In considering the essentials of teacher
retraining at the Minneapolis Public Schools, be reminded of these definitions
and a firm conviction:
Definition #1:
An
excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal
arts curriculum in specified, grade by grade sequence to all students
throughout the K-12 years.
Definition #2:
An
excellent teacher is a person of broad and deep knowledge, with the pedagogical
skill to impart this knowledge to all students.
Firm Conviction
People are
highly intelligent creatures. All people
possessing IQs of 85 and above may learn anything there is to know.
Once we get this conviction in our guts, we
must acknowledge that the important factor for learning great amounts of
information concerns rate of intake and processing. People whose cognition operates at higher IQ
levels will learn more rapidly than those whose IQs are in the lower
range. We then adjust our rate of
delivery and our schedules projected for student acquisition of information
accordingly. But we proceed on the
absolute conviction that the great bulk of students can learn anything, and
that they can be properly prepared to take advanced courses no later than the
high school years.
We then do acknowledge that some students,
those operating below IQs of 85, are not likely to learn some information at an
acceptable rate during the K-12 years.
Even with this acknowledgment, we must be cautious. Cognitive assessments are extremely useful
but imperfect. We must maintain high
expectations for learners traditionally consigned to “special education”
classes, aspiring to give them the rich skill and knowledge sets that our
enhanced curriculum offers. We then try
hard, observe
astutely, and adjust schedules as
necessary. Even people who do give
evidence of genuine cognitive impairment have capacities to learn, feel, and
experience for which they frequently are not credited. We must do our very best culturally to enrich
every single child entrusted to our intellectual nurturing; then we must manifest the skill to make
judgments as to the learning capacity for those who process information very
slowly. We must sensitively and
accurately adjust learning schedules accordingly.
With our definitions of an excellent education
and an excellent teacher residing at the upper levels of our
consciousness; and upon the conviction
that human beings are highly intelligent creatures; we must then set about creating highly
educated students by giving them an excellent teacher in every single
classroom.
……………………………………………………………………..
In order to impart to our students their
rightful inheritance of the rich storehouse of knowledge that has been
generated by their fellow human beings, we need better teachers.
We must energetically be about the task of
training teachers to deliver the high-quality, advanced curriculum.
We must retrain teachers at the level of the
central school district, with the training that we render in our own
Minneapolis Public Schools as the model that other school districts will
follow.
To revolutionize teacher training is to
revolutionize the human experience.
Knowledge is empowerment. To empower teachers with knowledge is to
create in them the high potential for transforming the lives of young people
who have waited far too long to receive a substantive education.
As things stand now, many young people in the
Minneapolis Public Schools are not graduating as a technical matter, which
denies to them important certification in the workaday world via a high school
diploma; almost as bad is the prevailing
circumstance that those who do walk across a stage at the end of their senior
year to claim that formal certification lack the knowledge base that a diploma
should signify.
Many of our students graduate without
understanding fractions, decimals, or percentages; much less, then, do they understand algebra,
geometry, trigonometry, statistics, or calculus.
Many graduates of the Minneapolis Public
Schools have no ability to read Shakespearean literature, most have never heard
of August Wilson, and in fact even the mere names of Jane Austen, Mark Twain,
Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lorraine Hansberry, Ernest Hemingway,
Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Gwendolyn Brooks, John
Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, or Maya Angelou echo
faintly if at all. Most graduates cannot
write an acceptable essay, nor do they have the ability to conduct research or
to produce papers with proper citations (footnote, endnote, or internal).
Most graduates cannot tell you how long ago
the Big Bang occurred, and they do not know when the Earth was formed or
anything about the processes that formed our planet. They cannot trace the evolutionary development
of plant and animal life on Earth, and they cannot identify the importance of
Australopithecus, homo habilis, or homo erectus. They could not tell you about the importance
of neural synapses, chemical bonding, or the difference between nuclear fission
and nuclear fusion. Mention the names
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Curie and you’ll see a lot of dazed
eyes and hear confused mumbling. They
may know that Albert Einstein had some wild hair and said something about “E”
being equal to “MC-squared,” but they could tell you little about the physics
of energy, mass, and velocity, or the relativity of time in space.
Graduating seniors cannot as a rule separate
out very clearly the defining features of the great river valley civilizations
or tell you much about Egypt--- other
than that the latter had some cool
pyramids and some ruler-types called
pharaohs. Ask students to explain
clearly why the civilizations of ancient Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire,
Han Dynasty China, the Mauryan Emperor Asoka, Charlemagne, the Abbasid Muslim
Empire, empire of Songhay, or Mayan civilization are of such importance to
humankind’s past--- and they’ll be hard-pressed to give you anything resembling
an acceptable answer. Many would
struggle to distinguish a meteorite from a Shi’ite.
Our graduates typically walk across the stage
to claim a piece of paper that does not signify any understanding of Classical
Roman versus Gothic architecture; the
style of the Renaissance master painters versus those of the Impressionists,
Expressionists, Cubists, Surrealists, or abstract Modernists. They most likely could not identify whether a
recording played for them is Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven; Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, or John Lee
Hooker. They would be at a loss to
explain how exactly the disparate traditions of Ma Rainey and Hank Williams
gave us Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.
Ask them to describe the contributions to architecture made by Albert
Suger, Fillipo Brunelleschi, and Frank Lloyd Wright--- and those puzzled expressions would grow more
intense.
…………………………………………………………………………………
This will change with the implementations of
knowledge-intensive curriculum that I detail in Volume I, No. 2, August 2014 of
my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis,
Minnesota; and the training of
teachers able to impart such a curriculum, detailed in Volume I, No. 3, August
2014 of the journal.
Deliver to young people an abundant store of
knowledge in mathematics, natural science, history, language arts, and fine
arts and we transform their lives. Add
to those core subjects of the liberal arts the training detailed in the second
edition of the journal for world languages, industrial arts, physical education, and an abundance of
specialized courses in the social sciences---
and we send a new kind of human being forth into a world that they will
make better. They will apply for
employment confidently as they prepare for lives of professional
satisfaction; but, just as important,
they will live lives of cultural enrichment and civic engagement. They will have the information base and the
interest to vote, to be sure. But they
will also be motivated to be active citizens, showing up at public forums,
organizing for community and institutional improvement, and volunteering not as
rote, guilt-driven, episodic exercise---
but as human empathy put to altruistic action in the service of people
considered part of the human family.
To give students the knowledge base that they
will need to live such high-quality lives, we will need to view teachers in a
whole new way, and to train them accordingly.
Concisely stated,
K-5 teachers will undergo a full academic
year, 34 weeks in all, of training that will result in their receiving a
rigorous Masters of Liberal Arts degree.
Multiple weeks will be dedicated to the study of mathematics through
calculus; the natural sciences of
biology, chemistry, and physics; history,
economics, and psychology; world
literature and English usage; and the
fine arts (visual and musical).
Teachers at grades 6-12 will be credited for a
bachelor’s degree pertinent to the subjects that they will teach. They must then pursue and receive a master’s
degree in a discipline related to their teaching specialty; master’s degrees in education will not be
recognized.
Teachers at both grades K-5 and 6-12 will undergo
a full year as interns, at the end of which they will be evaluated for positions
as teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Teachers will thus be professionals who have undergone
rigorous training comparable to that of physicians and attorneys; accordingly, their pay will be raised to a
median of $95,000 (from the current approximate figure of $67,000), with top
earners receiving salaries of $155,000. Such
public sector salaries will not quite those of private sector physician and attorney
counterparts but will recognize teacher professionalism and represent significant
monetary upgrades. With teachers thus
trained, the Department of Teaching and Learning, the Office of Black Male
Achievement, and the Associate Superintendent positions will be eliminated.
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We must have such education for our precious
children. We must allow those currently
mired in generational poverty to break the cycle. And beyond the break-through into economic
stability, we must give children of all demographic descriptors lives of
cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction for the
common good of the human family.
We can do this through the power of a
knowledge-rich education, imparted to all members of the family named Humanity,
by high-knowledge, fully professionalized teachers.
