In the course of the last half-year, the
readership of this blog has exploded.
Newer readers may not know just how much
information they will find were they to scroll way back down through the more
than 900 articles written from the year 2011 forward. Articles on this blog cover all manner of
topics of current interest, historical significance, and scholarly investigation.
The number of articles posted began to increase
at a faster and faster rate from summer 2014, at which time I began
investigating the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools. At the same time, I started an academic
journal (Journal of the K-12
Revolution: Essays and Research from
Minneapolis, Minnesota); and began
to record a television show, The K-12
Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, on Minneapolis Telecommunications
Network (MTN) Channel 17 every Wednesday at 6:00 PM. The creation of these platforms for my viewpoints
and the Public Comments that I make at monthly meetings of the Minneapolis
Public Schools Board of Education are part of my
effort to induce the needed change at the
level of the locally centralized school district.
I actually had completed most of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts
Education by the spring of 2015, at which time I decided that I needed to
start assembling and adding to the information that I had collected on the
Minneapolis Public Schools and to work most vigorously toward the production of
the activist document, Understanding the
Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect, to expose the deep philosophical poverty and
lamentable political maneuvering that keeps our locally centralized school
district from providing a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to the
precious children for whom our schools exist.
I have completed eleven (11) of the
fourteen (14) chapters of Fundamentals of
an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
In this book I provide the essential knowledge sets with which every
high school student should graduate. Thus
far I have completed the eleven (11) chapters covering Political Science, Economics,
Psychology, World Religions, World Prehistory and History, United States History,
African American History, World Literature, English Usage, Fine Arts, and
Mathematics. I have complied much of the
information for the final three chapters on the natural sciences: Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.
My authorship of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education was a response
to the terrible education that students get in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Whenever I would be reading articles on
select topics with my students (all of whom have been or are enrolled in the
Minneapolis Public Schools), all manner of subject area content would be
mentioned for which they would have no knowledge. I found myself doing lectures on key areas of
the subjects now covered in the book, so at a certain point I decided that
writing a book for my students to use would be more efficient than taking time
out to do whole lectures on material that should have been covered in classes
at school.
This book has become an enormous resource
for providing my students the education that they are not getting in the Minneapolis
Public Schools. The tome also
constitutes my statement on the importance of a knowledge-intensive education
and a legacy that I can leave for students to come.
………………………………………………………………………………….
Writing Understanding
the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect is driven by my conviction that the locally centralized
school district is and should be the main institution for educating our
children, in fulfillment of the Jeffersonian vision for an educated citizenry
that the 19th century educator Horace Mann conceptualized for
delivery in common schools wherein students would receive the knowledge and
skill sets necessary to be participating, effective citizens; and to go forth to lives of economic
prosperity. Knowing how far the
Minneapolis Public Schools falls short of providing the necessary education to
students, I set out to detail those deficiencies, along with any favorable aspects
of this iteration of the locally centralized school district.
The book proceeds in three parts: Part One, Facts; Part Two, Analysis; and Part Three, Philosophy.
Part One (Facts) provides strictly
objective, factual information on all departments at the Davis Center (MPS
central offices, 1250 West Broadway), staff within those departments; district leadership, finance, human resources,
and academic programming; detailed
factual content pertinent staff, demographics, and academic performance of each
of the 70 schools in the district; information
on all key aspects of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT); and MPS student academic performance.
Part Two (Analysis) gives careful
analytical attention to the objective information from Part One (Facts), providing
my views on the key facts and issues arising from the facts.
Part Three (Philosophy ) could be a book
unto itself. In this part of the book, I
present a bevy of information pertinent to the history and philosophy of
education and give in very full exposition my views as to what must be done to
overhaul K-12 education at the level of the locally centralized school district
for the provision of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to all of
our precious children
…………………………………………………………………………….
In additional to the general bevy of
articles on all manner of topics, you can now discover on this blog almost all
of the material covered in Understanding
the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect. You will
find, therefore, most of what you need to accumulate factual knowledge of this
school district; you will find my analysis; and you can read essentially a book within a
book on the history and philosophy of education.
At this point you will find many series of
articles, carefully organized as a unit;
but organization of this mass of material into conventional book form is
underway and should be complete as December 2018 gives way to a new year in January
2019.
As to Fundamentals
of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, you will find snippets of each of
the first eleven (11) chapters, with nearly full presentation of some of the
chapters. Full assemblage of the book
awaits completion some time before the end of summer 2019.
……………………………………………………………………………
New and veteran readers alike have found
their way to the best blog in the United States on K-12 education. Nowhere will you find more factual content or
more incisive analysis.
Read carefully and thoughtfully, then
commit yourself to the needed change that inspired my own efforts.
There is no more important mission than the
provision of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to all of our
precious children, of all demographic descriptors.
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