Reportage in that newspaper is mediocre at best and never involves issues that have more than tangential relevance to the constituent elements of an excellent education.
If one were only to depend on the surface meaning of articles published in the Star Tribune, one would be forever operating at the periphery of the vital core of K-12 academic excellence.
Readers have been witness to these truths in a spate of articles that have appeared in the Star Tribune over the course of the last weeks of March and the beginning of April.
First came a series of articles engendered by the reportorial mediocrity evident in coverage of a slight uptick in graduation rates In Minnesota. Former Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Peter Hutchinson pounced on that one, pointing out that the knowledge and skill levels of Minnesota graduates are so low that diplomas are a fraud; then the editorial board of the Star Tribune tried to retreat to a position similar to that of Hutchinson but in the end resorted to a typically vague appeal to educators to employ strategies that have proven successful, apparently lost in the irony that the paucity of such strategies is exactly why we are mired in mediocrity.
Then came the fury that followed upon Katherine Kersten’s article, “Undisciplined.”
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Kersten’s article issued a dire warning that great disorder was going to result from pressure exerted by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) on school districts wherein African American youth, especially males, have been suspended far in excess of their percentage representation in the student populations of those districts.
Kersten is closely associated with the conservative Center of the American Experiment, which has backed legislation to prevent teachers, deemed by the Center to be overwhelmingly politically leftist, from requiring that students express opinions on controversial issues. Two teachers, Tom Connell and Daniel Bordman, weighed in against that legislation via separate opinion pieces, thematically participating in the fury induced by the Kersten article.
Connell objected to the accusation by the Center of the American Experiment that teachers in his Edina school district have been indoctrinating students with materials urging them to engage in leftist activism. He views the proposed legislation as inspired by those false accusations and misguided concerns, creating additional pressures on teachers who already feel besieged.
Bordman argued against the proposed legislation for the capacity to prevent vigorous discussion in social studies classes, where civic participation is learned.
Directly addressing Kersten’s own article regarding MDHR investigation of school district suspension policies and actions, Julia Hill and Dana Bennis asserted that the article was contemptible and that Kersten cast aspersions on the African American family while ignoring a host of systemically racist features that abide in the public school system.
And Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius sounded notes harmonious with those of Hill and Bennis, labeling Kersten a racist, defending the MDHR investigation as a sincere effort to reveal systemic discrimination, and arguing that such discrimination denies the right of all students to an education that will prepare them for work and social success.
In the last article responding to that of Kersten, African American mother and advocate Laura Gilliam also assigned the racist label to Kersten but argued that systemic racism is the greater problem: assumptions that African American students are not destined to an advanced academic course of study, the supposition that disorderly behavior must necessarily involve black children, the many ways in which neither children of color nor their parents are made to feel welcome in the school community, and the composition of overwhelmingly white teaching staffs so pervasive as to preclude many children from having in any given year a teacher whose ethnicity they share.
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As you scroll on down the blog, you will have the opportunity to review these articles and my detailed sub-textual analysis of these items that gained publication in the Star Tribune.
Here consider these key points >>>>>
The mediocrity of Star Tribune coverage draws reader attention to the tangent and away from the core of K-12 excellence, about which staff at the newspaper has no clue.
Peter Hutchinson’s highly valid comments concerning the fraudulence of the high school diploma in Minnesota must be considered against the fact that Hutchinson oversaw the delivery of such diplomas into the hands of graduates during his tenure as superintendent, and that he has exerted no effort in the twenty years hence to promote needed change.
Bordman and Connell would have more persuasive arguments if the typical social studies course conveyed any substantive body of knowledge concerning history, government, or economics.
Katherine Kersten is skilled at raising questions true to her politically rightist ideology, but her faith in the unfettered individual to forge a better future for self and family is naïve, and she joins most of the rest of humanity in viewing life on the basis of the false notion of free will.
Jill and Bennis undermine their valid observations concerning systemic racism by denying the statistically verifiable challenges faced by families living at the urban core that frequently prevent them from being acceptably functional.
Cassellius, having overseen a system of sustained academic mediocrity in Minnesota during her tenure as commissioner, wobbles on uncertain turf when she maintains that suspended students are not getting the education that academically abuses those students who do get to stay in class.
Laura Gilliam needs to gather her justified righteous anger against a racially and generally abusive system as energy for participation in the K-12 Revolution to promote overhaul of the locally centralized school district on the basis of knowledge intensity, teacher excellence, skill development, family resources, and bureaucratic paring.
Look in vain for any appearance of these features of academic excellence when you read articles in the Star Tribune, but dutifully hold these features in our own consciousness as you analyze these articles and make of them much more in your brain than they will ever be as presented by staff at that publication.
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