Good
afternoon to you, Michelle, and to all of you of the Minneapolis Federation of
Teachers.
Conventional
Universe Minneapolis Superintendent Ed
Graff is busy with development of the Comprehensive District Design and in any
case not constitutionally inclined to deliver these forthright comments to
you. So I am happy to summon you into
the Alternate Universe wherein I serve as MPS Superintendent to tell you what
you need to know.
When
we first began our most recent negotiations, you presented a platform that is
misguided as a plan of action to deliver a program of academic excellence to
the students whom we serve.
Let
me first address the errant notions in that program:
1) Beyond Academics: Educating the Whole Child
In
a locally centralized school district or any other organization charged with
the responsibility of educating our precious young people, there is no “beyond
academics.” “Educating the Whole Child”
is one of those education professor mantras that echo perilously throughout all
chambers of the education establishment.
We should indeed make sure that
we have resources to impart directly and for referral to students from families
struggling with dilemmas of poverty and dysfunction; but our sensitivity to the life circumstances
of our most challenged student populations must not obscure the fact that our
ultimate responsibility is to provide knowledge-intensive, skill-replete
education to students of all demographic descriptors. That we should love and care for the social
and emotional well-being of our students is a given.
2) Smaller Class Sizes
We
will give you classes of manageable size, but this manageability is situation
specific. East Asian teachers deliver a
much higher quality of education than do you, with much larger class sizes than
you now have. We prefer to give you K-5
classes of approximately 25 students, but at the middle school and high school
levels (as at the university level) whole-class instruction can be rendered by
the skilled teacher to students of much greater number. Small classes may be desirable but are not
germane to the delivery of an excellent education.
3) Students are More Than a Test Score
This is another mantra from
education professors and on your part is an attempt to hide the embarrassing
level of education that you have rendered to our students. Over the years, the Minnesota Basic Skills
Test (MBST), Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs), and the ACT assessment
of college preparedness have all exposed the deficiency of your teaching. So, of course, you want to avoid giving
students objective assessments of their knowledge and skills in mathematics,
reading, and the key subject areas. You
would prefer to hide actual student achievement by a retreat to the project and
portfolio method that you farcically call “authentic assessment,” but you will
get no farther under my leadership with that than you did before three
organizations that reviewed the failed “Profile of Learning” based on you
preferred means of assessment in the 1990s.
4) Support, Don’t Punish: Restorative Practices
“Restorative practices” has
become rather terminologically the insipid shibboleth, but the idea is
fine; better yet, let us deliver an
excellence of education in a loving and caring environment that would minimize behavior
problems.
5) Clean
and Healthy Buildings
Of course.
6) Full Service Community Schools
I’ll give you credit for good
intentions on this one, but better yet let us have ready staff members
comfortable on the streets and in the homes of students from families
struggling with dilemmas of poverty and functionality. Let us be ready to provide resources directly
and by referral to meet the precise needs of students, and let us do this in a
highly targeted, precise, effective manner.
And let us not retreat from our responsibility to impart a
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to students of all demographic
descriptors by wringing our hands and griping that young people bring society’s
problems into our classrooms: Of course, they do, so it is our sacred
mission to end cyclical poverty via the impartation of common knowledge and
skill sets especially vital to children whose families have borne the crushing
weight of history.
7) Quality Education for All: Inclusion and Equity
Of course. But we must be clear as to what quality
education means. Be attentive to my closing
comments.
8) Invest in Public Schools
We must make the best use of the
resources available to us. We need
restructuring and overhaul of curriculum and teaching quality much more than we
need more money. Again, be attentive at
my closing.
9) $15 an Hour for All MPS Employees
I agree.
10) Recess
Fine, but let us be good models
and good conveyors of what the constituent elements of good nutrition, vigorous
exercise, and good life habits entail.
……………………………………………………………………
I am
a teacher.
I
love you and respect you for what you have implicitly told your students that
you want to do for them.
I
have taught in every situation imaginable, mostly in classrooms full of
students living at the urban core, but also in a prison, in Taiwan as a teacher
of English, in a small-town high school, and for four and half years in a
university setting. I have a bachelor’s
degree in political science with heavy concentrations also in history and
psychology, with teacher certification in government, history, and social studies; and master’s and Ph. D. degrees in Chinese
and Taiwanese history. I have authored
eight books, one of those co-written with my wife, St. Olaf college professor
Barbara Reed.
For
twenty-five years I have coordinated the Tuesday Tutoring program at New Salem
Missionary Baptist Church and for more than a dozen years I have incorporated that program into the New Salem Educational
Initiative that includes a seven-day-a-week small-group program that I teach myself. That program includes young people at all
levels K-12 and a number of adults; the
program is college preparatory and includes all key subject areas. I have 125 people in my network of students. All of my K-12 students are recipients of
Free or Reduced Price Lunch.
All of
this conveys much about how I view the profession of teaching K-12 students. One does it seriously, with an attitude of
serving students of all demographic descriptors, with special responsibility to
those young people whose families have borne the weight of a brutal history and
the burden of familial cyclical poverty.
I
endured education courses during my undergraduate years at Southern Methodist
University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, as
requirements for certification; but I
would never have considered getting a master’s or doctoral degree from a
department , college, or school of education.
First as a teacher of government and history; then in my role as teacher in at least
fourteen different subject areas for which I have written Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education; I consider the role of scholar, as bearer of
knowledge, as germane to the responsibility that I have to my students to give
them the very best in knowledge-intensive, college preparatory education.
……………………………………………………………………………..
As
Alternate Universe Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools, I am bringing
ideas for adoption by Conventional Universe Superintendent Ed Graff.
These
ideas are given in my five-point program for the overhaul of K-12 education at
the level of the locally centralized school district: 1) design and implementation of knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete curriculum for impartation in logical grade by grade sequence
throughout the K-12 years to students of all demographic descriptors; 2) thorough training of you, the teaching
force, for capability of delivering such a curriculum; 3) curricular enrichment and remedial
instruction as appropriate to student need;
4) familial resource provision and referral; and 5) bureaucratic paring.
I
have given Superintendent Graff credit for momentous feats in number five, in
trimming the bureaucracy; his paring of
the Davis Center burden from 655 to 427 staff members is a very great achievement. Now he must proceed to the first five facets
of the program.
You,
my fellow teachers, will undergo thorough retraining:
Teachers
at K-5 will be given intensive subject area training in mathematics, natural
science (biology, chemistry, and physics), history, government, economics,
psychology, literature, English usage, and fine arts; you will write a thesis for a Masters of
Liberal Arts and will serve a year of internship or probation before gaining or
continuing status as a teacher in the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Teachers
at grades 6-8 and 9-12 will be required to get a master’s degree in your teaching
specialty, from a university department such as mathematics, history, or
chemistry--- not a department, college,
or school of education. You, too, will
serve a year of internship or probation before gaining or continuing status as
a teacher in the Minneapolis Public Schools.
For
undertaking this challenging course of training, the median teacher’s pay will
rise from a median of $67,000 to a median of $85,000.
We at
the Minneapolis Public Schools henceforth will deliver knowledge-rich education
to all of our students, sending them according to the three great purposes of K-12
education forth to lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional
satisfaction.
……………………………………………………………………………………………
As we
embark on this exciting journey into the world of knowledge, we will do so with
particular dedication to students of poverty and familial dysfunction. This is our most sacred duty. We will create an ether in which people will
imbibe the spirit of service, so that our very best vie for the opportunity to
teach those who need us the most. Fiscal
rewards for this level of service will be bestowed, but it is the spirit of
service that we will honor most.
You
now have an opportunity to be the professionals that many of you have long
wanted to be, and that all of you will now want to be.
I
love you for what you are at your best and for the great public servants that
you will become.
And I
know that in time Superintendent Ed Graff will implement this program in the
Conventional Universe, for he wants to create equitable education for all of
our precious young people, and this is the program that will achieve those
great aims.
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