Curricular shibboleth and erroneous
pedagogy pervade the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Comprehensive District
Design.
The paramount goal of
the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Comprehensive Design should be to improve
academic proficiency rates for students.
The core mission is
the impartation of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum by excellent
teachers to students of all demographic descriptors.
But the academic portion of the MPS
Comprehensive District Design is a jargon-infested document, full, as detailed
in Articles # 1 and #2 of this series, of jargon such as “academically rigorous,”
“culturally relevant,” “differentiated
instruction,” and “personalized learning.”
To this infestation of jargon, those
responsible for the academic portion of the MPS Comprehensive Design have added
>>>>> “project-based learning.”
The problem with these sound-good items
from the education professor’s lexicon is that in the hallways and classrooms
of the administrators and teachers whom such campus intellectual light-weights
have trained, knowledge is devalued, skills are underemphasized, and curriculum
continues to be deficient in the key subject areas. Such terms are likely to appeal to readers
inured with American mythology of the rugged individual and the chimera of
personal choice. But the curriculum and
pedagogy implied by these terms cannot possibly impart the knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete education in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history,
government, economics, world and multi-ethnic literature, music, and visual art
that students of all demographic descriptors must have to give life to equity,
another key term that becomes tumbling out of the mouth of academic decision-makers
at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) as shibboleth
rather than integral goal with any chance of attainment.
Remember that the most vexing dilemmas
pervading the Mnneapolis Public Schools are emphatically that
curriculum at the Minneapolis Public
Schools is weak, with no plan for improvement;
and
average teacher quality is low.
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If students of all demographic descriptors
were to be offered an academically rigorous curriculum, this certainly would
include
>>>>> a
mathematics program that proceeds through the four basic operations, fractions,
decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, simple probability, graphs, tables,
and charts before then sequencing in middle (grades 6-8) and high (grades 9-12)
school courses in algebra I, geometry, algebra II, pre-calculus (trigonometry
and statistics), and calculus
and
>>>>> a science
program that starts at the elementary (preK-5 level) to introduce
fundamental concepts in biology, chemistry, and physics and then intensifies
instruction in those subjects through middle and high school so that
)
in addition to Advanced Placement (AP)
Calculus, all students but those facing truly daunting mental challenges (and
those students should still be offered academically challenging special
education curriculum) would have the training necessary to score at a high
level on AP exams in biology, chemistry, and physics.
Certain word problems and exercises in
advanced mathematics and natural science can be phrased in ways that resonate
with a diversity of cultures, but for the most part academic rigor in these
subjects is the same for students of all cultural and demographic descriptors.
Neil DeGrassy Tyson would affirm as much.
But do readers and those who hear
presentations from the inept academic decision-makers at the Davis Center (MPS
central offices, 1250 West Broadway pause to consider that academic rigor for
one culture is essentially the same for students of other cultures?
Usually not.
Parents of African American, Somali,
Hispanic, and Hmong cultures should also think and speak clearly when they
refer to wanting the same academic rigor as they imagine has been rendered to
affluent white students. If they do,
they should understand that this will mean succeeding in mathematics through
calculus and natural science through physics.
Such parents have a right to demand culturally sensitive teachers with
an understanding of the backgrounds of all students in their classrooms.
But as to mathematics and science as
academic disciplines, the curriculum must be the same for students of all
cultural backgrounds.
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Students of all demographic descriptors
should receive common knowledge sets in key academic areas.
World history should, for example, teach
all students about the Hmong people of the Laotian highlands, before and during
the Vietnam War; the history of the Horn
of Africa going back to the civilizations of Axum and Nubia and continuing to
the present day cultures and conflict in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia; the historical experiences of all cultures of
the world before the advent of European imperialism; and the general attitudes and policies
embedded in European imperialism, as well as the specific consequences of
individual societies.
Similarly, for example, American history as
taught to all students should include the historical experiences of indigenous
cultures that became the Iroquois confederacy, the Five “Civilized” Tribes, the
Three Fires Confederacy, the Mississippian Mound Builders, the Anasazi
Cliff-Dwellers and Pueblo cultures, and the indigenous cultures of the northern
and southern plains, the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains, and
California. That history should also
include the relationship of what became Mexico to what became the United States
and the ensuing experiences of Hispanic and Anglo cultures separately and in
interaction with one another. All
students should understand the immigrant experiences of West Europeans, East
Europeans, Jews, and those who came from many parts of Asian Africa, and Latin
America. Students of all demographic descriptors
should gain factual information relevant not only to slavery but also and
especially to the failure of Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow,
vigilante groups and lynching, and the nature of the southern police state that
induced the Northern Migration.
Literature classes should, for example,
include the works of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Maya Angelou, Toni
Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, August Wilson, James
Baldwin, and Te-Nehisi Coates; as well
as those of Jane Austin, Emily Bronte, George Elliot, Mark Twain, Herman
Melville, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Margaret Atwood, and William Shakespeare.
Students of all demographic descriptors
should hear and learn about the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella
Fitzgerald, and Miles Davis; Beatles and
Rolling Stones; Sam Cooke, Smokey
Robinson, and Aretha Franklin; NWA,
Jay-Z, and Beyonce.
Approaches implied by jargon such as “differentiated
instruction” and “personalized learning” are unlikely to assure that students
of all demographic descriptors gain knowledge and sublime reading and listening
experiences with the literature and fine arts of the many cultures that
comprise the historical and cultural legacy of a world populated by many
peoples.
…………………………………………………………………………………
Whole-class discussion of teacher-imparted
knowledge is the most efficient and engaging approach for the delivery of the
requisite knowledge and skill sets acquired in an excellent education.
In order to deliver a knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete education, curriculum should not be “differentiated” or “personalized.”
Nor should “project-based learning” as conceived
and implemented by education professor acolytes be inflicted upon the students
of the Minneapolis Public Schools or any other school district.
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“Project-based learning” is an old approach
that first gained major emphasis in an article and then a book of that name,
authored by Teachers College, Columbia University Professor William Heard Kilpatrick. Articulation and implementation of project-based
learning proceeded upon racist and ethno-centric ideology that opposed a set
curriculum under the guise of “child-centered” learning. Campus figures such as Heard, John Dewey, and
Harold Rugg doubted the capacity of African American and immigrant populations
from eastern and southern Europe to absorb subject information from a
substantive curriculum. So they imagined
classrooms in which students were given reign to explore their personal
interests; the assumption was that most
students would opt for topics of everyday utility that would not likely, given
assumptions about their ethnicity and parentage, include matters of academic
rigor. Tracking into vocational fields
for these students was pervasive and only grudgingly did these putatively
progressive but actually racist and white male dominated campus presences
provide an academic curriculum for select students.
Project-based learning as conceived by MPS
Davis academic decision-makers and classroom teachers does not proceed on the
basis of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum. The assumption abides that knowledge needed
for the moment can always be accessed in conventional written and now
especially cybernetic sources. But when
students seek such information, they do so without broad subject area context,
on the basis of an approach that makes understanding unlikely in the
extreme. Project-based learning tends
also in the classrooms of education professor acolytes to be conducted in
groups, with the result that one person tends to dominate: If the leader is academically adroit, the
grade for the group may be good, but the situation also abides in which other
members of the group undercut the efforts of the leader and all students
receive the same bad grade.
Projects and research are best done
individually and only upon a strong base of subject area knowledge.
Research efforts, pursued by students who
have been given proper instruction in source material and citations, become
especially important at the high school (grades 9-12) level. But scholarly research is typically not an
asset of classroom teachers, so that students are sent forth to college and
university campuses undertrained:
Ill-conceived and misguided group projects
have prevailed over academic research and will continue to do so under the
approach implied by the MPS Comprehensive Design.
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As utilized in the MPS Comprehensive District
Design, “project-based learning” becomes enjoined with “differentiated
instruction” and “personalized learning” in such a way as to degrade curriculum
and pedagogy. Academic rigor and
cultural relevance are necessarily embed in a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete
academic program; but given the degraded
nature of the training received by administrators and teachers upon whom
education professors have inflicted such harm, these elements of the academic
portion of the MPS Comprehensive Design become shibboleths, mere verbalizations
from the contemporary public educator’s storehouse of jargon.
No one who now occupies a sinecure at the
Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) has any idea how to
construct and articulate such a curriculum.
Only university or independent scholars in
key academic disciplines will be able to construct the logically sequenced
knowledge-intensive curriculum that would necessarily be “academically
rigorous” and “culturally relevant” in substance rather than shibboleth.
Once this morally corrupt and
intellectually debased MPS Board of Education votes to adopt the MPS Comprehensive
District Design devised by the academic lightweights who dominate at the Davis
Center,
university or independent scholars should
be hired immediately to do what those lightweights who generated the jargon of
the Design’s academic portion have no chance of doing.
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