How Many Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools Have the Necessary Knowledge Sets to Evaluate the Current Drama in the United States Senate Regarding the Brett Kavanaugh Hearing?

As a national drama unfolds in the United States Senate with the dueling testimonies of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, how many students in the Minneapolis Public Schools have the knowledge sets required to understand what is at stake?  Putting aside, for the purposes of the key question herein, the salacious details of Kavanaugh’s high school and college misdeeds, which may rise to the level of criminality in a state having no statute of limitations, how many students even have much of an idea as to the importance of a United States Supreme Court Justice nomination?

 

In addition to my book on the inner workings of the Minnesota Public Schools (Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect), I am also continuing to move toward completion of another work, for which I have finished writing eleven of fourteen chapters and that I am already reading with my students as a conveyor of knowledge and skill sets that they do not receive in the Minneapolis Public Schools.  This book is titled Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, focused on the key subject areas of mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, world history, American history, African American history, economics, psychology, political science, world religions, world literature, English usage, and fine arts.

 

An excerpt from the political science chapter reads as follows:      

 

There are nine members of the United States Supreme Court.  They may serve until they opt to retire.  Current members of the U. S. Supreme Court include Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel  A. Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen G. Breyer.  Scalia, Alito, and Thomas are the staunch conservatives (strict constructionists) among the current members of the Supreme Court.  Ginsburg, Kagan,Sotomayor,  and Breyer are the liberals (emphasizing the contemporary context for application of constitutional principles).  Chief Justice Roberts leans toward the conservative side but has flexibility that occasionally might put him on the side of liberals, as in a key case involving the Affordable Health Care Act.  Justice Kennedy ironically sided with the conservatives in that case but in general is the key moderate often considered to be the “swing vote” in cases that go before the Supreme Court.

 

The major responsibility and power of the Supreme Court is known as judicial review, which entails deciding if statutory laws (laws passed by Congress) and actions taken by members of the executive branch (including the president) are constitutional.  This power accrued to the Supreme Court as a result of the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1803 case, Marbury v. Madison.

 

An update to that chapter will now review Anthony Kennedy’s retirement and the Brett Kavanaugh nomination.  My students are evaluating that nomination not only as to Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Court as a human being (possible sexual predator) but also on the governmentally germane matter of qualifications for occupation of a seat on the highest court in the land---  and for what his appointment would mean for decisions of cases pertinent to civil rights, abortion, labor organization, natural environment, and immigration.

 

My students all come to me from the Minneapolis Public Schools.  I try to keep them enrolled in that school district while I agitate for the overhaul of MPS curriculum and teacher quality, in the meantime giving them their real education in their two hours per week with me.

 

My students at every level (grades K-5, 6-8, and 9-12) rarely have any knowledge of all manner of subjects, of which Supreme Court appointments, composition, and function are salient examples.  Often MPS teachers do not even cover the material.  In other cases, coverage is offered only through inefficient group projects and loosely guided investigations in which the most important knowledge sets are not mastered.  The bottom line for the salient example given herein is that none of my students, coming as they do from the Minneapolis Public Schools, have the requisite knowledge sets to evaluate the current national drama, particularly as relevant to the ultimately vital matter of the nominee’s fitness for the United States Supreme Court.

 

Many students of the Minneapolis Public Schools are mired in economic poverty.

 

All are mired in knowledge poverty.

 

This will change with the adoption and implementation of a Core Knowledge curriculum.

 

 

Values in K-12 Education >>>>> As the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education Dithers, MPS Superintendent Ed Graff and I Have Our Own Clear Answers, Many of Which Intersect on a Metaphorical Venn Diagram

Yesterday (Thursday, 27 September) at the scheduled 5:00-6:15 PM (with an actual 6:05 PM wrap) meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education Finance Committee, a discussion ensued that broached the matter of values.  For many moons now, the question of just what the school board itself identifies as the driving goals of the district has hovered as an insistent dark cloud that will not be dispersed until those buzzing with activity below take recognition.   

 

This has been a head-scratcher for me for the 37 years that I have been in Minnesota and been privy to the failures of this school district;  my head scratching has been particularly vigorous during the four-plus years beginning in June 2014 in which I have been conducting my investigation into the inner workings of MPS, soon to produce in final form my essentially complete book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

 

How can people making decisions for a provider of K-12 education proceed without asking the central question:

 

What is an excellent education?

 

An epiphany for me as to the cluelessness of school board members on this matter came at a community gathering at Bryn Mawr K-5, next to Anwatin Middle School, located in that fascinating well-to-do neighborhood just a bridge away from the different economic universe of the Glenwood Avenue area.  The meeting was in spring 2015 and as in the case of other gatherings (witness most recently my description of the 24 September meeting at the Minnesota Department of Education featuring staff ineptitude in touting the doomed North Star Accountability System), all was proceeding smoothly for the education establishment until I asked an intellectually disruptive question.

 

The MPS Board of Education members present at the time were Jenny Arneson, Kim Ellison, Rebecca Gagnon, Nelson Inz, and Don Samuels.  Tracine Asberry arrived late and never got the chance to answer my question.  This was prior to the November 2016 election that brought KerryJo Felder, Ira Jourdain, and (particularly lamentably) Bob Walser onto the board.  The absentee school board members pertinent to this meeting were Carla Bates, Josh Reimnitz, and Mohamud Noor.       

 

In posing my question, I referred to the books, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (E. D. Hirsch, 1996) and The Schools Our Children Deserve (Alfie Kohn, 1999), as representing contrasting philosophies of education on which board members should take a stand.  I asked the board members present if they agreed with Hirsch that at the core of an excellent education is academic subject matter:  knowledge and skill sets imparted by knowledgeable teachers and specified for grade by grade acquisition;  or if they agreed with Kohn that excellent education is a matter of facilitating the acquisition of information sought by students according to their own driving interests, with key goals being the development of critical thinking and lifelong learning.  I challenged the board to make a firm decision, since the inevitable cop-out answer is to claim that we need both approaches.

 

The answers from the board members were murky in the extreme. 

 

I asserted my own definition of an excellent education as a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum in logical grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors;  I took as always a clear and definitive stand in favor of the Hirsch Core Knowledge approach, commenting that any critical analysis must be conducted on a solid knowledge base and that any love of learning ensues upon the respect for knowledge embedded in an approach to education at which disciplined acquisition of academic subject matter is at the core.

 

Four years on, the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education are no closer to a declared philosophy of education.  Whatever can be gleaned leans toward the Kohn approach: 
Rarely do members of this board ask clear questions about academic programming or make any statements as to the specific knowledge and skills that students should be acquiring.

 

At an MPS Board of Education meeting on 8 September 2018 to consider the MPS Comprehensive Assessment Design, Superintendent Ed Graff sought definitive comments from board members on the driving programmatic features of his own approach:  Social and Emotional Learning, literacy, equity, and Multi-Tiered System of Support---  and how these goals should be pursued with regard to racial integration and central office versus site decision-making.  The board has been privy to these key Graff emphases since a retreat in August 2017.  But the members of this iteration of the MPS Board of Education is even worse than the previous composition prior to November 2016 in taking a stand on matters of educational philosophy and programming.

 

Superintendent Graff has been clear as to his values, discerned in his clearly stated emphases.

 

I have been clear as to an actual philosophy of education that takes a firm stand for knowledge imparted by teachers of broad and deep information bases.

 

Were new Chief of Academics and Research & Accountability Eric Moore to state clearly that my program for delivery of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education would provide the substantive curriculum and excellent teaching staff as foundation for the realization of Graff’s four goals of Social and Emotional Learning, literacy, equity, and Multi-Tiered System of Support---  then the locally centralized school district of the Minneapolis Public Schools would be on course for development as a national model.

 

Graff, who has been clear as to his programmatic objectives, should take this powerful combination of his ideas and mine to the members of the MPS Public Schools Board of Education and say,

 

“My values are clear.  I am developing a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete approach to education that will provide the substantive program for infusing my values throughout the system:

 

“Please be as clear in embracing these values and this approach with its undergirding philosophy as your own.”  

 

Superintendent Graff and I have both been clear as to our values, our driving emphases.

 

Members of the MPS Board of Education should embrace our ideas, which intersect on a metaphorical Venn diagram, and then state clearly that these ideas are in accord with their own values.

Ascendance of Eric Moore to Head the Academics Division of the Minneapolis Public Schools is an Event of Great Significance in the Annals of K-12 Public Education

In another adroit administrative move, Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff early last week exercised his astute judgment on personnel issues by tapping Eric Moore to be the head of the MPS Academic Division.  Moore brings a much needed breadth and depth of personal educational experiences to the most important position at the district, inasmuch as academic achievement and the acquisition of knowledge are the prime foci for any locally centralized school district.

 

Moore grew up in Langston, Oklahoma, one of that state’s interesting, history-induced all-black towns.  His mother and father were staff members of the town’s HBCU (Historically Black College/ University), Langston University.  Grandfather Ivory Moore, whose earthly sojourn ended just four years ago (autumn 2014), was among the most important African American educators and public servants on both sides of the southern Oklahoma/ northern Texas border area.  He coached and taught as the first African American educator at a newly integrated Wichita Falls (Texas) High School and held diversity and dean of student positions at Langston and another university;  and this remarkable man became the first black mayor of Commerce, Texas, located very close to the town of Greenville (TX), at the entrance to which there was deep into the 1960s a sign that read, “Welcome to Greenville, Texas:  Home of the Blackest Dirt and the Whitest People.”

 

Thus does Moore have superlative bloodlines.  He also is a highly educated man, an English literature major at Langston University who went on to study at the University of Texas (Austin) and then came northward to earn graduate degrees in public policy with abundant coursework in statistical research, at which with application to K-12 academic achievement he has become one the leading specialists in the United States.  With his grasp of both English literature and mathematical concepts, Moore has the kind of breadth and depth of knowledge necessary to lead a K-12 academic program.

 

Here is the new presentation of Moore’s dual role on the MPS leadership website:   

Chief of Academics and Accountability, Research, and Equity– Eric Moore

The Chief of Academics and Accountability, Research and Equity oversees two departments responsible for ensuring that both academic and student supports are aligned to school needs, that equity is embedded in all academic divisional processes, and that identified district priorities (including equity, literacy, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support and Social and Emotional Learning) are clearly articulated and monitored. The Chief provides MPS executives with decision-support through data analysis and interpretation and assures programs are in compliance with federal, state, and local laws.

 

 

Eric Moore is now positioned to become one of two most important educators in the United States.

 

He should quickly set about establishing a curriculum that takes for reference the E. D. Hirsch Core Knowledge K-6 sequence and my own extension of that curriculum to the late middle school and high school levels.  He should work with Michelle Wiese (President of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers [MFT]) and Maggie Sullivan (MPS Chief of Human Resources) to establish a thorough teacher retraining program---  that goes far beyond conventional Professional Development---  to transform the MPS teaching corps into true bearers of knowledge, with the ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

Moore should also work with Superintendent Graff and capable Homeless/ Highly Mobile and Community Engagement staff to engender growth in the one area for which additional personnel should be sought, hired, and trained to connect with struggling families of impoverished students facing multiple life challenges, engaging with them right where they live as friends, counselors, and as providers of and guides to needed services.

 

And Moore should oversee the development of a very aggressive and intentional program of remedial instruction for students languishing academically below great level, working with the highly talented MPS Chief of Finance Ibrahima Diop to make sure that all expenditures in the district are directed as much as possible to the academic program generally and for targeted purposes such as remedial instruction particularly.

Superintendent Ed Graff and new Chief of Academics and Accountability, Research, and Equity Eric Moore have a chance to be the two most important figures in K-12 education in the United States, overhauling the locally centralized school district of the Minneapolis Public Schools to become a national model.

Graff and Moore should seize the moment.

There are lives of long-suffering children in the balance.

When Will We Care Enough to Educate All of Our Young Gems of Humanity Upon a Foundation of Knowledge and Love?

People in the United States do not care much about K-12 education.

 

This is despite claims to the contrary.

 

If the general citizenry were claimed by some to care about public education, then why do citizens not take the time to find those critical pressure points at which the pulse of K-12 education can be found and at which change can occur?  Prospective voters listen passively as candidates for president, governor, or mayor lay out their forthcoming initiatives so that every child will have a “quality education”;  but in matters of K-12 education local school officials and board members are more important than presidents, governors, and mayors.  

 

Parents either send their children to the residential areas in which they have established their homes, seek residence because of the area’s reputation for “quality schools,” or maneuver to find the best educational options for their children in private schools, charter schools, parochial schools, or within their local school district.  But even with best intentions, what are parents seeking when they assertively pursue educational options for their children?  Typically they are seeking institutions that have a reputation for preparing students for college;  or they are trying to find a hospitable environment, one wherein violent incidents are rare or ethnic animosities are minimal;  or they are angling for certain programmatic options in the arts or career training.

 

Rarely, though, are these assertive parents truly seeking programs for their children with a clear idea of what an excellent education entails.  And they are certainly not thinking of other people’s children.

 

If we cared enough about education in the United States broadly and in Minnesota specifically, we would take time to ponder the constituent elements of an excellent education, which go beyond prospects for sending young people to college, finding a supportive school environment, or locating a narrow program of interest.  And we would define excellence in education for the benefit of all of our precious children and for the development of a citizenry likely to create a more loving and caring society.

 

An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete, logically sequenced grade by grade curriculum in the liberal, vocational, and technological arts to students of all demographic descriptors throughout the K-12 years;  an excellent teacher is a professional of broad and deep knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

The critical organization of delivery of K-12 education in the United States is the locally centralized school district.  If the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized school districts were to provide an excellent education according to the above definition, then people in the pertinent metropolitan areas would enroll enthusiastically in those districts.  Broad and deep knowledge sets and the provision of excellent programming in the arts, business, and technology would attract students of both general and specific aspirations.  Students would be prepared for any career or college goal in their future, and they could participate in an array of engaging programs fitting their driving interest.  They would be both broadly educated and specifically trained according to individual interest.  Children of all demographic descriptors would be served.  All would be welcome.

                                                                                                                          

But for this vison of the locally centralized school district to materialize, we must care about an excellent education as defined and discussed above.  We as a people must come to understand that this one earthly sojourn is lived fully only with an abiding appreciation for the exciting world of knowledge, music of all genres, artistic creations international in scope, and the history and culture of humanity in all of its many beautiful ethnic manifestations.

 

In the United States, the citizenry leans toward a local control view of government.  The best school systems in the world are centralized and the quality of education is consistent from locale to locale.  But in the United States, people lean toward local control;  inasmuch as that is true, then locally is where we have to design an excellent education and therefore a model upon which other districts can innovate.

 

To design an education capable of sending forth citizens prepared to live as culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied citizens, we must care about the broad and deep constituent elements of a truly excellent knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.  We must want more than individual status and recognition.  These will come easily for those who care about such things if we provide a comprehensive education of excellence. 

 

But beyond status and recognition, we should want to be our best selves on this one earthly sojourn.

 

We must be genuinely empathetic, altruistic, and compassionate.

 

We must love all of our precious children as if each were our own.

 

When we will care enough to love all children, to be our best selves, and to live life most fully on this one earthly sojourn?   

 

When will we care enough to educate all of these young gems of humanity upon a foundation of knowledge and love?                                                                                                                                 

Three Books That Every Thoughtful Educator Should Read--- and Two Others to Be Read for Their Counter-Positions

I’ve read all major tomes on public education and over the years have acquired deep knowledge of the history and philosophy of education.  I can make a debater’s argument in favor of misguided approaches to education better than can the perpetrators of such approaches;  accordingly, I can forcefully pretend to favor the errant approaches of Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, Harold Rudd, Jonathon Kozol, Deborah Meyers, Ted Sizer, and Alfie Kohn.

But for those of you who know that an excellent education is a matter of broadly and deeply educated teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education is logical sequence throughout the K-12 years, undergird your understanding by reading the following, in order of importance:

 

1)  E. D. Hirsch, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them

      (New York:  Anchor/ Doubleday, 1996)

 

Hirsch summarizes the origins of the anti-knowledge ideology of education professors in the teachers colleges that were incorporated into universities in the early 20^th century.  He describes how a creed with roots to philosophical and literary romanticism became a devotion to inefficient project and portfolio methods that fail to deliver logically sequenced knowledge bases to students, thereby hurting most those young people from ill-educated families often stuck in cyclical poverty.  With calls for ‘’critical thinking” and “lifelong learning” that proceed on the basis of very slim knowledge and skill sets, the “Thoughtworld”  of education professors has damaged generation of students, as detailed in this heavily researched and cogently argued work.  

 

2)  Diane Ravitch, Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform

      (New York:  Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster, 2000)

 

With masterful comprehensiveness, Ravitch delivers a classic history of education in the United States, with emphasis on the shifting manifestations of the so-called “progressive” approach to education that begins with Dewey, Kilpatrick, and Rugg;  imbeds itself in the teachers colleges, most especially Teachers College of Columbia University;  and shoves past the resistance of local opponents until triumphing in the 1960s.  Ravitch details how, despite quite different emphases the common facet of child-centered education, vocational education, and social utility education was an anti-knowledge stance by education professors who found themselves surrounded by field specialists with whom they could not compete intellectually and therefore asserted the preeminence of a form of pedagogy that ironically involved very little teaching.

 

3)  Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World (and How They Got That Way (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 2013)

 

Ripley innovatively follows three foreign exchange students from the United States to three nations wherein students have vastly outperformed American students on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).  The students hail from a district in Oklahoma, another in Pennsylvania, and a third from our very own Minnetonka, Minnesota, who land respectively in Finland, Poland, and South Korea.  These three systems are very different in detail and range from the emotionally brutal South Korean system;  to the spare but substantively successful Polish system;  to the gentle, emotionally nourishing Finnish system productive of students who have achieved at the highest international level.  What these systems have in common, though, are features that are missing from the system of K-12 education in the United States:  a conviction that knowledge matters, that educators should be taken seriously and paid as professionals, and that objective assessments are vital measures of academic achievement, typically administered as exit exams at the end of the elementary, middle/ junior high school, and high school years.

 

After reading these books, read two others: 

 

Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve  (New York:  Doubleday, 1999)

 

This is the “progressive” response to Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, serviceably making the case for projects, demonstrations, portfolios, child-identified topics for study, teachers as guides to (rather than transmitters of) knowledge, and the elimination of standardized testing.

 

Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error:  The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York:  Vintage/ Random House, 2013)

 

Ravitch in this work denounces the standards movement that she embraced at the time she wrote Left Back:  A Century of Battles over School Reform, detailing the involvement of private corporations in the reform movement, the profit motivation behind the design and distribution of standardized tests, and the corruption of many charter school administrations.  Ravitch does a one hundred eighty degree turn from her earlier work, critical as it was of the anti-knowledge views of the education establishment, in stoutly praising teachers and their unions for defending public education from these outside attackers.

 

When you have finished reading these books, reflect especially on the Hirsch versus Kohn arguments.

 

Take a stand.

 

Have a philosophy, a working definition of an “excellent education.”

 

Is an excellent education a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive curriculum?

 

Or is excellent education a matter of students researching topics according to their own driving interests, guided by classroom facilitators, while developing critical thinking skills as they prepare for lifelong learning?

 

Don’t finesse this one.  Any thoughtful person knows that critical analysis of material is important, and true lovers of knowledge will read for information and pleasure throughout their lives.

 

But take a clear position:  Should knowledge be at the center;  or can critical thinking and lifelong learning proceed in the absence of the acquisition of a systematically acquired broad and deep knowledge base?

 

This is the question of vital importance in designing an educational program of excellence for students of all demographic descriptors.

Board of Education Member (District #4) Bob Walser is Perpetually the Parrot of the Education Establishment: If He Weren’t So Silly and Derided by the Best Thinkers at the Minneapolis Public Schools, He Would be Capable of Inflicting Further Intellectual Carnage on Students Already Damaged by Those of His Ilk

At the Tuesday, 25 September 2018, Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education Committee of the Whole meeting, MPS Board of Education Member (District #4) Bob Walser demonstrated his consistent willingness to be the parrot for the excuse-making machine that is the education establishment, the intellectually laggardly assemblage of shallow thinkers that begins with education professors and then includes those teachers and administrators whom they have damaged irreparably.    

At the meeting of reference, the superlatively talented MPS Chief of Research and Accountability Eric Moore (now also head of academics) delivered a report on the academic performance of MPS students for academic year 2017-2018 that revealed another year of failure.  As an expert data-cruncher and interpreter, Moore was at pains to point out signs of progress as demonstrable with small gains in reading proficiency and slightly reduced percentages of students falling academically behind.  But math proficiency is at best flat and overall MPS student proficiency rates still languish under 47 percent, with an appalling continuance of a multiyear pattern whereby not even 20 percent of African American and Native American males demonstrate proficiency in either reading or mathematics.

In response to this level of dismal academic performance, the education establishment typically offers a bevy of excuses rooted in the societal and familial conditions that students bring with them into the classroom.

And they do indeed bring these problems, bearing the weight of a brutal history along with them.  The collapse of Reconstruction upon the shameful Democrat and Republican connivance in forging the Compromise of 1877 brought a police state into being under the apartheid conditions of Jim Crow (it was this system that inspired the infamous South African system of apartheid).  African Americans sought escape via the Great Northern Migration, scrambling to New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Gary (Indiana) and thence westward to East St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, where restricted housing covenants herded these arrivals into sections of the city such as North Minneapolis along with Jews and southern and eastern Europeans.

When 1960s civil rights and fair employment and housing legislation opened the way for middle class black flight coincidental with the white phenomenon, left behind at the urban core were the poorest of the poor.  Cyclical poverty is famous companion to familial dysfunction and feelings of desperation productive of debilitating drug use and violent psychological and physical wounds.

With terrible timing, the period from the 1970s to this very year of 2018 was also the time when the degraded anti-knowledge philosophy of education professors that had been festering since the 1920s finally became ingrained in the K-12 school systems of the United States.  Knowledge does not matter, the nonsensical education-professor-speak goes;  students can always access information that they want, with classroom presences as guides or facilitators to assist their personal explorations.

This has meant that just when African Americans and those Hmong, Hispanic, and Somali populations that followed in their wake needed knowledge the most, a degraded approach to education took the needed information base away from them.  Teacher training programs sent increasingly knowledge-impoverished teachers into the classroom to deliver a subject area curriculum that was in any case vacuous.  Disillusioned, with too little intellectual or emotional nourishment provided at home or at school, young people took their satisfaction where they could, collapsing into lives whereby babies have babies and fertile young brains give themselves to the life of mean streets leading to prison or early death.

And thus the Bob Walsers of the world, those vicious parrots of an education establishment keen on offering excuses, ramble on about the impossibility of providing a substantive education to young people with too many familial and societal dilemmas.

Providing the young people stuck at the urban core with a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education is the central mission of the public schools.  We do that by overhauling curriculum for knowledge and skill intensity, thoroughly retraining teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum, aggressively remediating skills as needed, and providing all needed counsel and assistance to families struggling with dilemmas of poverty and functionality.

We then get these precious young people to school and give them an education that will allow them to end cycles of poverty and proceed to lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

We stop making excuses.

We jettison the Bob Walsers of the world from the school board as soon as possible and never again elect his ilk to a position so vital to precious young people waiting to escape from a history marred by the cruel conditions of a brutal police state.  

My Incisively Analytical Responses to Session Feedback for the North Star Accountability System Kick Off in September 2018: Observations on an Exercise in Minnesota Department of Education Professional Incompetence and Moral Irresponsibility

The following are my incisively analytical responses on the form for Session Feedback for the North Star Accountability System Kick Off in September 2018 that I attended on 24 September 2018:

 

MN Department of Education

Session Feedback – North Star School and District Accountability Kick Off – September 2018

Location __MDE Conference Room B_________  

Date _____24 September 2018______________

Name (Optional) ___Gary Marvin Davison_____

                                   Please circle your responses below:

Strongly Agree (SA), Agree (A), Disagree (D), or Strongly Disagree (SD)


[Note:  Given the typed form of my responses, I put an "X" in the indicated areas in lieu of circling]

I have a deeper understanding of:     SA     A     D     SD

 

Minnesota’s North Star                          X

Accountability System

 

Support and improvement                    X

requirements and timeline

 

Available supports and resources       X

for identified district and schools

 

2)  List your top 3 takeaways from

      the session today:

 

       1]  The session was a formality to meet the strictures of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the latter of which was passed by members of the United States Congress under pressure from both the political left and the political right, for whom objective assessments under No Child Left Behind had respectively revealed embarrassing failures on the part of the nation’s public schools or presented opportunity to undermine the premises upon which public schools are founded:  For the left, under pressure from the likes of the National Education Association, Education Minnesota, and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, the failures of locally centralize school systems throughout the United States and in Minnesota to provide anything remotely resembling an adequate education had become too embarrassing;  and for the right, the embarrassments actually became a delight for the corporate crowd that wants public education to fail and an opportunity to reassert a state’s rights stance in order to give privatization more scope to undermine the provision of education by locally centralized school districts.

 

     2]  You met ESSA strictures through the North Star Accountability System, which is just an update on the Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS), which the Brenda Cassellius-led Minnesota Department of Education  (MDE) articulated after a second application securing a waiver from No Child Left Behind under the federal Race to the Top program;  the North Star Accountability System is similar to MMRS inasmuch as it takes the focus away from objective assessments that reveal embarrassing results and gives failing school systems a chance to demonstrate a bit of improvement on those assessments while also gaining rating for attendance, graduation rates, and progress for English learners.

 

     3]  The variously clueless or prevaricating assemblage of four MDE staff members attempted to sell this ruse to the public at the 24 September meeting, but the public was as usual mostly absent, so that the meeting was full of members of the education establishment with keen interest in assisting MDE in foisting this hoax on the public;  the representatives of Minnesota’s school districts and staff members of the MDE are all too eager to continue to deliver a wretched quality of education to the K-12 students of Minnesota without paying any consequences.

 

3)  What aspect(s) of the day

      was/were most beneficial?

 

      The most beneficial aspects of the 24 September 2018 meeting were confirming that the North Star Accountability System is just a smokescreen behind which will be continued failure and therefore my own responsibility to detail the lies being told by MDE staff in foisting this fraud on the students of Minnesota;  and observing the verbal ineptitude and professional incompetence on display by Michael Diedrich and the other presenters.

 

4)  What are your next steps when leaving

      this meeting?

 

     My next steps upon leaving the meeting are to reveal the subtext behind the delivered message of the dissembling presenters at the 24 September 2018 meeting, discussing these on my blog, on my television show, (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison [6:00 PM every Wednesday on Minneapolis Telecommunications Network, Channel 17 in Minneapolis]), in my academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota), and in my public appearances.

 

5)  Additional Comments:

 

You know that the North Star Accountability System cannot work and that you are just meeting legal requirements in promoting this ruse.  I will with relentless presentation of factual detail expose your professional incompetence and dissembling protection of your publicly funded sinecures of employment.

Brenda Cassellius, Michael Diedrich, and All Staff Members at the Minnesota Department of Education Must Realize the Consequences of Your Prevarication at the 24 September 2018 Meeting >>>>> I Will Now Be in Even Greater Search of the Factual Details Pertinent to Your Fraudulent Claims

At 6:00 PM on Monday, 24 September, in Conference Center B at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), Michael Diedrich and other MDE prevaricators made a big mistake in their handling of the meeting and for the fraudulent claims made therein.

 

Their efforts represent one more hoax inflicted on the K-12 students of Minnesota in the form of their North Star Accountability System (described in full as you scroll down through previous recent entries on this blog), now being foisted on the public as the latest failed proclamation hailing a program that nevertheless has no chance of raising academic performance of Minnesota students.  Minnesota State Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius and aide Michael Diedrich both know that they are just putting on a dissembling performance, yet they persist in inflicting this ruse on the K-12 students of Minnesota, and on of those who make at least some show of caring, because they must by law make some response to the dictums of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

 

Student performance in the public K-12 systems of Minnesota during the eight years of the Governor Mark Dayton administration (for which Cassellius has served as academic agent of destruction) has languished at a wretched level of proficiency.  In this context of defending the indefensible, Cassellius and her inept aides are now making the rounds in an attempt to sell their ruse to the public.

 

Cassellius was absent from the meeting on 24 September.  She and Diedrich had the heads up that I would be calling them on their dissembling antics.  Cassellius most likely stayed away to avoid my tough questions, in cowardice leaving Diedrich to deal with my abundant knowledge base and thorough mastery of factual detail.  If Cassellius would now claim otherwise, my challenge remains:  Meet me in a refereed debate according to formal rules of disputation.  Or remain cowed in cowardly silence.

 

When I asked those tough questions, Diedrich and his even more inept MDE associates tried to make the case that I was disrupting their meeting.  They had glided glibly through an easy evening until I asked those questions as this charade slipped over the one-hour point:  Diedrich and company had received only perfunctory questions from the audience of less than 50, full of education establishment types from the school districts of Minnesota and those at the MDE there to protect their well-remunerated sinecures.  So when I asked if they lived in a fantasy world or were frankly perpetrating the North Star Accountability System hoax on the students of Minnesota, they were trapped and they panicked.

 

Cassellius and her lackeys should now be on notice:  As busy as I am putting the finishing flourishes to my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, I will now be collecting a bevy of factual information that will fully reveal your ineptitude and your dishonesty.  I will over time reveal your incompetence and prevarication as relentlessly as I have pursued the truth about the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS).  And since Superintendent Ed Graff and many top MPS administrators have actually made many improvements in the administration and programming of this school district while my investigation has been underway, I expect the MDE to fare much worse.

 

Do realize this, Commissioner Cassellius, Michael Diedrich,  and all staff members at the Minnesota Department of Education:  I am now in unswerving pursuit of the facts pertinent to your pretensions.  You have nowhere to hide.  You are trapped:

 

Start telling the truth, or face dire public consequences.