain licensure, he most
likely has imbibed the invidious ideology of those least regarded of all occupants of academic sinecures. That anti-knowledge ideology is the gravest
harm inflicted upon students in K-12 systems of education. A knowledgeable and pedagogically skilled
teacher moves forward with the impartation of important subject area content and
the conducting of vigorous class discussion, ever apt at wending her or his way
through evanescent legislative concerns and statutes of the moment; and properly disregarding all that she or he was told by intellectually lightweight education professors.
The real problem to be recognized for subtext in Connell’s
article is the low quality of classroom instruction that will persist in the
absence of the needed overhaul of K-12 education, whatever the ephemeral
concerns that currently abide at the state capitol, in the state capital, and in
the public ether.
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