Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall >>>>> Observations from >Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< (with 500 pages of factual and analytical content)

A hard rain’s gonna fall on the education establishment of Minnesota, particularly on the administration and all key actors in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), but also on those many culpable parties who set the context for the wretched quality of education delivered by that school district.  The rain will fall amidst the thunder and lightning of data pouring forth from my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

All problems in PreK-12 education in the United States, an institution within which the Minneapolis Public Schools serves as salient example, begin at colleges and universities with teacher and administrator training programs.  Departments, colleges, and schools of education located on postsecondary campuses operate with a degraded philosophy of education that devalues knowledge, sends forth teachers who are low on knowledge, and connives to direct teachers toward lightweight masters and doctoral programs that add very little to the academic knowledge base of teachers and administrators. Such programs are cash cows for the coffers of colleges and universities, so that administrators at these institutions are deeply complicit in sending forth teachers who lack subject area knowledge, have slim pedagogic skill, and have little idea as to how to communicate personally and academically with students facing challenges of historical abuse, economic poverty, and familial dysfunction.

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) is bountifully staffed by people who have graduated from these academically insubstantial programs.  They receive ever-changing directives from the United States Department of Education, which pretends in legislative initiatives such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to be moving forth with yet another new approach for the betterment of public education.  Officials at MDE cynically receive these directives, do whatever is necessary to appear to be fulfilling legal mandates, and then create programs such as World’s Best Workforce and North Star Accountability System that have no chance of improving the quality of preK-12 education in Minnesota but establish the norms to which locally centralized school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools must mount their own cynical response.

Academic administrators at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) and at school sites have no scholarly credibility.  When charged with creating curricula and programming, they spew forth the mantras of education professors who ruined their already challenged intellectual capacities with the nonsense offered as educational philosophy.  A notable fact pertaining to the administration at the Minneapolis Public Schools is that huge talent fills the finance and technology divisions but that the efforts made by the highly educated people in these divisions are largely wasted because of the low intellectual level and corrupt philosophy of those making decisions pertinent to academic programming, which is the only reason for having public schools.  Hence, the purpose of these schools is not realized and cannot be until teachers and administrators are trained outside of conventional college and university programs.

Teachers at the PreK-5 level have been through the weakest course of study at any college or university.  They have no hope, even if they deemed the impartation of subject area knowledge important, of providing academically substantively education in natural science, history, geography, economics, or high quality literature to their students.  Art and music teachers are also frequently second-rate talents or people who are biding time and making a buck while trying to figure out how to break into the realms of the professional artist or musician.

Secondary teachers generally do have to pursue a degree in a major academic discipline (e. g., mathematics, biology, English literature) but they typically are not at the head of their classes and when they seek a bump up the step and lane system they demonstrate their lack of academic seriousness by entering those lightweight masters programs in departments, colleges, and schools of education.

Teachers unions (Education Minnesota;  Minneapolis Federation of Teachers) protect the sinecures of their constituencies and thus sustain academically insubstantial teachers who lack any understanding of and dedication to the most challenged student populations.

Identifying those at locally centralized school districts such as MPS who are ultimately responsible for the abominable quality of education delivered is a quixotic quest.  Responsibility lies in some netherworld between the superintendent and the board of education.  Current members of the MPS Board of Education constitute as incompetent and philosophically adrift group as one is like to find, even among many other similarly incompetent assemblages;  given the shallow academic training of Superintendent Ed Graff, there is no hope that with this school board and this superintendent any progress can be made in the thorough redesign necessary for the delivery of knowledge-intensive education.

The school district functions in behalf of a public that is also generally clueless as to the elements of an excellent education.  Attendance at school board meetings is greatest when some hot issue (cops in the schools, signs of racism in the reading program, programmatic and administrative changes that affect a given parent’s child) but typically slim when apparently mundane but highly significant decisions are under consideration.

Reporting on preK-12 education at the Star Tribune is abhorrent;  beat writers such as Faiza Mahamud just pursue topics determined by the school district with little analysis and upon a knowledge base not likely to produce incisive analysis even if the inclination abided.  Editorial pages editor Scott Gillespie and opinion pages editor Doug Tice have little understanding of preK-12 education and have in their decisions demonstrated moral and intellectual corruption.

Thus is our system of preK-12 education rife with culpable parties, radiating from those teacher and administrator training programs at colleges and universities and reaching to the voting public and conventional journalists.

In my Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, I provide 500 pages of details concerning the matters discussed above, and all manner of information on central office departments and divisions;  school by school profiles and academic performance;  Minneapolis Federation of Teachers;  MPS Board of Education;  college and university teacher and administrator training programs and the officials and teachers produced by them;  policy making and policy makers at the national and state levels, including a bevy of detail on those at the Minnesota Department of Education;  the current MPS Comprehensive District Design, by comparison with the previous Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan;  salary and duties for those who occupy positions in the Davis Center, including evaluation of quality of performance;  and many other areas for research and exploration suggested by my nearly 50 years of experience as a teacher, scholar, and keen observer of locally centralized school districts.

A hard rain’s a gonna fall.

It’s gonna fall on many culpable parties, including those who are expecting the storm and many who will be caught unaware.