No More Business as Usual after Summer 2018 >>>>> Update on the Advanced Draft for My Nearly Complete Book, >Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> MPS Condemned by the Scathing Truth of Data

While still anticipating a few final meetings, school visitations, and data collections before the text for Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect is fully complete, that tome is rapidly gaining assemblage. 

 

I have long had the book set up in three separate files for Part I, Facts;  Part II, Analysis;  and Part III, Philosophy;  with certain items not likely to change over time firmly in place.  I am now rapidly sorting the great wealth of material that I have collected and generated during these last several months for placement in the appropriate part of the book.

 

The facts section of the book features all manner of data and information on the administrative organization of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS);  staff membership by department;  description of departmental functions;  budget and finance;  school board organization and composition; Minneapolis Federation of Teachers;  Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan;  Educational Equity Framework;  student academic performance over a half-decade;  how that performance breaks down for the schools for which each of the associate superintendents has responsibility;  credentials and training for key academic program decision-makers;  salary of the entire Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) staff;   new teacher contract;  median teacher salary information;  credentials and degrees for MPS teachers;  social and emotional learning initiative;  new Benchmark reading program;  plan to provide multi-tiered support for struggling students;  and programs designated to meet Minnesota Department of Education World’s Best Workforce (WBWF) regulations for assuring equity and academic proficiency for all students.

 

The analysis section evaluates those items that appear in the facts section with the most persistent lens trained on student academic performance, knowledge level, skill acquisition, and readiness for life post-graduation.

 

The philosophy section of the book presents my vision for excellent education delivered by excellent teachers in the locally centralized school district of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  I place the current circumstances of the public schools in historical context, providing an overview of the history of education in the United States;  the development of teacher colleges on university campuses as they evolved from independent normal schools;  the origin and defining characteristics of the role of education professors;  and  the origins of the philosophy of education professors as they appropriated the names “progressive” and “constructivist”  for a creed that came to have such unprogressive and destructive consequences.  I connect this specific history of education in the United States to the forces in United States and African American history that have given us the wretched systems of public education that we have in this nation, in general and with particular attention to systems prevailing at the urban core.  I explore the conflicting and competing notions of school reform with reference to the leading proponents of those notions;  and I present my five-point program for revolutionizing the locally centralized school district for the provision of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education for students of all demographic descriptors.

 

Part I condemns the Minneapolis Public Schools program and personnel on the basis of the objective data.


Part II explains in full the nature of the condemnation.


Part III details the revolutionary program for making MPS a model of educational excellence at the level of the locally centralized school district.

 

Quite a book.

 

Quite a revolution.

 

There will be no more business as usual after summer 2018.