We Must Convince the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) to Commit to Thorough Retraining >>>>> (Part Five of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members)

Teachers are abominably trained. 

 

Education professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education throughout the United States are philosophically united around a harmful creed known as “constructivism,” which takes student experiential frames of reference and avid personal interests as the driving forces of curriculum.  In a system undergirded by this approach for identifying what is to be studied, teachers are conceptualized as “facilitators,” classroom presences adept at understanding the life experiences of students, listening to young people talk about their passions, and directing learners to resources appropriate to their life experiences and interests.

 

There is much that is initially appealing about this conceptualization of the educational experience, especially in the United States.  People in the United States frequently see themselves as rugged individualists, free to do, live, worship, work, and congregate as they choose.  To rugged individualists, there is a great deal of appeal in the notion of a freewheeling classroom of happy, smiling students enthralled with an educational experience that focuses on them, pitched to their interests, with a classroom facilitator interfering as little as possible with the students’ exciting educational journey.    

 

But such an approach shortchanges students.

 

By not transmitting to them what is their cultural inheritance, we rob students of the great body of knowledge and wisdom accumulated over the centuries from the greatest mathematicians, most brilliant scientists, finest literary masters, most adroit historians, and most supremely talented practitioners of the fine arts. 

 

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Low are the odds that a young student is going to gain an early understanding of the specific Native American groups who populated the two continents of the Western Hemisphere, the importance of Columbus’s voyages to the Americas, the injustices of the Middle Passage, the essential principles of the United States Constitution, or the presidencies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson---  unless a knowledgeable teacher presents information and directs discussions about these major historical events and personages. 

 

Unlikely in the extreme will students in the early grades come to know the difference between

deciduous trees and evergreens, exactly what causes and constitutes different forms of precipitation, what plants thrive in the tropics versus those that persist under desert conditions, how cells promote the growth of bodily tissue and anatomical organs, why Copernicus was so insightful in describing the universe as heliocentric, how Gregor Mendel revolutionized our understanding of heredity and genetics with his seminal work---   unless a teacher who knows and cares about such things conveys the wonder of scientific discovery to students.

 

Not at all predictable will be the student’s path to understanding the cultural contexts that have given us classical, blues, jazz, rock, and hip-hop music;  the musical forms that determine the classification of those musical genres;  the defining elements of tap, folk, ballet, ballroom, and hip-hop dancing;   the musical concepts of melody, pitch, and harmony;  or the distinguishing features of West African, Renaissance European, Song Dynasty, American Realist, or International Cubist visual art forms---  unless a culturally and artistically astute teacher animates a classroom with the sheer glory of these extraordinary human accomplishments in the fine arts.

               

Nor will young students be privy to the elegant simplicity of Arabic numerals;  the interplay of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in solving and explaining so many practical problems;  the thematic unity of fractions, decimals, and percentages;  the art of selecting which of these expressions of part to whole is most efficiently applied to a given circumstance;  the magnificent equilibrium of the algebraic equation;  the combination of art and science to be observed in geometric two-dimensional and three dimensional shapes---   unless a teacher alive in the world of mathematics conveys its power and beauty to students.

 

And there is not much chance that students will gain introduction to literary masterpieces such as the A. E. Milne Winnie the Pooh books;  the stories from One Thousand One Arabian Nights;  the strange worlds that Louis Carrol created in Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass;  the power of the African American folktale, The People Could Fly; or the Native American tale, Inktomi Has Two Eyes -----  unless a teacher who truly appreciates and reads high-quality literature models such love in transmission to students. 

 

And yet these are all realms of knowledge in the worlds of natural science, history, fine arts, mathematics and literature over which children as young as those in the Grade K-2 years can roam with acute understanding when taught by a teacher of intellectual substance, rather than a mere functional facilitator.  Indeed, the examples of the knowledge base that very young children are capable of building may be found in the Core Knowledge curriculum of E. D. Hirsch, and in my own full description of curriculum properly sequenced for transmission by teachers throughout the K-12 years in the immediately prior edition (Volume I, No. 2, August 2014) of this Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.    

 

When we give students room to make their own decisions for research efforts, we must make sure that they have a solid informational base on which to identify topics for investigation.  When we ask young people critically to analyze an issue, we must ensure that they have the factual knowledge necessary to inform their analysis.  We take from our students something very precious when we deny to them their cultural inheritance in mathematics, literature, history, natural science, and the fine arts.

 

And if we deny them thusly, we send our students across the stage at graduation, after thirteen years of schooling, almost as ignorant as they were when they entered Grade K---  however thoroughly their egos have been massaged on the flimsy notion that the curriculum should be guided upon their own whims.

                                                                                               

The level of knowledge that abides in the heads of most high school graduates is unconscionable.

 

To correct this violation of a public trust, to rectify our failure to provide common skill and knowledge sets to all of our precious young people, whatever their demographic descriptors, we need better teachers.  We need teachers who respect knowledge and have it rumbling along their neural pathways, ready to be imparted with conviction, energy, joy.

 

To do this we must overleap the impediments posed by the vapid creed of education professors in our departments, colleges, and schools of education.

 

At the central school district level, we must retrain our teachers to deliver the advanced curricular content that I detailed in the immediately prior edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

 

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Over the long haul, we need to dissolve our departments, colleges, and schools of education and come to a consensus on a new approach to training teachers. 

 

But this will take a lifetime or two, and we do not have time to wait.

 

We must immediately implement my program for training and certification of primary and secondary teachers of substantive intellect and exemplary pedagogical skill. 

 

My program focuses on an approach that would transform teacher training throughout the United States.  The approach to be implemented nationally follows logically from the program of teacher training that I assert to be ideal for the Minneapolis Public Schools.  The transformation nationally will require much time to confront entrenched interests of the many adults in the education establishment who benefit from the current system that is so deleterious to the interests of excellent teachers and students waiting to receive a substantive education.   The program designed for the Minneapolis Publics Schools could be implemented immediately, given full focus and dedication to the task, before that time when we can expect to dismantle departments, schools, and colleges of education.   

 

The immediate task is to retrain teachers newly certified after participating in current, useless programs of teacher preparation.  As to veteran teachers, my abiding estimate is that no more than 10% of the teachers presently on staff in the Minneapolis Public Schools are truly excellent;  15% are so terrible that they never should have been allowed in a classroom;  and the remainder fall in the broad 75% that are intolerably mediocre.  The terrible teachers in that 15% category will most likely always be terrible and in almost all cases will have to be jettisoned.  Most teachers in the 75% category of mediocrity should be given the option to retrain and prove their mettle for retention.  For those already operating at levels of true excellence, incentives should be put in place for them to retrain according to processes detailed in these articles, but a flexible approach may be utilized for those already manifesting abundant knowledge and high-level performance.

 

In the article that I will post on this blog tomorrow, I will provide a summary of the essential features for teacher retraining that we must convince the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers leadership and rank and file to undergo, so that they can reach their potential as teachers and impart a truly excellent education to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.