Understanding the Subtext Beneath the Surface in the Banter at Such Assemblages as the 8 September 2018 Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education Retreat for Consideration of the MPS Comprehensive Assessment

This past Saturday, 8 September 2018, the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education met at what was by the time of the meeting labeled a retreat, and indeed the meeting occurred at approximately the time of the year at which such retreats are typically held.  This is a time at which the board tries to come to grips with the performance of MPS students and consider various issues pertinent to the functioning of the district.

The exclusive topic of focus for this meeting was the Minneapolis Public Schools Comprehensive Assessment, the latter of which is in the process of generation by Dennis Cheesebrow of Teamworks International, in consultation with Superintendent Ed Graff, Chief of Staff Suzanne Kelly, and Chief of Research and Accountability Eric Moore.  The draft of the MPS Comprehensive Assessment tendered thus far for board and public consideration and comment proposes division of the district into four zones for maximum cost effectiveness in matters of transportation and programming.  Much emphasis is given to improving academic outcomes for underperforming students.  The draft implies minimization of busing and a focus on neighborhood schools.   

Chief Moore gave an hour-long overview of student performance, along with the driving question as to whether integration and diversity are enhancers of student achievement.  Board members were asked to express their views on the importance of integration and to identify their chief values.  At two junctures, board members were asked to pair off, confer, then report back to the assemblage (including about seventy members of the public).

In the aggregate, the board expressed concern for diversity and equity of student achievement.  But three board members expressed views that clearly specified certain concerns:

Siad Ali stressed the importance of academic achievement, saying that his driving concern was that any reorganization of the Minneapolis Public Schools into four zones brought programmatic initiatives capable of raising student performance.   

KerryJo Felder emphasized the equitable distribution of resources so as to strengthen neighborhood schools in North Minneapolis;  she cautioned against busing as the main tool of integration, saying that diversity is best served by ensuring that schools are staffed with equitably effective teachers and programming.

Bob Walser urged the board to consider what is meant by student achievement and stated that his own view of achievement is grounded in democratic principles, wherein students, teachers, and parents at each school pursue academic achievement as they define it.  

Walser is correct that the board needs to define student achievement. 

But he is abysmally errant in his definition of student achievement.

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Bob Walser is a total tool of the MFT/ DFL.  He often spouts the jargon that I detailed in my series of articles last spring, “How Not to Talk Like an Education Professor.”  He is the silliest board member that I have ever witnessed, a hippy-dippy white liberal type who is clueless as to the academic aspirations of students and especially the needs of students from families facing dilemmas of poverty and functionality.  He frequently references Deborah Meyer, who along with such folk as Alfie Kohn, Ted Sizer, and Jonathon Kozol appropriates the name “progressive” and mumbles the education professor speak dating to John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, and Harold Rugg in the 1920s.  This is the doctrine that has inflicted such knowledge-poor education on our students for at least forty years.

The best school systems in the world are centrally organized and demand continuity of excellence throughout the nation.  Students in the United States lag seriously behind nations such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, Finland, Poland, and Canada on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).  Students in these nations would with regard to the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) laugh and say, “How easy,” but apologists of the education establishment such as Walser maintain that standardized tests autocratically impose standards of measurement, thereby undermining school and classroom autonomy, in opposition to democracy.

 

In fact, the key proponent of democracy who exalted the importance of an informed citizenry was Thomas Jefferson, who extolled the benefits of common knowledge for the exercise of citizenship.  In the nineteenth century, Horace Mann maintained that the achievement of Jeffersonian democracy would come with geographically dispersed “common schools” for the delivery of an equitable education to people regardless of station in life.  Ranged against the facile ideas of William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg, William Bagley in the 1920s and 1930s eloquently called for the delivery of common knowledge and skill sets for the achievement of Jeffersonian democracy.  From the 1990s forward, E. D.  Hirsch emerged as the chief advocate for such an education, and he founded the most important organization, the Core Knowledge Foundation, for the advancement of logically sequenced, grade by grade, knowledge-intensive education;  the Foundation generates a great wealth of materials that are utilized in Core Knowledge schools throughout the United States.

 

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The members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education must develop a guiding philosophy.  They must define an excellent education, the excellent teacher, and they must embrace or frankly reject objective testing to determine if students are academically achieving at grade level.

 

I have defined an excellent education, the excellent teacher, and the purposes of public education in many places on this blog as the following:

 

An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education in the liberal, vocational, and fine arts in logical grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

The three great purposes of public education are cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.  

 

To understand the subtext of the utterings from the mouth of Bob Walser, readers should read works by those mentioned above, beginning with

 

E. D. Hirsch, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996);  and

 

Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve (1999).

 

These works express the key opposing views that have historically prevailed concerning education in the United States:  the Jeffersonian common knowledge for citizenship view; and the view expressed by those influenced by the education professors, saliently in the Teachers College of Columbia University, stressing child-centered education.

 

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Members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education should at the very least read the two works referenced above.

 

Then they should sponsor a debate between Bob Walser and myself to clarify the issues and to understand what is at stake for young people, particularly those mired in conditions of cyclical familial poverty.

 

And an understanding of these issues is vital for anyone who wants to comprehend the subtext running beneath the surface of the banter at such assemblages as the board retreat on Saturday, 8 September.