Earlier this month I completed to my satisfaction a work that will endure as a classic treatise on public education, utilizing the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) as research focus.
People read this blog for various reasons:
Some readers are genuinely interested in PreK-12 Education and know that this is the best source of ideas and facts regarding that most important endeavor in the United States and across the world.
Others know that my blog readership has increased greatly over the last two years and that my evaluations of them, say those who occupy sinecures at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway), will focus on their skill or, more often, their stark and lamentable ineptitude.
While there are other reasons why readers avail themselves of the articles on my blog, these two reasons dominate. The former group is comprised of those seriously interested in knowing the condition and improving the quality of preK-12 education in Minnesota and the United States. The second group consists of people focused mainly on their own navels--- those interested only in what my evaluations mean for public perception of their egotistical selves.
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A 595-page book is only for serious readers, of which there are few in the United States.
Very few people have read John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, which along with models afforded by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, most provided the philosophical underpinning of the United States Constitution and therefore government in the United States.
Even fewer people have read Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity or even popular presentations of his work, which challenged Newtonian principles of physics as applicable to the cosmos.
Time will tell if Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect will prove a more accessible read and draw a larger audience than did the works of Locke and Einstein. The quality of the work, whatever the accessibility proves to be, destines the book to be a classic in the manner of the works of those two masters. There does not elsewhere exist such a complete account of the inner workings of a locally centralized school system, the depraved philosophy that dooms academic effectiveness of such a system, or indicates the way toward excellent preK-12 education in the context of the history and philosophy of education.
In Part One: Facts, readers encounter 365 pages of purely objective information, so that they can meet all of the major decision-makers and those who implement the program of the Minneapolis Public Schools; examine profiles of all schools and the academic performance of MPS students, with data disaggregated by ethnicity and other demographic factors; and gain a complete explanation of department by department function.
In Part Two: Analysis, I examine the data from Part One, with focus on the shortcomings of Superintendent Ed Graff and Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing; the incompetence of the staff of the Department of Teaching and Learning; stark failures of Associate Superintendents Ron Wagner, Brian Zambreno, Shawn Harris-Berry, and LaShawn Ray; the tragicomic membership of the MPS Board of Education; and the academic programmatic failures of the Office of Black Male Student Achievement (led by Michael Walker) and the Department of Indian Education (led for many years by Anna Ross and now by Jennifer Simon).
In Part Three: Philosophy, I examine the failures of public school systems in the context of the history of education in the United States, the intellectual degradation of education professors, and the acolytes sent forward by those university-based offenders to assure that the quality of of education rendered by locally centralized school systems remains abysmal.
I then, in Part Three and at the book’s conclusion, detail a guiding philosophy and program for delivering high-quality, knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts to our precious young people, of all demographic descriptors.
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In a nation comprised of a citizenry characterized overwhelmingly by nonreaders and those who never read any serious work of fiction or nonfiction, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect will be daunting for most.
But for those who are truly interested in preK-12 education, mustering the discipline to read the book will instill an understanding that the work is seminal, destined to be classic in the manner of those of Locke and Einstein, and the most complete extant source of objective material, analysis, and philosophy on preK-12 education.
In April I will resume entry of articles on the Minneapolis Public Schools, including analyses of the MPS Comprehensive District Design. But for the remainder of March, I will continue to feature the complete 595-page presentation of Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect, found next as readers scroll on down the blog.
For the serious among you, read carefully and appreciatively.
You are reading a classic.
