Salient Observation from My 48 Years of Teaching, Mostly Students Living at the Urban Core--- and from My Five and One-Half Years of Research >>>>> No One in the Education Establishment Knows What She or He Is Doing

I decided to become a teacher of inner city young people in the spring of my sophomore year at Southern Methodist University (SMU, in Dallas, Texas).  The year was 1971.  I began coordinating tutoring programs for SMU Volunteer Services and did my own tutoring in West Dallas, which was and is demographically very much like North Minneapolis.  I began my professional teaching career at L. G.  Pinkston in West Dallas and for 48 years have been a teacher;  most of my work has been with young people living at the urban core.  Along the way, I have studied through to masters and Ph. D. degrees in Chinese and Taiwanese history and have taught four and a half years at the college and university level;  additionally, I have taught in a prison, English as a Second Language in Taiwan, and a course in American Culture via the medium of Mandarin Chinese for the Fulbright Foundation in Taiwan. 

 

Since 1991, I have been most active as a teacher in North Minneapolis, where I taught at the City, Inc., and Minneapolis Urban League alternative high schools and, especially, have directed what has become a seven-day-a-week commitment to the people of the Northside in the multi-subject instruction I render to students ranging from five years old to adult in the New Salem Educational Initiative.  I am as comfortable sitting with a five year-old for work on math and reading fundamentals and subject area instruction as I am leading a graduate seminar on farmers and agricultural development in Taiwan.

 

For five and a half years now I have conducted an in-depth investigation into the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS).  An advanced draft of this enormous work, running to 568 pages in single-spaced format, was entered on this blog a few weeks ago.  I will begin to circulate the document in hard copy form in January 2020 and begin discussions with commercial and academic  publishers, as I have done for my previous works on Taiwan and African America.

 

Thus, I bring unprecedented experience to my observations on the state of K-12 education in Minnesota and the United States:

 

No one affiliated with the Minneapolis Public Schools, including MPS Superintendent Ed Graff and certainly MPS Board of Education Chair Nelson Inz, would risk embarrassing themselves by engaging me in a formal debate on academic design and the history and philosophy of education in the United States.

 

Were go-to media expert Diane Ravitch to engage me in such a debate, she would leave with her legs wobbly and her knees buckling.

 

No one combines the classroom experience and scholarship that I bring to the study of K-12 education.

 

No one.

 

If any reader knows of such a person who would assert competitive knowledge, let them know that I am ready for that debate.

 

………………………………………………………………………….

 

So read carefully.

 

Here is the salient observation that I make on the basis of my unprecedented experience and research: 

 

>>>>>    No one in the education establishment knows what she or he is doing.

 

Let me repeat that:

 

>>>>>    No one in the education establishment knows what she or he is doing.

 

1     >>>>>             Education professors are a professional embarrassment who woefully train teachers and administrators.                

 

2     >>>>>             K-5 (elementary) teachers have little subject area knowledge;  they are often math phobic and unserious readers.              

 

3     >>>>>             Grades 6-8 teachers have insubstantial subject area knowledge and they teach in an environment born of American Middle School Association ideology that touts socialization over academic development.

 

4     >>>>>             Grades 9-12 (high school) teachers lack graduate degrees in subject area specialties opting, as do elementary and middle school teachers, to acquire credentials from the degree mills that are departments, colleges, and schools of education;  most lack the knowledge base to teach Advanced Placement courses.

 

5     >>>>>             Superintendents, other central office administrators, and building principals similarly are not scholars;  they, too, have studied in the jargon-infested world of the education professor, rather than in the legitimate academic realms of professors with Ph. D. degrees in mathematics, natural science, social science, history, literature, the humanities, or the fine (visual and musical) arts.

 

                                     This means that

 

     >>>>>  no one with any academic credibility is designing curriculum.

 

Thus it is that no one in the education establishment knows what she or he Is doing with regard to curriculum or pedagogy.

 

Thus do we have wretched locally centralized school district such as the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

And thus am I, a strong supporter of the locally centralized school district against charter and private school competitors, waging the K-12 Revolution in multiple forums and venues, very much including

 

>>>>>    ever wider circulation of Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect in the months ahead.

 

And remember to let me know if anyone expresses a desire to debate me on matters pertinent to the grim reality that I convey above.