In Order to Get Out, We Must Understand How We Got in This K-12 Education Mess

In the recent report from the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) on the results of Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) in math and reading for the 2017-2018 academic year we found out that just 60 percent of Minnesota students were proficient in mathematics, the same figure as that for 2016-2017;  for reading the comparable figures were 59 percent in academic year 2016-2017 and 57 percent in 2017-2018,a two percentage point decline.

 

In the Minneapolis Public Schools, reading proficiency rose a bit over those two academic years, from 43 percent to 45 percent, with math proficiency flat at 42 percent.  In that school district, one-third of graduates who matriculate at colleges and universities need remedial instruction.  And most graduates walk across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only, so deficient are they in key knowledge and skill sets in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, quality literature, English composition, and the fine, vocational, and technological arts.

 

How did we get in this mess?  

 

Thomas Jefferson, for his many human failings, was a visionary of citizenship in the democratic society who said that "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves;  and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

 

The 19^th century educator Horace Mann developed this Jeffersonian notion of an educated citizenry by asserting the need for common schools that would provide citizens with shared knowledge as the basis for participation in democracy.  Across the nation, teachers in one-room rural and larger town and city schools imparted knowledge and skill sets in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, and literature.  Often, teachers used the popular McGuffey Readers that were by no means ethnically representative but did provide substantive information and gave students experience with high-quality literature.

 

Two views of education for African Americans came from Booker T. Washington, who stressed vocational education and the development of economic independence before insistence on full citizenship rights;  and W. E. B. DuBois, who took a view consonant with that of Jefferson and Mann and asserted that a “talented tenth” of the African America population should lead the way to informed political participation.  And indeed, such African American luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and DuBois gave testimony to the power of knowledge as they held the ideals of the United States constitution before a nation that was not living up to the ideals expressed in that document;  the speeches of those three are replete with references to history, government, and literature.

 

Schools in the United States at the 19^th-20^th century divide were of widely varying quality.  Most students did not attend school past grade six.  But by the first two decades of the 20^th century an increasing number of students were seeking attendance in high schools that generally featured classical curricula in mathematics, natural science, history, government, English literature and usage, and Latin.  An intermediary institution, junior high, also appeared in some urban districts, for students in grades seven through nine, featuring academic preparation for the high school curriculum.

 

At that turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century, normal schools offered formal preparation for some teachers;  these varied widely in quality but in general assumed that teachers would be instructing students in a rigorous academic curriculum.  But by the second decade of the 20^th century, teachers colleges located on university campuses overtook the normal schools as institutions of teacher preparation.  Education professors, now ensconced in university settings among academic field specialists, began to emphasize pedagogy over curriculum, with the assertion that the systematic acquisition of knowledge was not important.

 

The writings of John Dewey, while full of internal contradictions and often lacking clarity, typically asserted that education should resonate with the experience of the child and offer practical preparation for life.  More clearly, William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg advocated for a putatively progressive approach to education that deemphasized the sequential acquisition of knowledge and skill sets.  Heard in 1918 penned an article, “The Project Method,” and soon published a book of the same name;  in 1928, Rugg, with coauthor Ann Shumaker, published the book,  The Child-Centered School.  In these two volumes we have the foundations for the “progressive” education movement that, against the vigorous counter arguments of such subject area proponents as William C. Bagley, became entrenched at the teachers colleges, most influentially at the Teachers College of Columbia University.

 

This view of education took many decades to prevail in the schools of locally centralized districts across the nation.  Many teachers had trained as field specialists.  Many parents of immigrant populations and African Americans relocating as participants in the Great Northern Migration wanted a substantive education as a basis for scaling the educational ladder to success.  But paradoxically in sync with a creed known as “progressive,” proponents of those ideas absorbed and espoused racist precepts of the first decades of the 20^th century that expressed doubts as to whether the children of southern and eastern European immigrants and African American migrants could master an academic curriculum .  Such populations were typically tracked into vocational curriculum while decision-,makers won to the “progressive” creed begrudgingly provided an academic track to satisfy expectations of university admissions offices.

 

During the late 1960s, the “progressive’ creed thrived in a zeitgeist with individual personal expression at the center;  “progressive” ideology now dominated among teachers and administrators, all trained by education professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education.  This was terrible timing.  In terrible and ferocious irony, advances in civil rights made possible the pursuit of the middle class lifestyle for African Americans positioned to climb the economic ladder;  and fair housing laws made residential housing covenants less likely:  African American middle class flight joined white flight as phenomena that at the urban core left behind the poorest of the poor.

 

Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980.  Gang activity proliferated.  Urban school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools were overwhelmed, with almost all-white middle class teaching staffs faced with the duty to teach populations with which they had no cultural affinity.  And with the triumph of “progressive” education, these teachers had little of substance to offer their students that could assist them in ending the cyclical poverty that created the conditions of inner city life.  Mainly white educational theorists touted critical thinking, lifelong learning, projects and portfolios as measures of student learning, curriculum driven by individual teachers and their students---  all in the absence of logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets measurable by objective assessments, thus robbing students of the information base upon which genuine critical analysis and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge could proceed.  The mantras of education professors became excuses for teaching very little at all.

 

By the late 1990s, a movement for academic standards and testing ultimately produced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, but telling disaggregated data results proved embarrassing to the education establishment, which went to work on those Democrats (in Minnesota, the DFL) to which the teachers unions give so bountifully;  and those on the right, supporters of Republicans, came to object to strict federal mandates.  No Child Left Behind gave way to waivers under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top moniker, which in Minnesota produced the murky Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS);  and then the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2016) produced the even murkier North Star Accountability System (NSAS). 

 

The latter system, now being rolled out by Brenda Cassellius and staff at the MDE, like MMRS relieves the pressure on school officials by relegating objective measures such as the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to status as just one factor among many---  including graduation rates, student attendance, incremental academic progress over time, incremental progress of English learners---  for rating school and district programs.  Cassellius and the other North Star explicators at MDE ask the public to believe that six Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs), each staffed with seven or eight members, are going to provide the needed assistance for addressing the abysmal academic performance of Minnesota’s students.

 

Charter schools and school choice programs have been part of the educational landscape of Minnesota since the early 1990s.  But charter schools are typically even worse than the mainline public schools, and choice programs have been a diversion from the fact that few schools in Minnesota provide true excellence of education by comparison with the nations of East Asia and those such as Germany, Finland, Canada, Poland, and Australia that far outperform students in the United States on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).

 

We got in this K-12 mess in Minnesota, with unfortunate resonance throughout the nation, with the unfortunate coincidence of an anti-knowledge approach to education, residential patterns traceable to a racist history, unprepared urban school districts that have never dedicated themselves to the education of students of all demographic descriptors, and the growth of charter schools and choice programs that exacerbated the problems.

 

We get out of this K-12 mess by acting at the level of the locally centralized school district, where change must occur in a nation with a mania for local control.  A district such as the Minneapolis Public Schools can 1) overhaul curriculum for the provision of knowledge and skill sets in grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors throughout the K-12 years;  2) thoroughly retrain teachers capable of imparting  such a curriculum;  3) provide highly intentional remedial instruction to students struggling below grade level;  4) train and send forth staff capable of providing counseling and resource referral to families struggling with dilemmas of poverty and dysfunction;  and 5) target resources carefully to reach the other four programmatic objectives.

 

We got in this mess for highly identifiable reasons.

 

We can get out of this mess with the above program at the level of the locally centralized school districts.

 

We must do this.  There are lives in the balance.