Oct 3, 2019

Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> Chapter Sixty-Five (Part Three, Philosophy) >>>>> Atoning for a Brutal History and Apologizing to the African American People Via the Power of PreK-12 Education

As a matter of long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core, we will demonstrate that we truly understand that Black Lives Matter by overhauling K-12 education.

 

The education establishment of the United States has never properly educated the great majority of African American people, and in the broader sense K-12 public education in this nation has never offered academic instruction of excellence to most people.

 

African Americans have been most victimized by the deficiencies of K-12 public education In the United States.

 

Consider the history:

 

Most African American slaves were denied access to literacy.  When slavery ended in 1866 with the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and when the immediately succeeding 14th and 15th Amendments respectively acknowledged fundamental rights of citizenship and voting rights specifically, the pathway opened for African Americans to gain access to education.  But Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877, whereby Democrats granted the contested votes in the very close 1876 presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for withdrawal of federal troops from the South.

 

This left innervated the guarantees of the Reconstruction amendments and created conditions for the rise of hate groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, Midnight Raiders, and Ku Klux Klan; the advent of Jim Crow; and the “separate but equal” abomination in the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).  Segregation, violence, and the sharecropping system sent multitudes of African Americans scrambling on a Great Northern Migration. 

 

But in the urban North black people found restrictive housing covenants that directed them to certain parts of the city where, as in the case of African Americans settling in alongside the Jewish population of North Minneapolis, they joined other ethnic groups who also bore the burden of hateful treatment.  The Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, decision of the Supreme Court formally ended segregation in 1954, and the Civil Rights victories manifested in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965;  in combination with fair housing and employment laws in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s;  opened a pathway for African Americans positioned to grab for the middle class American Dream.

 

Ironically, though, many successful African American people joined whites fleeing the urban core.  In North Minneapolis, after rioting on Plymouth Avenue in summer 1967, Jewish people left in droves for St. Louis Park and other suburbs;  when many middle class African Americans did the same, this left behind--- as a general rule--- the poorest of the poor.

 

The Minneapolis Public Schools, like all American systems of K-12 public education, never had offered a superb quality of education.  Now mostly white educators were at a loss to provide high-quality education to a Northside population that increasingly included very challenged populations moving in from such places as Gary, Indiana;  Southside Chicago;  and Kankakee, Illinois.

 

And that’s where we remain today.

 

Our locally centralized system of the Minneapolis Public Schools has never provided anything close to a decent K-12 education to African Americans living at the urban core.

 

The time is now for us to provide knowledge-intensive K-12 education to our African American youth, and to our general populace of students of whom African American students constitute a particularly long-denied subset.

 

If we really believe that Black Lives Matter, then we must formulate a long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core by overhauling K-12 education in the Minneapolis Public Schools and across these not yet very United States.

 

The Opportunity to Confront the Forces of History and Overcome the Impact of Errant Legislative Policy in Minnesota

 

During the 1970s, North Minneapolis (the MPS schools of which are most challenged in terms of student achievement) underwent a great transition.  Civil rights and fair housing legislation had opened up suburban residential possibilities for those African Americans positioned to attain middle class status. Among those stuck in poverty, though, anger seethed.  Riots broke out along Plymouth Avenue in the summer of 1967;   overwhelmingly, destruction fell hardest on shops owned by members of the long-established North Minneapolis Jewish community, accelerating a residential shift into St. Louis Park.

 

From the 1920s through the 1960s, programming of the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, particularly under the leadership of W. Gertrude Brown from 1924 through 1937, typified a culturally vibrant North Side African American community harboring deep yearnings for middle class status.  Highly motivated Jewish and African American students responded with alacrity to teachers at North High School, at that time the best public secondary institution in Minnesota.

But as middle class African American and Jewish folk moved away from the North Side in the course of the 1970s, relatively low housing costs attracted those moving in from more challenged communities such as Gary, Indiana;  South Side Chicago;  Detroit, Michigan;  and other Midwestern urban outposts.  By this time, the old Wheatley had fallen to urban renewal, memories of the rich cultural heritage of North Minneapolis were fading, and North Minneapolis was giving evidence of problems faced by inner city communities throughout the United States.

Crack cocaine hit the streets about 1980 and gang activity rose precipitously.  Minneapolis Public Schools educators were overwhelmed by students facing very challenging circumstances.  Teachers, very few of whom were African American, had little training pertinent to instructing students from severely challenged families of economic poverty and frequent dysfunction.

This situation coincided with a lamentable trend in departments, schools, and colleges of education to promote a degraded “constructivist” pedagogical creed, according to which students and teachers define subjects to be studied, at whatever pace and in whatever manner that they choose. 

                                                                               

Education professors appropriated for this innervated approach to education the term “progressive,” but academic content declined in quality for those who most needed carefully defined and sequenced skill and knowledge sets.                                    

 

In 1983, a federally commissioned study entitled A Nation at Risk detailed the poor quality of K-12 education in the United States.  Fads for addressing the dilemma came and went until a movement

for higher academic standards and measurable results finally produced a worthy bipartisan program, No Child Left Behind.  In 2004, consistent with the requirements of this legislation, committees formed by the Minnesota Department of Education generated academic standards for reading, math, science, and social studies.  Officials of the Minnesota Department of Education also constructed the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) to assess student knowledge in reading and math for Grades 3 through 8.  Grade level performance on assessments for writing (administered in Grade 9), reading (Grade 10), and math (Grade 11) was deemed necessary for graduation.

Steadily, as student performance proved embarrassing, Education Minnesota (the well-funded teachers union in Minnesota) went to work on members of the DFL, undermining support for the MCAs and for academic standards.  The DFL-dominated, farcically dubbed “education session” of the 2013 Minnesota Legislature terminated the high school tests as graduation requirements.   Governor Mark  Dayton’s Education Commissioner, Brenda Cassellius, inaugurated an imprecise new Multiple Measure Ratings system and signaled that the MCAs would eventually be replaced by assessments more aligned to the ACT, upon the fanciful notion that students who could not pass high school level tests now are going to be better prepared to take the much more difficult, college readiness instrument.  Republicans, meanwhile, typically say that standards and assessments that they once supported now offend their local control sensibilities.  Perceiving an opening and adding further to the disarray, certain teachers, never keen on implementing measurable standards, are refusing to administer the doomed MCAs.

In this morally corrupt condition of state-level ineffectiveness, in which academic targets shift, no one can be held accountable, and “local control” becomes the mantra, meaningful overhaul of our K-12 systems must indeed ensue at the level of the central school district.         

The Vital Mission to Make of the United States a True Democracy by Providing Excellent Education to All of Our Precious Children

In the course of the middle to late 19th century, power-holders in the United States pursued courses of action that would in the 20th century come to be identified with the apartheid regime of South Africa.  At the same time that the United States government was systematically appropriating land that had been occupied for millennia by Native Americans, policies implemented by that same government reneged on a promise that had been made to African Americans in the waging of the Civil War and, especially, in the enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. 

 

The greatest miscreant acts taken by the United States government with regard to Native Americans were not in the expropriation of land as such, because something akin to the exercise of eminent domain was inevitable in the context of agrarian expansion by settlers of European ancestry;  the reprehensibility of government policy relevant to Native Americans was, rather, in the failure to compensate them fairly for lands seized and to evolve a policy in consultation with Native American

leaders and populace capable of integrating these ancestral first inhabitants of the Americas into the life of the United States on culturally respectful terms.  Policies pertinent to the forcible redistribution of Native American land as individualized land parcels, and the violent removal of children for reeducation on terms decreeing European styles of physical presentation and forbidding communication in native languages, were both ethically abhorrent and pragmatically ineffective.  Federal policy toward Native Americans anticipated in some respects the apartheid system of South Africa.  Policy toward African Americans had even clearer parallels.            

                                                                                               

Slavery in the plantation system of the Antebellum South has received due reprobation.  Less pervasively understood and disseminated is information relevant to the failure of Reconstruction and the one hundred years of American history that resulted from a major Constitutional breach.  Slavery was embedded in the United States Constitution of 1789, but denial of citizenship in the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 contravened the 14th Amendment asserting citizenship for people regardless of race or previous condition of servitude and the 15th amendment guaranteeing the right of males 21 years of age and older to vote;  and although the 13th amendment forbidding slavery was generally followed as a technical matter, aspects of the sharecropping system revived many features of the plantation system.            

According to the Compromise of 1877, a dispute over a contested presidential election in Florida was resolved when Democrats agreed to concede victory in that state to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel Tilden, with the understanding that federal troops would be removed from the South.  With this agreement, the white establishment in the South was able to reassert  dominance and over the course of the ensuing years to institute the system of segregation defined by Jim Crow institutions and the Black Codes;  the decision of Supreme Court Justices in Plessy v. Ferguson gave federal  judicial blessing to state legislative initiatives and ad hoc societal practices asserting the right of states (according to the concepts of interposition and nullification) to pursue courses of action in defiance of federal law. 

                                                                               

In this context of betrayal, a Great Northern Migration ensued whereby a huge contingent of the African American population relocated in cities of the North and Midwest such as New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Minneapolis.  African Americans did find more remunerative jobs in the North, but they also experienced a great deal of social anomie and less formal but pervasive racism in the form of restricted housing covenants and denial of access to restaurants and hotels commonly accepted as reserved for exclusively white patronage.

                                                                               

The Northern Migration accelerated in the aftermath of World War I and continued with great force throughout the 20th century.   People of African American ethnicity in the Twin Cities settled especially heavily in the Rondo Community of St. Paul, in North Minneapolis from Glenwood Avenue northward, and in certain sections of South Minneapolis, focused initially along 4th and 5th Avenues between East 35th and 41st Streets.  In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, continuing to the present time, there was also a pronounced trend toward a kind of Westward Migration, especially from Chicago and nearby urban, suburban, and exurban communities:  Southside Chicago;  Gary, Indiana;  and places of African American settlement such as Kankakee, Illinois.

 

African American populations have in the main been ill-served by urban school districts in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and indeed in Minneapolis and St. Paul.   In Minneapolis, the education of African Americans facing severe economic challenges has languished;  Minneapolis Public Schools decision-makers have not heretofore generated a viable program for addressing the needs of students of various ethnicities mired in generational poverty, whether these students identify as African American, Hispanic/Latino, Native American/ American Indian, Hmong, or Caucasian.  Over thirty years now since the publication of A Nation at Risk, the risk falls most heavily on impoverished families living at the urban core. 

 

The time is now to reduce that risk by addressing the academic needs of the urban poor, thus moving forward with the key agenda of the Second Phase of the Civil Rights Movement.

 

When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, he was in the midst of organizing a Poor People’s March on Washington in frank recognition that his Civil Rights Movement had achieved only a partial victory with the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), along with subsequent federal initiatives in health care, housing, and employment.  These congressional acts of statutory law had opened a way toward political and economic progress for those who had the wherewithal to strive for middle class status, residentially moving if they so desired into the tranquility of suburban enclaves.  Left behind at the urban core, though, were people mired in cyclical generational poverty who saw little hope for themselves as to they looked toward futures reminiscent of the familial and community examples they saw around them in the detritus of inner city life.

 

So Dr. King knew as of 1968 that his job was only half done.  He had opened the way toward equality of citizenship in a technical sense, but he had fallen far short in making a path through which those in the most challenged urban areas could move toward equity of educational and economic opportunity.  In the program he was generating, Dr. King’s emphasis was on diverting federal dollars from military involvements (he had become an outspoken opponent of the War in Vietnam), toward programs that would indirectly and in some cases very directly transfer into the familial coffers of impoverished people of the inner city.

 

I will never know if Dr. King would eventually have put more emphasis on improving the quality of education dispensed by the public schools.  What I do know is that as the 1970s ensued, urban school districts that had been minimally acceptable by international standards became outright disasters.  And this is the case today, over 30 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk. 

 

By the 1980s, observers with any degree of discernment knew that the most important policy implication to result from Brown v. Board of Education offered no definite path to excellence in education for African American young people living at the urban core.  There had been people in many quarters who assumed that desegregation would result in vastly improved outcomes for inner city youth, that attending schools by tradition receiving far better educational resources housed in superior facilities would provide a significantly better education.  This was wrong for chiefly four reasons.

 

First, K-12 education in the United States is weak by the standards of nations at similar levels of economic development.  Public education in the United States does not come close in quality to that offered by the systems of East Asia and the European social democracies.  Results of the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) exam perennially demonstrate this.

 

Second, curriculum is weak in the K-12 public institutions of the United States.  In the East Asian nations of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore;  and in the social democracies of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and France;  a strong liberal arts curriculum is set at the national level, and implemented through each nation in a way that demonstrates that literature, fine arts, economics, history, political science, natural science, and math are valued.  These subjects are introduced sequentially year by year at each grade level from kindergarten forward.  By comparison, curriculum in the United States is decided at the state and local levels in a way that demonstrates contempt for knowledge of the liberal arts.

 

Third, teachers in the United States are ill-trained.  Decision-makers and professors in university departments, schools, and colleges of education operate programs that prepare prospective teachers poorly in terms of pedagogy, subject area knowledge, and practical experience.

 

Fourth, those administrators and teachers at the central school district level (which according to the penchant in the United States for local control is the most important unit for examination) who design and implement programs for urban youth do so in the absence of any sincere conviction that all students are capable and deserve an excellent education.  These educational professionals generally have little understanding of the problems of the urban poor, lack the skills to communicate effectively with people from economically challenged circumstances, and have few institutionalized approaches for reaching out to people with caring assistance right where they live.

 

We must exert every effort and apply every pressure necessary for success.  And we must begin by getting a firmer idea of what constitutes an excellent education and what describes an excellent teacher.          

 

Realizing the Vision of a Democratic Society by Revolutionizing K-12 Education

 

The United States has never functioned as a democracy, given an understanding of that sociopolitical form as a polity providing equal opportunity for all citizens.  As of 1789, most people of African heritage counted constitutionally as “all other persons” who were not free, indentured, or Native American.  The free and the indentured were counted in determining apportionment by states in the House of Representatives;  African Americans were counted at the fractional three-fifths, while untaxed Native Americans were counted not at all.  Women were counted for the purpose of determining representation in the House, but they had to wait until 1920 to vote, and they awaited the late 1960s and early 1970s for legal guarantees that moved them nearer to equality with men.

 

African American men should have achieved full citizenship according to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, but the Compromise of 1877, Jim Crow, Black Codes, interposition, nullification, vigilante judges, and lynching jurists favored de facto practices over de jure formulations.  Formal citizenship for African Americans came with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but a post-Reconstruction history of migration and Northern-style segregation yielded urban ghettos wherein the equality of opportunity inherent in democracy could not abide.

     

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted on 2 July, fifty years ago at the publication of this new journal.  But fifty years hence, we still do not have democracy.  We will only have democracy when we provide excellent education to all of our young people, providing those living at the urban core a genuine route out of the entrapment of multigenerational poverty, pressures conducive to familial dysfunction, recourse to pharmaceutical pleasure, easy money discovered en route to incarceration, and a life that will never know the cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that excellent education bestows.

 

 

Training Teachers Capable of Imparting a Rich Liberal Arts Curriculum   

Teachers are abominably trained. 

 

Education professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education throughout the United States are philosophically united around a harmful creed known as “constructivism,” which takes student experiential frames of reference and avid personal interests as the driving forces of curriculum.  In a system undergirded by this approach for identifying what is to be studied, teachers are conceptualized as “facilitators,” classroom presences adept at understanding the life experiences of students, listening to young people talk about their passions, and directing learners to resources appropriate to their life experiences and interests.

 

There is much that is initially appealing about this conceptualization of the educational experience, especially in the United States.  People in the United States frequently see themselves as rugged individualists, free to do, live, worship, work, and congregate as they choose.  To rugged individualists, there is a great deal of appeal in the notion of a freewheeling classroom of happy, smiling students enthralled with an educational experience that focuses on them, pitched to their interests, with a classroom facilitator interfering as little as possible with the students’ exciting educational journey.    

 

But such an approach shortchanges students.

 

 By not transmitting to them what is their cultural inheritance, we rob students of the great body of knowledge and wisdom accumulated over the centuries from the greatest mathematicians, most brilliant scientists, finest literary masters, most adroit historians, and most supremely talented practitioners of the fine arts. 

 

Giving Students Their Rightful Cultural Inheritance

 

Low are the odds that a young student is going to gain an early understanding of the specific Native American groups who populated the two continents of the Western Hemisphere, the importance of Columbus’s voyages to the Americas, the injustices of the Middle Passage, the essential principles of the United States Constitution, or the presidencies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson---  unless a knowledgeable teacher presents information and directs discussions about these major historical events and personages. 

 

Unlikely in the extreme will students in the early grades come to know the difference between

deciduous trees and evergreens, exactly what causes and constitutes different forms of precipitation, what plants thrive in the tropics versus those that persist under desert conditions, how cells promote the growth of bodily tissue and anatomical organs, why Copernicus was so insightful in describing the

universe as heliocentric, how Gregor Mendel revolutionized our understanding of heredity and genetics with his seminal work---   unless a teacher who knows and cares about such things conveys the wonder of scientific discovery to students.

 

Not at all predictable will be the student’s path to understanding the cultural contexts that have given us classical, blues, jazz, rock, and hip-hop music;  the musical forms that determine the classification of those musical genres;  the defining elements of tap, folk, ballet, ballroom, and hip-hop dancing;   the musical concepts of melody, pitch, and harmony;  or the distinguishing features of West African, Renaissance European, Song Dynasty, American Realist, or International Cubist visual art forms

---  unless a culturally and artistically astute teacher animates a classroom with the sheer glory of these extraordinary human accomplishments in the fine arts.

               

Nor will young students be privy to the elegant simplicity of Arabic numerals;  the interplay of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in solving and explaining so many practical problems;  the thematic unity of fractions, decimals, and percentages;  the art of selecting which of these expressions of part to whole is most efficiently applied to a given circumstance;  the magnificent equilibrium of the algebraic equation;  the combination of art and science to be observed in geometric two-dimensional and three dimensional shapes---   unless a teacher alive in the world of mathematics conveys its power and beauty to students.

 

And there is not much chance that students will gain introduction to literary masterpieces such as the A. E. Milne Winnie the Pooh books;  the stories from One Thousand One Arabian Nights;  the strange worlds that Louis Carrol created in Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass;  the power of the African American folktale, The People Could Fly; or the Native American tale, Inktomi Has Two Eyes -----  unless a teacher who truly appreciates and reads high-quality literature models such love in transmission to students. 

 

And yet these are all realms of knowledge in the worlds of natural science, history, fine arts, mathematics and literature over which children as young as those in the Grade K-2 years can roam with acute understanding when taught by a teacher of intellectual substance, rather than a mere functional facilitator. 

 

When we give students room to make their own decisions for research efforts, we must make sure that they have a solid informational base on which to identify topics for investigation.  When we ask young people critically to analyze an issue, we must ensure that they have the factual knowledge

necessary to inform their analysis.  We take from our students something very precious when we deny to them their cultural inheritance in mathematics, literature, history, natural science, and the fine arts.

 

And if we deny them thusly, we send our students across the stage at graduation, after thirteen years of schooling, almost as ignorant as they were when they entered Grade K---  however thoroughly their egos have been massaged on the flimsy notion that the curriculum should be guided upon their own whims.

                                                                                               

The level of knowledge that abides in the heads of most high school graduates is unconscionable.

To correct this violation of a public trust, to rectify our failure to provide common skill and knowledge sets to all of our precious young people, whatever their demographic descriptors, we need better teachers.  We need teachers who respect knowledge and have it rumbling along their neural pathways, ready to be imparted with conviction, energy, joy.

 

To do this we must overleap the impediments posed by the vapid creed of education professors in our departments, colleges, and schools of education.

 

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