Sep 30, 2019

>Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> Chapter Fifty-Three (Part Two, Analysis) >>>>> The Enormous Obstacle to Excellent Education Posed By the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers


Two paramount problems will doom the impartation of an excellent education to students of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) until gaining resolution:  1) weak, illogically sequence curriculum;  and 2)  teacher quality. 

 

Inasmuch as teacher-scholars would bring strong subject area curriculum embedded in their brains, the problem of teacher quality is even graver than that of weak curriculum.

 

In protecting inadequate teachers, the Minneapolis Federation fo Teachers (MFT) poses an enormous obstacle to the impartation to an excellent education to MPS students.

 

Consider the following 10-point platform put forward by the MFT in anticipation of the most recent round of contract negotiations, followed by my analysis.

 

MFT59 10 Point Platform

 

Common Sense Bargaining for the Common Good

 

Beyond Academics:  Educating the Whole Child

 

All students deserve books in the library;  instruments in the band room;  supplies in the art room;  equipment in the gym;  vision, hearing, and dental screenings every year.  Students deserve nurses, social workers, counselors, psychologists, and library media specialists in their schools---  all day, every day.

 

Smaller Class Sizes

 

All students deserve to have individual relationships with their teachers, as strong relationships create strong classrooms.  Small class sizes allow time for teachers to plan quality lessons, talk to families, talk to each student every day, and give students the attention they need to learn and grow.

 

Students are More Than a Test Score

 

All students deserve a broad, rich curriculum including academics, arts, music, language, and trade, emphasizing engagement and authentic learning, instead of preparation for high-stakes tests.  Students deserve teachers and administrators focused on development of quality curriculum in an educational environment that acknowledges and respects backgrounds, perspectives, and learning styles of our diverse communities.

 

Support, Don’t Punish:  Restorative Practices

 

All students deserve compassion, empathy, and a safe place to learn.  Students deserve educators well-trained in restorative practices.  Schools must move toward practices that build relationships and resolve conflict.  MPS must work to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

 

Clean and Healthy Buildings

 

All students deserve fully staffed schools that ensure a clean, healthy, and safe environment with soap in the bathroom, safe drinking water, sanitary classrooms, and working air conditioning in every school.

 

Full-Service Community Schools

 

All students and their families deserve community-based services.  Increasing the number of full-service community schools throughout the city would provide school-based community access to critical services such as healthcare, childcare, dental clinics, adult education courses, and enrichment and recreational opportunities for children from preschool to high school.

 

Quality Education for All:  Inclusion and Equity

 

All students deserve high quality education regardless of their special education needs, primary language, race, ethnicity, religion, documentation status, family income, family composition, sexual orientation, gender identity, or zip code.  Students deserve educators committed to disrupting racism and other systems of oppression in our classrooms and schools.  Our schools need to be welcoming to all our students and their families.

 

Invest in Public Schools

 

All students deserve a school district committed to fully funded public schools governed by a democratically elected school board accountable to the public.  Students deserve schools that will not close at a moment’s notice, schools that educate all children regardless of their needs, and schools that are staffed by highly qualified, licensed educators.

 

$15 an Hour for All MPS Employees

 

All students deserve a school district committed to investing in all employees by paying a living wage.  MPS employees include bus drivers, educators, food servers, secretaries, and engineers who are also mentors to students;  they are also our neighbors and parents to our students.

 

Recess

 

All students deserve at least 30 minutes of play and movement on a daily basis.  Recess promotes social and emotional learning such as working together as a team, making friends, and deciding which game to play next.

 

My Analysis

 

Now know this about the ten-point program given above, taken in point-by point order in the following exposition:

 

“Educating the whole child” is a phrase typically used by education professors and other members of the education establishment to avoid emphasis on academics.  Like so much from the strange world of of education departments, colleges, and schools, the phrase has a certain facile appeal, capable of moving anyone who claims to love children and to want to develop them as well-rounded human beings.  But members of the education establishment are better at launching pleasant sounding slogans into the ether than they are at providing the truly well-round education in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts that is the primary  responsibility of K-12 teachers and administrators.  In this case, the ten-point MFT program conveys the message that decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools should make sure that students are provided with an array of support services and adequate stocks of library books, art supplies, and gym equipment.  These items and services are indeed important, and I have argued persistently for greatly expanded outreach to families via the direct provision of certain services and resource referral for others.  But material necessities and support services will go to waste in the absence of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.

 

East Asian societies (e. g., South Korea, Taiwan, Shanghai [China], Singapore) conduct highly effective classrooms with large class sizes, ranging to 50 students and beyond.  Students in these nations; along with those in such nations as Finland, Poland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand;  regularly outperform students of the United States on the Program of International Students Assessment (PISA) designed by Andrea Schleicher to assess ability to analyze problems and to apply knowledge and skills creatively.  Small class sizes have intuitive appeal, and have many advantages if resources are available to keep classes small.  But class size is much less important than curriculum and teacher quality.

 

“Authentic learning” is another education establishment shibboleth.  This is code for the project and portfolio approach to education formerly taken in the defunct Profiles of Learning of the Minnesota Department of Education in the 1990s, now replaced by academic standards that I helped to design in the early years of the new millennium.  Standardized tests are the most objective assessments of student knowledge and skills, the sort of instruments represented by the college readiness measures of the ACT and SAT and the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) for grades 3-8 math and reading, grade 10 reading, and grade 11 math.  Because students (especially those facing challenges of familial poverty and functionality) in Minnesota record such a lackluster performance on such tests, the teachers unions (Education Minnesota, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers) seek escape into the project and portfolio approach that obscures information on student ability to perform a wide range of math skills and to read a wide swath of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

 

Students should receive a knowledge-intensive education in “academics, arts, music, language, and trade”;  but teachers have neither the knowledge nor the approach to curriculum that can provide such an education.  And as a group, teachers are lamentably short of the training and life experience that would truly allow them to provide knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts.

 

Students should be provided clean and healthy buildings, restorative justice, and equity.  But, given adequate buildings, if students were engaged with a knowledge-intensive, skill replete curriculum delivered at the behest of genuinely excellent teachers, the behavior problems that give rise to the need for restorative justice would diminish drastically and equity would be implicit.  Recess, health, and physical education are necessary parts of a fully developed curriculum---  but at present these are not generally provided in such a way as to  encourage the good eating habits and aerobic exercise that promote quality life on this one earthly sojourn.  Varsity sports get much more attention, again contrasting the educational programs of the United States with those of the best school systems across the world, all of which relegate sports activities to community programs rather than the schools.

 

Our schools should be properly funded, but the most vexing dilemma is not lack of funds but rather proper application of funds for the provision of high-quality curriculum, teachers, academic enrichment (set-aside time for tutoring and additional academic challenges), and outreach to families, all delivered by a greatly trimmed central office (Davis Center) bureaucracy.  All employees should receive at least $15, after proper training and a probationary period in which all staff members throughout the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools demonstrate an understanding of the central mission of the locally centralized school district to impart a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.         

 

Excellent education is the provision of a knowledge intensive, skill-replete curriculum in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts by excellent teachers, delivered in grade by grade sequence throughout the K-12 years.  As a group, members of MFT59 do not believe in such a knowledge-focused education, and the nature of their training does not prepare them to deliver such an education.

 Such a circumstance reduces the MFT 10 Point Platform to a substantively gossamer document, lacking in either common or intellectual sense, and certainly not capable of ensuring the common good through the impartation of an equitably excellent education to students of all demographic descriptors   

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

Teacher training is the root of the teacher quality problem at the Minneapolis Public Schools

 

Teachers at the K-5 level typically receive a B. A. in Elementary Education, the weakest degree on any

any college or university campus.  They are then encouraged by the step and lane system to secure an M. A. in Elementary Education, for which they take very similar courses, also the least challenging of any master’s degree program.  Only a few teachers at the K-5 level receive doctorates;  all of those doctorates received by K-5 teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) are in education.

 

Teachers at the grades 6-8 and 9-12 levels do often receive a B. A. or B. S. in fields other than education, but they almost always receive master’s degrees in education rather than in subject areas pertinent to the fields in which they teach.  Only a few teachers at grades 6-8 and 9-12 receive doctorates.  Among teachers at grades 6-8 in the Minneapolis Public Schools, none hold a Ph. D in a field other than education.  Among MPS teachers at grades 9-12, only three hold a Ph. D in a field other than education. 

 

One of the two reasons that students graduate from the Minneapolis Public Schools with so little knowledge in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, psychology, literature, English composition, music, and visual art is because curriculum is mostly absent at the K-5 level and is weak at grades 6-8 and 9-12, except for Advanced Placement courses at the 9-12 (actually 11-12) level.

 

The other reason for the knowledge deficiency of students and graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools is that very few teachers at grades K-5 have much subject area knowledge at all.  At grades 6-8 and 9-12, very few teachers are genuine masters of their fields.  Very few teachers at these levels have the ability to teach Advanced Placement courses.

 

Consider the following data:

 

Degrees Held by Teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools

 

Number of Teachers Who Hold Each of the Following as Their Most Advanced Degree

 

Grade        Bachelor’s     Master’s   Ed. D.     Ph. D.

Level

Taught

 

K-5                  515                872            22                   6

 

6-8                  172                 235              3                    5

 

9-12               289                 388                 5               11

 

Number of Teachers Who Hold a Master’s Degree or Ph. D. in a Field Other Than Education

 

Grade        Master’s   Ph. D.

Level

Taught

 

K-5                 56              -----

 

6-8                  23              -----

               

9-12               48                3

 

Percentage of Teachers with Master’s Degree in Education

vs. Teachers with Master’s Degree in Other Fields

 

Grade         Master’s Degree        Master’s Degrees

Level           in Education                 in Other Fields

Taught

 

K-5                    93.58%                             6.42%

 

6-8                     90.21%                             9.78%

               

9-12                  87.62%                         12.37%

 

 

Percentage of Teachers with Ph. D. in Education

vs. Teachers with Ph. D. Other Fields

 

Grade         Ph. D                               Ph. D.

Level           in Education                 in Other Fields

Taught

 

K-5                   100.00%                           0.00%

 

6-8                    100.00%                           0.00%

               

9-12                    81.25%                       18.37%

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

Teachers are thus philosophically corrupted by professors of education, and their potential as scholars is thwarted by the phenomenon of degrees in education having since the 1990s supplanted those in academic subject areas.

 

Teachers enter classrooms unprepared to impart the logically sequenced preK-12 knowledge and skill sets that comprise an excellent education.  They seek the comfort of schools with student populations that are wealthy and unscarred by history.  Any given teacher is likely to have very little understanding, despite all the buzz about culturally relevant curriculum and cultural competency, of students of African American, Latino-Latina, Somali, or Hmong provenance.

 

Teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools are incompetent across an astonishing array of indicators.

 

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers protects and promotes such incompetence.

 

Thus, the MFT is the major obstacle to the impartation of excellent education to students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  

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