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

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 clear reasons for the abominable quality of education delivered by this salient representative of the locally centralized school district.

 

I detailed the internal reasons in a recent article.  In this article I present the external reasons for the wretched education imparted to MPS students, as follows:

 

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-12 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.

 

In this situation, 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.