Apr 23, 2020

Article #3, >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, Volume VI, No. 8, February 2020 >>>>> The Intellectual Folly of Project-Based Learning


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

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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.

 

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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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