Oct 28, 2019

Article #1 of a Ten-Article Series on the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education >>>>> Jenny Arneson’s Second Astoundingly Stupid Statement Obligates Her to Resign from the MPS Board of Education


District 1 (Northeast and Southeast Minneapolis) Jenny Arneson is an enigma:

 

Arneson is the hardest working of the members on the current Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education.

 

She is a courageous person who appears to be triumphing over a very serious case of lymphatic cancer.

 

Arneson is a masterful accumulator of factual detail on many aspects of the inner workings of the district, notably information pertinent to her Northeast Minneapolis stomping grounds and items relevant to current district finances.  She also was an adept chair during her term of service in that position , a knowledgeable manager of meetings per Robert’s Rules of Order, a skill that stands her in good stead in her current role as chair of the finance committee.

 

But three moments impel me to call for Arneson’s resignation:

 

………………………………………………………………………………………….

 

In the spring of 2016 a forum sponsored by the League of Women’s Voters unfolded at Bryn Mawr K-5 school.  This forum offered one of the very few chances for audience members to ask open-ended oral questions;  that is to say, there was none of the usual scripted nonsense, such as questions having to be written down on slips of paper and then vetted for posing to members of the board.  The MPS Board of Education then consisted of Arneson, Siad Ali, Tracine Asberry, Carla Banks, Kim Ellison, Rebecca Gagnon, Nelson Inz, Josh Reimnitz, and Don Samuels.  Ali, Banks, and Reimnitz were not in attendance;  Asberry arrived only very late.  Hence, the members fully available for questioning were Arneson, Ellison, Gagnon,  Inz, and Samuels.

 

Most of the questions from the audience were nondescript and had little to do with academics.

 

I by contrast posed a question that made reference to the opposing philosophies of education represented by the knowledge-intensive views of E. D. Hirsch and the student-driven curriculum advocated by Alfie Kohn;  each of these views have roots in a discussion that began in the 1920s with William C. Bagley and William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College at Columbia University.

 

My question to the members of the MPS Board of Education in spring 2016 was:

 

“Given the description that I just gave you of the views expressed in Hirsch’s 1996 The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them  and Alfie Kohn’s 1999 The Schools Our Children Deserve, do you favor Hirsch’s knowledge-intensive established curriculum or Kohn’s open-ended, student and teacher driven curriculum?”

 

Board members were tongue-tied and tried to have it both ways, articulating their views no better when I maintained that for clarity they had to favor one of these views over the other, because Hirsch and Kohn would agree that these approaches result in very different curriculum and pedagogy. 

 

Jenny Arneson was as inept as the others in articulating any philosophy of education.  She does not to this day reveal any coherent philosophy of education, a telling observation regarding a board member who is now in the midst of her ninth year on the MPS Board of Education.

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

Arneson should resign for having not developed an internally consistent philosophy of education in nearly a decade of board membership.

 

Two recent statements further obligate her to resign:

 

>>>>>    Eight months ago Jenny Arneson noted, as part of her final report at a meeting of the MPS Board of Education (of the sort with which board members conclude each of their meetings) that her son had been accepted by his first choice for college attendance, Grinnell College in Iowa.  She then opined that “This proves that every student at MPS is College and Career Ready.”

 

That statement was astonishingly stupid, given that fewer than thirty percent (30%) of students on Free and Reduced Price Lunch and those of several ethnicities who tend to fall in the Free/Reduced category are not proficient in mathematics, reading, or science;  and that one-third (33%) of MPS students who matriculate on college and university campuses need remedial courses.

 

>>>>>    At the Committee of the Whole meeting of Tuesday, 22 October, Arneson  conveyed the essence of a conversation that she had had with a student who liked the idea of ethnic studies courses offered as alternatives to a United States history course, because the high school course is just a repetition of what students learned in a course focused on the same subject in grade seven.  Arneson accepted the student’s view uncritically, thereby revealing appalling ignorance for a graduate of St. Olaf College, albeit in the academically undemanding field of social work.

 

The pertinent truth is two-fold  >>>>>

 

1)  The grade 7 course is typically taught via videos and through packets that students fill out in the absence of teacher-imparted information or comment and without class discussion.  And unless students take Advanced Placement (AP) United States history in high school, the mode of teacher disinterested, unengaging instruction evident at grade 7 abides also in the high school course---  and lamentably even in some AP courses, taught as they often are by knowledge-deficient teachers.  

 

2)  Limiting the number of United States history or any other courses in core subject areas should be determined only as a practical matter, since the number of such courses would be multiple if the amount of information to be conveyed were the determinant.

 

Perpend:

 

>>>>>    Various American Indian groups, tending toward one hundred (100) in number, upon arrival of Columbus and subsequent Europeans---

 

>>>>>    Impact of American Indians and Europeans on each other---

 

>>>>>    the different ruling styles of Spaniard, Portuguese, French, and British imperialists---

 

>>>>>    pre-slavery organization of agricultural labor---

 

>>>>>    reasons for the economic appeal of slave as opposed to indentured labor---

 

>>>>>    exact functioning of the slave trade, from the sale by Ashanti and Dahomey kingdoms of African human commodities to the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and eventually mainly the British shippers and traders---

 

>>>>>    everyday slave resistance and occasional rebellions---

 

>>>>>    Loyalists versus Rebels in the run-up to the American Revolution;  the tough, extremely constrained options for African Americans in assessing potential for manumission via participation---

 

Now consider that I have not even arrived at the precipitating events and fighting of the American Revolution, the American Constitutional Convention, the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the United States Constitution,  or the first decade (1790s) of the new republic---  nor to the little matter of the two complete centuries (19th and 20th) that by definition reveal the bulk of events in the history of the United States.

 

Thus, Arneson’s comments regarding the repetition involved in two courses of United States history is appallingly stupid because

 

 >>>>>   the problem is not repetition but rather that students learn nothing of great substance in either course because of the approach to curriculum and pedagogy;

 

and

 

>>>>>    on the basis of amount of information important for conveyance, even multiple courses could not impart all that there is to learn concerning American and United States history---  so that the decision as to how many courses to offer is a matter of temporal practicality:  Repetition except as a matter of review as foundation for new learning is a matter of teacher inadequacy, not intrinsic to the abundant knowledge sets for mastery of American and United States history.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………….

 

For reasons that I will detail in looming articles, all of the current membership of the MPS Board of Education should resign.

 

For lack of a coherent philosophy of education after nine years on the board, and for the two starkly stupid comments tendered by her as given above, Jenny Arneson should lead the others out the door.

 
>>>>>    Jenny Arneson should resign immediately from the MPS Board of Education.

No comments:

Post a Comment