As a matter of
long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core, we
will demonstrate that we truly understand that Black Lives Matter by
overhauling K-12 education.
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
Fads for addressing the ills of public
education 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.
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-five years now since the publication of A Nation at Risk, the risk falls most heavily on impoverished
families living at the urban core.
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 cities.
In the aftermath of Dr. King’s death, 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.
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.
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.
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 Lewis Carroll 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.
We must adopt that program that will bring to
our precious children of all demographic descriptors a knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete education and make of the Minneapolis Public Schools a model for
other locally centralized public school districts across the nation.
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