Readers of this edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis
Minnesota will find the essence of the five-point program for revolutionary
change at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS).
The key features detailed in those articles
are the following:
1
>>>>> curriculum overhaul for
knowledge-intensity;
2
>>>>> training to secure knowledgeable,
pedagogically adept teachers;
3
>>>>> new Department of Resource Provision and
Referral;
4
>>>>> highly intentional skill acquisition for
student languishing below grade level;
5
>>>>> overhaul of the Davis Center (central office)
bureaucracy, with the jettisoning of the Associate Superintendent positions;
the Department of Teaching and Learning, and the Office of Black Male
Achievement; and the redesign of the
legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education, with possible
reassignment of staff in the latter two corners of the bureaucracy to positions
in the Department of Resource Provision and Referral.
This program, rather than the academic
portion of the MPS Comprehensive District Design, must guide
academic-decision-making at the district.
……………………………………………………………………………
The MPS Comprehensive District Design will
be revealed in advanced draft form later this month, with an MPS Board of
Education vote to come at the monthly April meeting. The Design has many admirable features but has
taken too long to be written, submitted for board approval, and
implemented.
Ironies abound in the process that has
unfolded since early in the 2018-2019 academic year, when the initial plan was
given in skeletal form:
Among the ironies is the matter of errant
objections from members of the community, who in asserting that MPS
decision-makers have not been transparent and have rushed the Design through
without proper community input, reveal the scant attention that the community
pays to matters of ongoing discussion and activity at the district. Eighteen months have now passed since the
Design was first revealed in summary form and almost two years have passed
since consultant Dennis Cheesebrow first gave an account of the demographic
changes that have occurred in Minneapolis in the course of the preceding
decades; the loss of student enrollment
to charter, alternative, and private schools;
and the need for an academic program that can recapture community
confidence.
All of this was highly transparent.
The spring and early autumn 2018 meetings
were posted and available for attendance to anyone in the community who was
paying a modicum of attention.
Then, as community members were given a
chance to weigh in, their concerns were predictably particularistic >>>>>
As changes were suggested in Spanish
Immersion programming locations, magnet program geographical centralization,
and transportation route rationalization, community members who would be
inconvenienced by these changes failed to grasp the overall benefits. These community responses are typical; community members rarely show up to board
regular or other meetings until some particular change or happenstance affects
families’ own children, a hockey coach is fired, cops in the schools (School
Resource Officers [SROs]) become an issue of focus, or elements of racism are
discovered in the prevailing reading curriculum; while many of these are serious issues, none
of them goes to the core of the district’s failure to articulate and implement
a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum, the paramount duty of any
locally centralized school district.
When community members did in the course of
these past few months step forward to promote change, the kind of change sought
was misguided.
I loved the energy that Hispanic and other
parent groups who agitated for :”Priority Enrollment” brought to school board
meetings during autumn 2019, but the abiding request that students from
underperforming schools be allowed to enroll in putatively high-performing
schools demonstrated many points of misunderstanding. The suggestions would wreak havoc with
district efforts to emphasize improvement in educational quality at community
schools, to capture economic efficiencies by centralizing magnet programs, and
to locate other specialized programming according to rationalities pertinent to
demand and transportation costs.
The movement for “Priority Enrollment” also
proceeded on the false assumption that the district educates any students at
any school very well or that students from historically abused and economically
challenged populations would be any better served after moving to their
prioritized location. Those populations
do not fare any better academically when moving to schools outside their neighborhood. Although arousing appreciated energy and
issuing a highly justified fundamental protest against lousy education, the
sought redress tapped into misguided initiatives similar to those of the local
chapter of the NAACP in seeking suburban options for ill-served urban youth; and those who still see desegregation as the
cure-all for the failure of schools to educate students bearing the burdens of
an abusive history and the inner city ills that history has wrought.
……………………………………………………………………………………
MPS decision-makers and community members
alike need to focus on what truly matters:
>>>>> making each school a center of
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete, education of excellence.
Because that is hard to do and the neither
decision-makers nor community members understand the root causes of the
wretched education delivered by locally centralized school districts such as
the Minneapolis Public Schools, we are forever mired in a muck of ignorance and
subjected to complaints and policies that are diversions from the needed
change.
Far from failing to be transparent or
moving too quickly, district officials have offered multiple venues for
community members to receive information and to convey opinions, and the
process of articulation and implementation of the MPS Comprehensive District Design
has taken far too long.
District members should have formulated the
Design within two years of Superintendent Ed Graff’s assumption of his position
in July 2016, given the community a chance to convey opinions, and made all of
the courageous decisions necessary in either accommodating community opinion or
in professional judgment respectfully explaining those features of the Design
that would remain, despite community comments.
As matters now stand the MPS Comprehensive
District Design has many admirable features pertinent to economic efficiencies
and rationalization of programming with regard to demand and location. Sections of the Design relevant to special
education and career and technical education are particularly strong. But the problem that escapes the analytical
grasp of both MPS decision-makers and community members is that the weakness of
the jargon-infested, vague, misguided academic portion of the MPS Comprehensive
Design will produce no improvement in the academic progress of students that
should be at the apex of concern in undertaking the Design.
…………………………………………………………………………………
To understand the nature of the most vexing
abiding problems at the Minneapolis Public Schools and what must take place to
provide knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to students of all
demographic curriculum, be reminded again as you scroll on down to the next
five articles on the blog that the essence of the necessary program is found in
the following features:
1
>>>>> curriculum overhaul for
knowledge-intensity
2
>>>>> training to secure knowledgeable,
pedagogically adept teachers
3
>>>>> new Department of Resource Provision and
Referral
4
>>>>> highly intentional skill acquisition for
student languishing below grade level
5
>>>>> overhaul of the Davis Center (central office)
bureaucracy, with the jettisoning of the Associate Superintendent positions,
the Department of Teaching and Learning, and the Office of Black Male Achievement; and the redesign of the legislatively
mandated Department of Indian Education, with possible reassignment of staff in
the latter two corners of the bureaucracy to positions in the Department of
Resource Provision and Referral.
Understand that I will be picking apart the
current structure at the Minneapolis Public Schools via multi-media venues and
tactically and strategically astute activity over the course of New Year 2020.
MPS decision-makers have dithered too long.
The community has been variously
ill-attentive and misguided in issues of focus.
The time for clarity has arrived.
There are lives in the balance.
The time is now.
No comments:
Post a Comment