Karren Devet is a
supremely intelligent person who is working hard to capture needed resources
via redesign of the irrational transportation system and other operational
matters that she inherited at the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Rochelle Cox is a
clear thinker and compassionate person who has superintended one of the best
parts of the emerging Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Comprehensive Design.
Sara Etzel is a
powerful speaker and forceful advocate for Career and Technical Education (CTE)
and--- critically important--- she understands that students who pursue CTE options
should have a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education that MPS should be
offering to students of all demographic descriptors and vocational aspirations.
Ibrahima Diop,
Karen Devet, Rochelle Cox, and Sara Etzel are major human assets of the
Minneapolis Public Schools.
This cannot be
said for Aimee Fearing and her fellow academic lightweights in the Department of
Teaching and Learning that she leads.
The inadequacy of
academic decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools is the reality that
will have Achilles nursing his heel as he rises symbolically over the
developing Comprehensive Design.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
The academic
strategies put forth in the emerging versions of the MPS District Design last
spring were similar and inevitably incoherent.
Exactly who put
together this mishmash is not clear, even to an apt research detective such as
I.
Deputy Chief of
Academics, Leadership, and Learning Cecilia Saddler knew that her days at MPS
were numbered; whatever input she put
into the hodgepodge that she presented to the MPS Board of Education was
predictable for her predilection toward the debased jargon that she had imbibed
from her education professors.
The Department of
Teaching and Learning staff was in flux and never up to the task of designing
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.
This remains the
case as applicable to Aimee Fearing and staff now assembled, with a number of
holdovers and a few additions at the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning
that Fearing now leads as executive director.
Fearing attended
the low-ranked University of Northwestern (not to be confused with Northwestern
University in Evanston, Illinois [Chicago area]) in St. Paul as an
undergraduate, majoring in English as a Second Language. She holds meaningless masters and doctoral
degrees in education programs that added not one whit to her limited academic
knowledge base.
Many staff members
in the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning hold even undergraduate degrees
in education and any graduate degrees held come overwhelmingly from departments,
colleges, or schools of education, rather than in academic departments for
serious students of mathematics, the natural sciences (biology, chemistry,
physics), English usage and literature, the social sciences and humanities
(government, geography, economics, history) or the fine arts (visual and
musical).
Superintendent Ed
Graff, who is effectively now acting as his own chief academic officer, has
proven to be a masterful administrator in nonacademic matters--- but he,
too, is an intellectual lightweight who holds no degree in an academic subject.
Thus, as is the
case under the academically lightweight education professors under whom they
have so inadequately trained, neither Aimee Fearing nor her staff have any chance
of designing a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete academic program that first
of all follows the law by teaching Minnesota State Academic Standards that are
not now being taught; but goes far beyond
these to articulate an academic program that witnesses grade 5 students who
have excellent initial knowledge bases in those key subject areas given above,
continues to develop that knowledge base in middle school, and sends students
into high school prepared to take Advanced Placement courses and to exercise
preferences according to those educational and vocational goals that they
envision for themselves in their post-secondary lives.
……………………………………………………………………………………..
Ibrahima Diop,
Karen Devet, Rochelle Cox, and Sara Etzel constitute major human assets for the
Minneapolis Public Schools.
This is not true
for Aimee Fearing and staff at the Department of Teaching and Learning.
They must get assistance
from professors of legitimate academic fields for the design of knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete curriculum to draw upon when articulating the key academic
principles of the MPS Comprehensive Design.
In 1937, MPs had
over 80,00 students; as late as the year
2000 the district had 50,000 and even in 2005 had 40,000 students. The loss of students in recent years has been
precipitous, so that the total is now 33,380.
Parents and
students opt for lousy charter and alternative schools--- and in
some cases do a little better at Ascension, Harvest Prep, and KIPP (Knowledge
is Power Program ) Academy--- trying
desperately to find a safe, hospitable learning environment.
If academic decision-makers
at the Minneapolis Public Schools want to get the students of Minneapolis back into
public schools that should be designed for their academic development, they must exercise that courage that they
claim as inspirational in words appropriated from paragons of bold action, Martin
Luther King and Sitting Bull.
Courage in this
case will involve recognizing their own intellectual inadequacies, turning to
academicians who can design knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum and thoroughly
train teachers capable of imparting that curriculum; they must then bring on staff people who are comfortable
on the streets and in the homes of students facing the greatest life
challenges.
Failure to follow
this course will diminish any benefit from the MPS Comprehensive Design and
result very probably in a student population base of 25,000 and the collapse of
our vital Minneapolis manifestation of the locally centralized school district
by 2025.
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