Throughout most of United States history, the
nation has for African American people operated as a totalitarian state.
As of 1789, most people of African heritage
counted constitutionally as “all other persons” who were not free, indentured,
or Native American. The free and the
indentured were counted in determining apportionment by states in the House of
Representatives; African Americans were
counted at the fractional three-fifths, while untaxed Native Americans were
counted not at all. Women were counted
for the purpose of determining representation in the House, but they had to
wait until 1920 to vote, and they awaited the late 1960s and early 1970s for
legal guarantees that moved them nearer to equality with men.
African American men should have achieved full
citizenship according to the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments, but the Compromise of 1877, Jim Crow, Black Codes, interposition,
nullification, vigilante judges, and lynching jurists favored de facto
practices over de jure formulations.
Formal citizenship for African Americans came with the 1964 Civil Rights
Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but a post-Reconstruction history of
migration and Northern-style segregation yielded urban ghettos wherein the
equality of opportunity inherent in democracy could not abide.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted on 2
July, fifty years ago at the publication of this new journal. But fifty years hence, we still do not have
democracy. We will only have democracy
when we provide excellent education to all of our young people, providing those
living at the urban core a genuine route out of the entrapment of
multigenerational poverty, pressures conducive to familial dysfunction,
recourse to pharmaceutical pleasure, easy money discovered en route to
incarceration, and a life that will never know the cultural sustenance, civic
preparation, and professional satisfaction that excellent education bestows.
An excellent education provides cultural
sustenance. The world comes alive in
appreciation of the musical forms of classical, jazz, rhythm and blues, blues,
folk, country, and rock and roll. The
visual cortex lights up with excitement in viewing the work of the Old Masters,
Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and Abstractionists. The cosmos becomes a source of wonder upon
contemplation of the great astronomical concatenation that followed a
tremendous explosion 13.8 billion years ago.
Language and dramatic insight flow from the literary treasures of
William Shakespeare and August Wilson.
Historical context explains the advent of Betty Friedan and Gloria
Steinhem, the power of their conviction, the impact of their activism. The
Pythagorean Theorem is seen for the sheer beauty of its explanatory
precision. Newtonian Laws of Motion
explain one’s traverse across earthly expanses, Einstein’s Relativity provides
introduction to worlds beyond worlds.
An excellent education provides civic
preparation. One understands the great
experiment of the Enlightenment that is the United States. The educated person has a grasp of constitutional
principles and can personally evaluate Supreme Court decisions. One understands the historical forces that
have produced roles and statuses pertinent to class and gender. She who has received an excellent education
knows the function and the functioning of the Electoral College, understands
caucus and primary, has the knowledge base to file for public office,
comprehends the array of issues necessary for effective campaigning. He who has the educational foundation to join
the informed electorate can determine on the basis of historical fact, national
relevance, and international circumstances the wisdom of sending the sons of
mothers and the daughters of fathers forth into potentially lethal battle.
An excellent education provides professional
satisfaction. Fueled with the power of
an excellent education, a person can take one’s position in the fields of
medicine, law, education, business, or agriculture. Given the options provided by an excellent
education, decisions regarding vocation may be rendered with considerations of
responsibility to the family formed of spouse, children, and relatives; and the family formed of humanity. Dedication to a satisfying job gives a person
a sense of dignity, the spirit of contributing to the familial and the greater
good, and the abiding assumption that at the end of this earthly journey a
legacy will remain.
People of all ethnicities of whatever economic
wherewithal deserve the cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and
professional satisfaction that an excellent education brings. Excellent education for most people must be
gained in the schools of locally centralized school districts. An excellent K-12 education is defined by
knowledge and skill sets especially yielding information across the liberal
arts of math, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), social science
(upon a foundation of history, geography, and economics; with introduction to political science,
psychology, sociology, and anthropology);
and the fine arts (visual and musical).
An excellent education can only be imparted by excellent teachers, who
by definition are pedagogically gifted professionals possessing deep and broad
subject area knowledge across the liberal arts.
The locally centralized school district is the
unit in the United States best positioned to impart an excellent
education. It also must be the
organization that provides teacher retraining, so that well-meaning and
dedicated teachers who truly strive for excellence can overcome the inadequacy
of their training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.
We must get this mission in our guts:
We must feel in the depths of our individual
and collective souls the responsibility to all of our precious children. We cannot wait until all families are the
perfections of our imagination. If all
families are not as we think they should be, be must embrace all children as
our own. Through excellent K-12
education we can shape a different world.
We can pay the debt of history and atone for the misdeeds of our
forbearers, even as we seize the instruments of democracy that our ancestors
have placed in our hands. For to be
sure, we can at last achieve true democracy by providing equal opportunity for
every person via our transformation of K-12 education.
The beauty
of all of this for those of us living in Minneapolis is that we have been
graced with an educational leader in Bernadeia Johnson who has the requisite
courage, the intellectual ability, and the manifest compassion that will be
needed to turn an underperforming school district into a model for urban
educational excellence. We need not go
to Guatemala to build schools, though that is a great service if we can do
that, too. We do not have to wait until
the next hurricane hits Haiti, although compassion for people in other places
is a wonderful thing. But there are
people very near your house, close to your community, living a short flight of
the robin from your abode, who await the justice to which you can contribute if
you care enough.
You need
not go to an international outpost, to Washington, D. C., or even to the state
Capitol in St. Paul to make a difference.
The opportunity to make an enormous difference lies in organizational
and personal effort to overhaul K-12 educational at the Minneapolis Public
Schools. You can voice support the
necessary overhaul at school board meetings and public forums. You can promote and work for school board candidates
who are not lackeys of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and the
Democrat Farmer Labor (DFL) party. You
can offer your own tutorial services and recruit others to assist teachers at
the High Priority Schools; and if you
can do this well, you will make a direct contribution to educational excellence
for every child.
And in
doing these things you will be helping to realize, for the first time in United States history, the vision of a democratic
society by revolutionizing K-12 education.
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