Change in the quality of education
delivered by the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) and other public school
districts must happen at the local level.
In many other nations across the globe,
public education is either highly centralized or practices assure continuity of
quality; this is true for those nations
the students of which score highest on the Programme of International Student
Assessment (PISA), such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Finland. But communities in the United States clamor
for local control; thus, although
federal and state policies have an impact, especially as tied to funding, they
prove ephemeral as political power shifts from one party to another and as
local officials work to undermine those policies they oppose.
Across the nation, locally centralized school
districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools labor under a misguided
anti-knowledge creed traced to the insecurity of education professors at
Columbia Teachers Colleges and the many institutions influenced by ideas
espoused by William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg during the 1920s. By the 1970s these anti-knowledge ideas took
firm root in the consciousness of the teachers and administrators trained by college
and university based education professors.
Student knowledge and skill levels suffered; those hurt worst were those left behind at
the urban core by white and black middle class flight.
Two groups currently work the greatest
hardship on student knowledge levels and proficiency rates:
The first group is comprised of the
teachers and administrators of reference above.
In the Minneapolis Public Schools this includes incompetent academic
decision-makers such as Superintendent Ed Graff and Executive Director of
Teaching and Learning Aimee Fearing;
staff in the Department of Teaching and Learning; Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry,
LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno;
and on through the ranks of building principals and teachers. Among those leaders identified by name above,
none is a serious scholar, and across the ranks advanced degrees in legitimate
academic disciplines are scant.
The second group that works the greatest
hardship on student knowledge levels and proficiency rates is comprised of the
members of the MPS Board of Education.
If academic decision-makers are incompetent and promote an anti-knowledge
creed, academically inclined citizens who gain positions on the board could initiate
the necessary overhaul of curriculum and teacher training. But the current board has no such scholars
and to a person members are politically controlled by the Minneapolis
Federation of Teachers (MFT). Change of
the type and magnitude necessary cannot come from the current membership.
Thus, we need to
1 >>>>> pressure Graff to engage the scholars he
needs to design and implement the necessary overhaul of curriculum and teaching
training; and
2 >>>>> work toward electing a new membership to
the MPS Board of Education.
Four members of the current board are up
for reelection in November 2020. In order
of importance for defeat are District #4 Member Bob Walser, District #2 Member KerryJo
Felder, and At-Large Member Kim Ellison.
District #6 Member Ira Jourdain is also up for reelection; he is not currently effective but he is not
as thoroughly offensive as the other three and shows some promise, so that I am
continuing to assess his candidacy.
Recent miscues and insidious actions of
Walser, Felder, and Ellison give indication as to why they must be defeated:
District #4 Member Bob Walser >>>>> The Silliest and Most Offensive of a Motley
Crew
Bob Walser is the silliest, most offensive
member on this and any school board that I have witnessed during my
half-century of observation. This
iteration of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education is by far
the worst that I have witnessed during my particularly close five-year scrutiny
of this motley assemblage.
Walser is a disaster.
Walser was among the group recruited by
Nelson Inz, Kim Ellison, and Rebecca Gagnon to run for the MPS Board of Education
in 2016. Gagnon eventually got caught in
her political manipulations and was ousted in 2018. Inz remains as District #5 (South
Minneapolis, east of I-35) representative and board chair; Ellison as one of three At-Large
members. Inz, Ellison, and Gagnon
recruited candidates friendly to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT)
to run against the independent voices of Josh Reimnitz and Tracine Asberry (the
most assertive actor for better academic results); and for the At-Large seat vacated by Carla Bates.
Walser, who represents the toney areas of
Bryn Mawr, Lowry Hill, and Linden Hills, is a salient example of that creature
who assigns to himself the appellation of “progressive” on matters pertinent to
preK-12 education, thus a participant in a sordid history traceable to Teachers
College at Columbia University.
Consistent with the various strands of this ideology, Walser rails
against objective assessment of student performance and spouts the jargon of
putatively child-centered education.
The most stupid verbal fodder spills from
Walser’s mouth:
Two recent whoppers demonstrate the facile,
grating nature of this lamentable school board creature:
>>>>> At one meeting that involved the fate of
middle schools versus preK-8 schools in the district, Walser wondered why we
have middle schools and asserted that we have only had this type of student
grouping since the 1950s. In making this
comment, Walser demonstrated the typically shallow nature of his reading and
research. He had apparently come across
a reference to the advent of the middle school (grades 6-8), which did from the
1950s mostly replace junior high (grades 7-9).
But Walser’s reference maintained that grouping at the level of the
middle grades did not begin until the 1950s.
In fact, the first junior highs appeared in 1909.
>>>>> At the September meeting of the MPS Board of
Education, Walser mentioned during the final, tortuous comments that members
make on the cusp of each meeting’s adjournment that he had attended a number of
community meetings lately and found the comment of one African American mother
especially enlightening. Walser said
that she identified the problems of the Minneapolis Public Schools as grounded
in the northern European approach to education taken by the district.
I have been deeply embedded in the African
American community for forty-eight years:
African Americans do in public forums
occasionally have recourse to the same jargon of “cultural relevance” and
“cultural competence” with assertions of Western bias as do hippy-dippy white
liberals of the sort that my radical leftist inclinations find me
abhorring. But face to face, I never
hear such jargon. When African American parents,
the largest familial contingent in the New Salem Educational Initiative, come
to me in behalf of their children, their plea is in essence, “Please impart to
my baby the mathematical and reading skills that the district of the
Minneapolis Public Schools fails to render, along with strong college
preparatory knowledge sets that MPS does not deliver.” They trust and know that I have a strong
grasp of European-based culture and history and also the traditions of Asia,
Africa, African America, and a bevy of other ethnicities. What they want for their children is the best
education that can be had, so that those precious young people can be the
vanguard that leads the family forth from cyclical poverty and centuries of
abusive history.
Armchair white liberals of the Walser type
are offensive to most African Americans.
They sense that the rhetoric of those who shout adoring phrases from
afar are frauds, full of condescension and paternalism. Bob Walser has offended most African Americans
of positions of leadership at the Minneapolis Public Schools. They know a fake and a patronizer when they
encounter one.
………………………………………………………………………………………………
In any case, the approach taken by the
Minneapolis Public Schools is not northern European, except inasmuch as it is
through British conveyance that a curriculum consisting of knowledge gathered
from the entire globe was delivered to American colonists and thence to the
fledgling United States of America. The
knowledge thus conveyed came prominently from southern (not northern) Europe,
China, India, and from the Muslim empires of the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman
dynasties. The best contemporary masters
of modern curricula are students of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Note the absence in any of those references
from the last two sentences of anything identifiable as northern European.
………………………………………………………………………………………………
Bob Walser is the silliest, most
intellectual trivial board member I have witnessed on the MPS or any other
board of education.
Walser needs to excuse himself for forging
ahead of Jenny Arneson and Kim Ellison as he leads them with all appropriate
haste out the Davis Center door.
District #2 Member KerryJo Felder >>>>> Fraudulent Claimant to North Minneapolis
Leadership
Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of
Education member KerryJo Felder represents District #2, encompassing North
Minneapolis. She was endorsed by the
Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) for her winning candidacy in November
2016. She also has firm ties to the
Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party that looms behind the MFT front powerfully to
influence the outcomes of school board elections.
Thus, Felder is a political hack doing the
bidding fo the MFT/DFL cohort, as is the case for all nine members on this
unfortunate current assemblage of the MPS Board of Education.
Felder has children in Northside schools
and was active at MPS sites and at board meetings many years before she ran for
a seat. She had an unsettled childhood
and adolescence, mostly growing up in South Minneapolis. Her personal accounts allude incoherently to
an academician father who held a doctorate---
and to a life of poverty as a youth.
Also in her shadowing background is a young adulthood spent for many
desultory years in a lifestyle lacking firm vocational articulation in
California.
Those South Minneapolis and California
sojourns do not denote a firmly rooted Northsider.
Felder has little connection to the North
Minneapolis of the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, W. Gertrude Brown, Harry Davis, Bertha Smith,
Marion McElroy, Larry Brown, the Edmund Cohen Community Center, old Sixth
Avenue, North High School in its academic heyday of Jewish and African American
composition and friendship, or even to the more recent influence of the Way and
Opportunities Unlimited (where Syl Davis, Gwen Davis, and Spike Moss held sway)
and the City, Inc., as a successor to
the Way.
And yet Felder projects an image of herself
as a Northsider out to claim resources for MPS schools that have been
previously denied investment for buildings, athletic fields, and academic
programs by comparison to sites and programs in other areas of the city.
But Felder is a fraud, as a claimant to
firm Northsider status, and as an advocate for the schools of North
Minneapolis.
She is a corrupt politico with very little
knowledge of the history and philosophy of education.
But Felder is a particularly objectionable
member of the MPS Board of Education for pretending that she is an advocate for
academic quality in what she abidingly refers to as “my schools” for “my
Northsiders.”
When confronted with student reading,
mathematics, and science proficiency rates at North High School that are less
than seven percent (7%) and ACT scores averaging 15.7, Felder has no
comment. When she is told that there are
classes at North that are so out of order that teachers have quit teaching, she
utters not a word. When Felder is told
that an English teacher pretending to teach The
Autobiography of Malcom X has absolutely no knowledge of that towering
personage, she sits silently and never thenceforth addresses the problem. When told by Hispanic parents that the
pre-K-5 and preK-8 schools of North Minneapolis are failing, she gives
appearance of the denial that is her wont.
KerryJo Felder is a fraud as pretender to
firm Northsider status.
She is a corrupt political hack typical for
a group that to a member is beholden to the MFT/DFL cohort.
Felder has no grasp of the history or
philosophy of pre-K-12 public education.
And she is in immoral, neglectful denial of
the rampant deficiencies of curriculum and teacher quality in the Minneapolis
Public Schools.
Felder projects the image of a fighter.
She should fight her way among Bob Walser,
Nelson Inz, Kim Caprini, Kim Ellison, and Jenny Arneson off the MPS Board of
Education and out the door of the Davis Center.
At-Large Kim Ellison >>>>> Salient Party Hack
At the same Tuesday, 22 October 2019,
Committee of the Whole meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of
Education at which District #1 member Jenny Arneson made her astonishingly
stupid comment regarding the sequence of United States history courses in the
district, At-Large member Kim Ellison chimed in with a remark of her own that,
when taken together with her nearly decade of ineffective participation on the
board, should induce her resignation and departure with Arneson out the Davis
Center door.
After hearing Executive Director of
Teaching and Learning Aimee Fearing and Chief of Research, Evaluation,
Assessment, and Accountability Eric Moore engage in double talk and
jargon-infested presentation of an academic plan that has no hope of success,
Ellison felt impelled to make a comment pertinent to Social and Emotional
Learning (SEL). Ellison commented that
Graff’s emphasis on Social and Emotional Learning resonated with her
immediately because of her experience as a teacher at an alternative
school. She did not mention the name of
the school, but the school of reference was known as Plymouth Christian Youth
Center (PCYC) for a number of years, now rendered as Plymouth Youth Center
(PYC) Arts and Technology High School.
Ellison said that at her school there was a strong emphasis on teacher
and staff relationships with students, with the implication that this produced
student success.
Ellison is half-right but the half-wrong
part reveals the abominable level of academic substance delivered at such
schools. The City, Inc., and the Street
Academy/ Minneapolis Urban League High School were schools at which
relationship building was touted; those
schools are now defunct. The Minneapolis
Public Schools contracts with seven privately run alternative schools to
provide academic and other services to students whom MPS failed to engage. Those contract alternative schools are 800
West Broadway, Loring Nicollet, Menlo Park, Merc, PYC Arts and Technology
(Ellison’s school of reference), Tatanka Academy, and Volunteers of America
(VOA) High School. Academic performance
for many years at these schools has stagnated at levels witnessed in the
following aggregate results for academic year 2018-2019:
Percentage of Students Proficient at MPS
Contract Alternative Schools
(Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment [MCA])
Mathematics 2%
(52 tested)
Reading
(32 tested) 22%
Science
(30 tested) 13%
Many more than 52 students are enrolled at
these alternative schools, so that even the number (52) representing students taking
the mathematics MCA fails to capture the number of students enrolled. But absences are high; on any given day, a small percentage of
enrolled students actually are in attendance.
There was also some formal opting out, as well as spontaneous refusal to
take the tests.
Staff members at alternative schools do
tend to build amicable relationships with students and to reach out to families
with a persistence and compassion not prevailing in mainline MPS schools. In that sense, the overwrought term, Social
and Emotional Learning, could resonate with Kim Ellison’s experience at PYC
High School. That she would only mention
this facet of the school, though, is telling:
I return to my abiding questions. Are the members of this constituent
composition of the MPS Board of Education
1) ignorant;
2) in denial;
or
3)
corrupt.
Accumulated evidence over five years of
observation strongly suggests to me that the members of this board manifest all
three qualities:
1) They are ignorant as to the history and
philosophy of education in the United States and have little understanding of
the components of an excellent education.
2)
Given their fascination with their ability to attain membership by
winning elections with the strong support of the Minneapolis Federation of
Teachers (MFT), they are in denial on matters of curriculum and teacher
quality;
and
3)
They are corrupt political hacks who care more about maintaining their
positions, in some cases for potential to spring from the school board to a
legislative seat or other political position---
than they do about the academic sustenance of the precious students
whose lives they disregard.
Kim Ellison is ignorant, in denial, and
corrupt in making such comments as attend her advocacy of alternative schools
as models for the Minneapolis Public Schools.
She has made such comments and failed to identify the problems pertinent
to curriculum and teacher quality for her near-decade of membership on the MPS
Board of Education.
Ellison needs to catch sight of Jenny
Arneson’s exit out the Davis Center door and follow with due haste.
……………………………………………………………………………
Public disinterest in preK-12 education is
demonstrated by the fact that three members---
District #5 Member Nelson Inz, District #3 Member Siad Ali, and District
#1 Member Jenny Arneson--- ran without
opposition in the November 2016 elections.
This is unconscionable.
This and other such happenstances make the
public the greatest culprit in the degeneracy of the Minneapolis Public
Schools.
Election of four candidates in November
2020 who are advocates for knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education would transform
the Minneapolis Public Schools into a district that would be a model for others
across a nation of citizens with a propensity for local control but little
energy for exercise of that control so as to give students an education of
excellence.
I am going to be doing everything I can to
arouse citizen energies in Minneapolis for the defeat of Bob Walser, KerryJo
Felder, and Kim Ellison in November 2020---
with ultimate assessment of Ira Jourdain forthcoming.
