In the Minneapolis Public Schools, reading proficiency
rose a bit over those two academic years, from 43 percent to 45 percent, with
math proficiency flat at 42 percent. In
that school district, one-third of graduates who matriculate at colleges and
universities need remedial instruction.
And most graduates walk across the stage to claim a piece of paper that
is a diploma in name only, so deficient are they in key knowledge and skill
sets in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government,
economics, quality literature, English composition, and the fine, vocational,
and technological arts.
Year after year we get similar results.
How did we get in this mess?
Thomas Jefferson, for his many human failings, was a
visionary of citizenship in the democratic society who said that "I know
no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people
themselves; and if we think them not
enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the
remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."
The 19th century educator Horace Mann
developed this Jeffersonian notion of an educated citizenry by asserting the
need for common schools that would provide citizens with shared knowledge as
the basis for participation in democracy.
Across the nation, teachers in one-room rural and larger town and city
schools imparted knowledge and skill sets in reading, writing, arithmetic,
history, geography, and literature.
Often, teachers used the popular McGuffey
Readers that were by no means ethnically representative but did provide
substantive information and gave students experience with high-quality
literature.
Two views of education for African Americans came from
Booker T. Washington, who stressed vocational education and the development of economic
independence before insistence on full citizenship rights; and W. E. B. DuBois, who took a view
consonant with that of Jefferson and Mann and asserted that a “talented tenth”
of the African America population should lead the way to informed political
participation. And indeed, such African
American luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and DuBois
gave testimony to the power of knowledge as they held the ideals of the United
States constitution before a nation that was not living up to the ideals
expressed in that document; the speeches
of those three are replete with references to history, government, and
literature.
Schools in the United States at the 19th-20th
century divide were of widely varying quality.
Most students did not attend school past grade six. But by the first two decades of the 20th
century an increasing number of students were seeking attendance in high
schools that generally featured classical curricula in mathematics, natural
science, history, government, English literature and usage, and Latin. An intermediary institution, junior high,
also appeared in some urban districts, for students in grades seven through
nine, featuring academic preparation for the high school curriculum.
At that turn of the 19th into the 20th
century, normal schools offered formal preparation for some teachers; these varied widely in quality but in general
assumed that teachers would be instructing students in a rigorous academic
curriculum. But by the second decade of
the 20th century, teachers colleges located on university campuses
overtook the normal schools as institutions of teacher preparation. Education professors, now ensconced in
university settings among academic field specialists, began to emphasize
pedagogy over curriculum, with the assertion that the systematic acquisition of
knowledge was not important.
The writings of John Dewey, while full of internal
contradictions and often lacking clarity, typically asserted that education
should resonate with the experience of the child and offer practical
preparation for life. More clearly,
William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg advocated for a putatively progressive
approach to education that deemphasized the sequential acquisition of knowledge
and skill sets. Heard in 1918 penned an
article, “The Project Method,” and soon published a book of the same name; in 1928, Rugg, with coauthor Ann Shumaker,
published the book, The Child-Centered School.
In these two volumes we have the foundations for the “progressive”
education movement that, against the vigorous counter arguments of such subject
area proponents as William C. Bagley, became entrenched at the teachers
colleges, most influentially at the Teachers College of Columbia University.
This view of education took many decades to prevail in
the schools of locally centralized districts across the nation. Many teachers had trained as field
specialists. Many parents of immigrant
populations and African Americans relocating as participants in the Great
Northern Migration wanted a substantive education as a basis for scaling the
educational ladder to success. But
paradoxically in sync with a creed known as “progressive,” proponents of those
ideas absorbed and espoused racist precepts of the first decades of the 20th
century that expressed doubts as to whether the children of southern and
eastern European immigrants and African American migrants could master an
academic curriculum . Such populations
were typically tracked into vocational curriculum while decision-,makers won to
the “progressive” creed begrudgingly provided an academic track to satisfy
expectations of university admissions offices.
During the late 1960s, the “progressive’ creed thrived in
a zeitgeist with individual personal expression at the center; “progressive” ideology now dominated among
teachers and administrators, all trained by education professors in
departments, colleges, and schools of education. This was terrible timing. In terrible and ferocious irony, advances in
civil rights made possible the pursuit of the middle class lifestyle for
African Americans positioned to climb the economic ladder; and fair housing laws made residential
housing covenants less likely: African
American middle class flight joined white flight as phenomena that at the urban
core left behind the poorest of the poor.
Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980. Gang activity proliferated. Urban school systems such as the Minneapolis
Public Schools were overwhelmed, with almost all-white middle class teaching
staffs faced with the duty to teach populations with which they had no cultural
affinity. And with the triumph of
“progressive” education, these teachers had little of substance to offer their
students that could assist them in ending the cyclical poverty that created the
conditions of inner city life. Mainly
white educational theorists touted critical thinking, lifelong learning,
projects and portfolios as measures of student learning, curriculum driven by
individual teachers and their students---
all in the absence of logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets
measurable by objective assessments, thus robbing students of the information
base upon which genuine critical analysis and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge
could proceed. The mantras of education
professors became excuses for teaching very little at all.
By the late 1990s, a movement for academic standards and
testing ultimately produced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, but telling
disaggregated data results proved embarrassing to the education establishment,
which went to work on those Democrats (in Minnesota, the DFL) to which the
teachers unions give so bountifully; and
those on the right, supporters of Republicans, came to object to strict federal
mandates. No Child Left Behind gave way
to waivers under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top moniker, which in
Minnesota produced the murky Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS); and then the Every Student Succeeds Act
(ESSA, 2016) produced the even murkier North Star Accountability System
(NSAS).
The latter system, now being rolled out by Brenda
Cassellius and staff at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), like MMRS
relieves the pressure on school officials by relegating objective measures such
as the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments and the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) to status as just one factor among many--- including graduation rates, student
attendance, incremental academic progress over time, incremental progress of
English learners--- for rating school
and district programs. Cassellius and
the other North Star explicators at MDE ask the public to believe that six
Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs), each staffed with seven or eight members,
are going to provide the needed assistance for addressing the abysmal academic
performance of Minnesota’s students.
Charter schools and school choice programs have been part
of the educational landscape of Minnesota since the early 1990s. But charter schools are typically even worse
than the mainline public schools, and choice programs have been a diversion
from the fact that few schools in Minnesota provide true excellence of
education by comparison with the nations of East Asia and those such as Germany,
Finland, Canada, Poland, and Australia that far outperform students in the
United States on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).
We got in this K-12 mess in Minnesota, with unfortunate
resonance throughout the nation, with the unfortunate coincidence of an
anti-knowledge approach to education, residential patterns traceable to a
racist history, unprepared urban school districts that have never dedicated
themselves to the education of students of all demographic descriptors, and the
growth of charter schools and choice programs that exacerbated the problems.
We got in this mess for highly identifiable reasons.
Now, according the precepts of Part
Three: Philosophy, we must get out.
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