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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