In conjunction with the
implementation of my replacement plan for the academic portion of the
Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Comprehensive District Design as I take MPS
apart piece by piece for reconstruction, we will be training staff members at
the Minneapolis Public Schools who comprehend the historical dimensions of the
problems of inner city youth and their families--- and who are at least as
comfortable in the communities and homes of these students as they are roaming
the sterile hallways of the Davis Center at 1250 West Broadway.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Staffing the Minneapolis Public Schools with People Comfortable at the Urban Core
People abused by history,
overwhelmed by poverty, and situated in communities wherein violence and
illicit drug sales are realities of existence are constantly on edge:
Most impoverished African
American extended families have to contend with the reality that some member or
members, especially males, have been, are, or will be caught up in the
maelstrom of the criminal justice system. Many must depend on federal government food
stamps, WIC (Women, Infants, and Children supplementary nutrition program),
Medicaid, low-income Section 8 housing assistance, and welfare (with AFDC as of
1996 replaced by TANF [Temporary Aid to Needy Families]). The latter program
requires adult heads of household to secure employment and sets a five-year
limit with the worthy goal of curtailing welfare dependency but creating
practical problems pertinent to child care.
Many families living at the
urban core feature numerous adults who are not high school graduates and
contain very few members who have successfully matriculated at a college or
university. Low levels of education and
high levels of poverty typically result in households with few books or
electronic sources of the written word. Impoverished
and ill-educated adults are not well-placed to manifest the habits of reading,
well-informed discussion, or sophisticated vocabulary usage. Many have had aversive experiences in school
and regard teachers and school administrators as intimidating figures. They may of necessity involve themselves when
their children are involved in conflictual situations, but they are not
well-prepared to advocate for their children’s academic interests.
We need community and family
outreach personnel at the Minneapolis Public Schools who by experience and
training understand these historical and contemporary forces that exert
pressure and circumscribe the lives of families dwelling in challenged inner
city communities. We must have a large
contingent of employees at MPS who are comfortable walking the streets and
visiting the homes of children living in families facing the challenges of
poverty, dysfunction, or both.
We need outreach workers who
comprehend the insecurity that attends gunshots in the middle of the night,
yards cordoned off for police investigation, high-speed chases involving
multiple law enforcement vehicles, and the possibility that a cracked taillight
or lapsed license plate sticker might result in a driver being thrown up
against the hood of a car amidst unsavory name-calling.
These community outreach staff
members also need to confer with social workers as necessary to provide
resource referral when families are thrust into any of the many possible
dilemmas of life at the urban core: spousal
abuse, child abuse, electrical power or running water curtailment, landlord
issues, roof leaks, pest infestation, low food supplies, inadequate winter
clothing, chronic unemployment--- for
starters. Well-trained community
outreach workers need to assist families with any problems getting children to
school, whether these are rooted in transportation issues, skewed familial
schedules, sleep habits, or medical issues.
The overpowering message that we
need to send to all of our families is that their children attend schools in
which all people of all ethnicities and economic circumstances are valued
equally; that the education of every child is considered vital; and that staff members of the Minneapolis
Public Schools are dedicated to the school attendance, familial connection,
academic success, and the present and future of every single child.
We need to create a group
psychology of love, hope, and trust in which all students and families
anticipate joyful experiences every day, knowing that there are staff members
in place who will remove any impediment to the expected joy.
We must in the Minneapolis
Public Schools establish a model of the locally centralized school system for
the delivery of an education of excellence to every child, thus leading the
nation toward the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
For that to happen, we must
prioritize outreach to families for the resolution of any difficulty preventing
the delivery of an excellent education. In
establishing priorities, we must construct budgets and create staff positions
accordingly.
In view of the imperatives, academic
decision-makers, administrators, and teachers will work closely with a new
Department of Resource Provisiion and Referral to ensure that students of
demographic descriptors are prepared the college preparatory, grade by grade,
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum of the Minneapolis Public
Schools.
Comprehending
the Problem in Historical Context
The life of people who live in
poverty is fundamentally different from people who live in circumstances of the
middle and upper economic classes.
History created the
circumstances of poverty in the United States as a result of differential
treatment of people according to race, nation of origin, and natal family
economies:
During the 16th to 18th
centuries, approximately 12,500,000 people of African descent were hauled
across the Middle Passage to insular Caribbean or mainland American locales and
forced into slave labor; about 500,000 of these slaves were sold in what became
the United States. Liberation from
involuntary servitude came when the 13th Amendment to the United States
Constitution was ratified in 1866. But
Reconstruction (1865-1877) failed and African Americans, who formally gained
full citizenship and voting rights via the 14th and 15th Amendments, fell
victim to Supreme Court justices who disregarded the Constitution; and to a racist white society in the American
South that imposed conditions of sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, and
vigilante brutality. Between the years
1877 and 1965, 4,600,000 people were lynched in the United States; a third of these were white victims in the
Wild West; the remainder, over 3,000,000
people, were African Americans lynched mainly in the South. Both of these lynching figures exceed
the number of people who lost their lives in the bombing of the Twin
Towers in New York City on September 9, 2001 (9/ 11).
Until the early 20th century,
public school education ended for most students with the completion of grammar
school in 6th grade; a very few students went to high schools, the rigor of
which matched the name. As more people
sought schooling beyond grammar school, an intermediate institution known as
junior high, also rigorous in academic content, came into being for grades 7
through 9. For students in grades 10 and
11 (the last grade in most high schools well into the 20th century), great
status accrued to those who graduated from these institutions during a time
when college or university matriculation was not common.
At the same time that African
Americans escaped from the violence and discrimination of the South from 1915
forward on a Northern Migration, great waves of immigrants came ashore,
especially from eastern and southern Europe. As these immigrants and others increasingly
sought education at the levels of junior and senior high school, new demands
were placed on systems of public education in the United States. Eastern and southern Europeans frequently were
more impoverished than were their counterparts from Scandinavia, Germany, and
other nations of northern and western Europe. They presented greater challenges
to public education systems and were stereotyped as less academically capable. In the schools of the United States there
developed a bifurcated approach to education whereby impoverished and stereotyped
populations were tracked into vocational education that ended before high
school graduation, while wealthier and systemically preferred students
proceeded through college preparatory study toward high school graduation.
African American students were
generally tracked along the lines of those immigrant populations that bore
heavy discrimination, and they bore the additional burden of attending mostly
segregated schools. Here and there in the American South, African American
teachers actually disseminated considerable knowledge and skill sets to
students under difficult circumstances, but on the whole African American
students into the 1950s received low quality and truncated education.
Desegregation as a result of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision
advanced the ideal of equality but had little favorable academic impact. African Americans were still stuck in lousy
southern schools or tracked in the manner of 20th century immigrant
populations.
Congressional passage of the
1964 Civil
Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and equal employment and fair
housing legislation during the late 1960s opened a pathway for African
Americans who had the wherewithal to pursue middle class educational and professional
aspirations. But African American middle class flight coalesced with white
flight from the urban core, leaving behind the poorest of the poor.
Riots along Plymouth Avenue in
the summers of 1966 and1967 accelerated the movement of Jewish and other people
of European origins out of North Minneapolis, coinciding with in-migration of
additional African American populations from challenged urban areas in
Southside Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Gary, Indiana. In the Minneapolis Public Schools, within
which there were less than 20 African American teachers and other personnel
throughout the 1970s, teachers confronted unprecedented classroom challenges
that they were ill-equipped to face.
Crack cocaine came to North
Minneapolis and other inner city areas by the early 1980s and gang activity
increased apace. Drugs and gangs placed
severe additional burdens on inner city communities and the schools that served
them. Many historical forces have
operated centrifugally to propel males away from their nuclear familial units; by the 1980s, this very much included the
well-intended but operationally deleterious Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC).
From the time of those turbulent
1980s, so full of challenges for people living at the urban core, nine
superintendents (Richard Green, Robert Ferrera, Peter Hutchinson, Carol
Johnson, Thandiwe Peebles, Bill Green, Bernadeia Johnson, [Interim
Superintendent] Michael Gore, and now Ed Graff) have headed the Minneapolis
Public Schools. Not one of those prior
to Bernadeia Johnson effectively addressed the needs of the most challenged
urban populations. Bernadeia Johnson
launched promising programs with Shift, High Priority Schools, and Focused
Instruction but departed before rooting these deeply into the
program of the Minneapolis Public Schools. Gore made little headway with any of these
programs.
And thus does Superintendent Ed
Graff and staff now face the challenge of imparting an excellence of education
historically denied to most students in the United States and never offered to
the overwhelming majority of the African American population--- nor to those Native American, Hispanic,
Hmong, and African immigrant populations that have now also arrived at the
challenged urban core.
…………………………………………………………………………………..
As we move forward from May 2020
into a bright new future for the Minneapolis Public Schools, well-trained
academicians who now infuse academic decision-making, administration, and
teaching with intellectual vitality, smart and street-wise staff working out of
the Department of Resource Provision and Referral will work those involved in
program delivery to ensure that students of all demographic descriptors are
ready to receive the challenging new curriculum and move forward to lives of
cultural enrichment, engaged citizenship, and professional satisfaction.
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