Analysis of the
Members of Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education as to Specific
Nature of Culpability >>>>> Six Who Should Resign Immediately and Three
Who Give Faint Hope
Six
Members of the MPS Board of Education Who Should Resign Immediately: Jenny Arneson, KerryJo Felder, Kim Elllsion, Kim Carpini,
Nelson Inz, and Bob Walser
Case
Number One for Resignation >>>>>
Jenny
Arneson
Astoundingly
Stupid Statements and Multi-Year Ineffectiveness Obligates Arneson to Resign
from the Board of Education
District 1 (Northeast and Southeast
Minneapolis Jenny Arneson is an enigma:
Arneson is the hardest working of the
members on the current Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education.
She is a courageous person who appears to
be triumphing over a very serious case of lymphatic cancer.
Arneson is a masterful accumulator of
factual detail on many aspects of the inner working of the district, notably
information pertinent to her Northeast Minneapolis stomping grounds and items
relevant to current district finances.
She also was an adept chair during her term of service in that position,
a knowledgeable manager of meetings per Robert’s Rules of Order, a skill that
stood her in good stead during fall 2020, when she was chair of the finance
committee.
But three moments impel me to assert that
Arneson should resign, along with fellow MPS Board of Education members KerryJo
Felder, Kim Ellison, Kim Caprini, (yesterday, if possible) Nelson Inz,
and--- day before yesterday, if miracles
abide--- Bob Walser.
………………………………………………………………………………………….
In the spring of 2016 a forum sponsored by
the League of Women’s Voters unfolded at Bryn Mawr K-5 school. This forum offered one of the very few
chances for audience members to ask open-ended oral questions; that is to say, there was none of the usual
scripted nonsense, such as questions having to be written down on slips of
paper and then vetted for posing to members of the board. The MPS Board of Education then consisted of Arneson, Siad Ali, Tracine Asberry, Carla Banks,
Kim Ellison, Rebecca Gagnon, Nelson Inz, Josh Reimnitz, and Don Samuels. Ali, Banks, and Reimnitz were not in
attendance; Asberry arrived only very
late. Hence, the members fully available
for questioning were Arneson, Ellison, Gagnon, Inz, and Samuels.
Most of the questions from the audience
were nondescript and had little to do with academics.
I by contrast posed a question that made
reference to the opposing philosophies of education represented by the
knowledge-intensive views of E. D. Hirsh and the student-driven curriculum
advocated by Alfie Kohn; each of these
views have roots in a discussion that began in the 1920s with William C. Bagley
and William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College at Columbia University.
My question to the members of the MPS Board
of Education in spring 2017 was:
“Given the description that I just gave you
of the views expressed in Hirsch’s 1996 The
Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them and Alfie Kohn’s 1999 The Schools Our Children Deserve, do you
favor Hirsch’s knowledge-intensive established curriculum or Kohn’s open-ended,
student and teacher driven curriculum?”
Board members were tongue-tied and tried to
have it both ways, articulating their views no better when I maintained that
for clarity they had to favor one of these views over the other, because Hirsch
and Kohn would agree that these approaches result in very different curriculum
and pedagogy.
Jenny Arneson was as inept as the others in
articulating any philosophy of education.
She does not to this day reveal any coherent philosophy of education, a
telling observation regarding a board member who is now in the midst of her
ninth year on the MPS Board of Education.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
Arneson should resign for having not
developed an internally consistent philosophy of education in nearly a decade
of board membership.
Two recent statements further obligate her
to resign:
>>>>> At an MPS Board of Education meeting in
late spring 2019, Jenny Arneson noted, as part of her final report at a meeting
of the MPS Board of Education (of the sort with which board members conclude each
of their meetings) that her son had been accepted by his first choice for
college attendance, Grinnell College in Iowa.
She then opined that “This proves that every student at MPS is College
and Career Ready.”
That statement was astonishingly stupid,
given that fewer than thirty percent (30%) of students on Free and Reduced
Price Lunch and those of several ethnicities who tend to fall in the
Free/Reduced category are not proficient in mathematics, reading, or science; and that one-third (33%) of MPS students who
matriculate on college and university campuses need remedial courses.
>>>>> At the Committee of the Whole meeting of
Tuesday, 22 October, Arneson conveyed the essence of a conversation that she
had had with a student who liked the idea of ethnic studies courses offered as
alternatives to a United States history course, because the high school course
is just a repetition of what students learned in a course focused on the same
subject in grade seven. Arneson accepted
the student’s view uncritically, thereby revealing appalling ignorance for a
graduate of St. Olaf College, albeit in the academically undemanding field of
social work.
The pertinent truth is two-fold >>>>>
1)
The grade 7 course is typically taught via videos and through packets
that students fill out in the absence of teacher-imparted information or
comment and without class discussion.
And unless students take Advanced Placement (AP) United States History
in high school, the mode of teacher disinterested, unengaging instruction
evident at grade 7 abides also in the high school course--- and lamentably even in some AP courses,
taught as they often are by knowledge-deficient teachers.
2)
Limiting the number of United States history or any other courses in
core subject areas should be determined only as a practical matter, since the
number of such courses would be multiple if the amount of information to be
conveyed were the determinant.
Perpend:
>>>>> Various American Indian groups, tending
toward three hundred (300) in number, upon arrival of Columbus and subsequent
Europeans---
>>>>> Impact of American Indians and Europeans on
each other---
>>>>> the different ruling styles of Spaniard,
Portuguese, French, and British imperialists---
>>>>> pre-slavery organization of agricultural
labor---
>>>>> reasons for the economic appeal of slave as
opposed to indentured labor---
>>>>> exact functioning of the slave trade, from
the sale by Ashanti and Dahomey kingdoms of African human commodities to the
Portuguese, French, Dutch, and eventually mainly the British shippers and
traders---
>>>>> everyday slave resistance and occasional
rebellions---
>>>>> Loyalists versus Rebels in the run-up to the
American Revolution; the tough,
extremely constrained options for African Americans in assessing potential for
manumission via participation---
Now consider that I have not even arrived
at the precipitating events and fighting of the American Revolution, the
American Constitutional Convention, the replacement of the Articles of Confederation
with the United States Constitution, or the first decade (1790s) of the new
republic--- nor to the little matter of
the two complete centuries (19th and 20th) that by
definition reveal the bulk of events in the history of the United States.
Thus, Arneson’s comments regarding the
repetition involved in two courses of United States history is appallingly
stupid because
>>>>> the problem is not repetition but rather that
students learn nothing of great substance in either course because of the approach
to curriculum and pedagogy;
and
>>>>> on the basis of amount of information
important for conveyance, even multiple courses could not impart all that there
is to learn concerning American and United States history--- so that the decision as to how many courses
to offer is a matter of temporal practicality:
Repetition except as a matter of review as foundation for new learning
is a matter of teacher inadequacy, not intrinsic to the abundant knowledge sets
for mastery of American and United States history.
…………………………………………………………………………………….
For lack of a coherent philosophy of
education after nine years on the board, and for the two starkly stupid
comments tendered by her as given above, Jenny Arneson should lead Felder,
Caprini, Ellison, Inz, and Walser out the door (or let the latter two lead,
because the sooner the exit for those two, the better).
>>>>> Jenny Arneson should resign immediately from
the MPS Board of Education.
