The Corrupt
National, State, and Local Context for the Abysmal Quality of the Minneapolis Public
Schools
Things are much worse at the Minneapolis
Public Schools (MPS) than even you who sense something dreadfully wrong are
likely to be aware.
The disaster starts with the corrupt national
and state context in which MPS exists:
For a half-decade now, since forces of both the political left and the political right assaulted the efficacious No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program, the innervated Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has created a smoke and mirrors national policy that opens the way for morally abysmal formulations such as the Minnesota North Star Accountability System (NSAS) behind which the education establishment can take cover. This Minnesota system was generated to satisfy the formal requirements of ESSA. The North Star Accountability system has put in place six putative Regional Centers of Excellence (RCE), plus the Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools systems acting as their own RCEs; the six RCEs located around the state have a total of 45 staff members who are in some fantasy world are supposed to serve the needs of all of Minnesota’s struggling students. The NSAS system, like the ESSA aegis under which it operates, is a formalistic pretension to promote equity in education but is devoid of any philosophy or program to make equitable education a reality.
In the localized emphasis of public
education in the United States, all meaningful change will happen when courageous
and capable staff produce knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum and
bring forth scholars to train teachers capable of imparting such a
curriculum. At the Minneapolis Public
Schools, people such as Ibrahima Diop (Finance Chief), Karen Devet (Operations
Chief), and Rochelle Cox (head of Special Education) are superbly talented and
caring people; this is true, too of
those involved in Information Technology and Career and Technical Education
(CTE).
But no one--- not a single person--- making judgments as to the academic program
has any idea what she or he is doing.
This is true of key decision-makers Superintendent Ed Graff and Interim
Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing, both academic lightweights with no advanced
training in any of the main subject areas of mathematics, biology, chemistry,
physics, history, government, economics, literature, English usage, music, or
visual art. The twenty-two person staff
at Teaching and Learning constitutes an intellectual vacuum of ethically
abysmal proportions: None of these
academic nonentities has any advanced training in an academic discipline. And departments that should be headed by
academicians are similarly devoid of such.
Neither Michael Walker (Office of Black Student Achievement) nor
Jennifer Simon (Department of Indian Education) has a degree in a key academic
field.
Thus do we have overall proficiency
rates that for many years running have not reached above fifty percent for
students as a whole and that remain below thirty percent for African American,
Latina/Latino, and Native American students;
and those on Free and Reduced Price Lunch.
None of this will improve until
someone other than Ed Graff, Aimee Fearing, and those in the Department of Teaching
and Learning is making decisions as to curriculum and teacher training.
At present, the national, state, and
local context in which policy is made, curriculum is constructed, and teachers
are trained provides no hope for an education of excellence for students in the
Minneapolis Public Schools.
None of this has anything to do with all
the errant buzz around the Comprehensive District Design (CDD), concerning which
most of those doing the buzzing have crawled back into their abject citizen
holes. None of this has anything to do
with the crises presented by COVID-19;
the sad and ill-understood part of that facet of the present discussion
is that students are not losing as much as many people assert, because they
learn so little anyway: One-third of
students of the slim majority who manage to graduate from the Minneapolis
Public Schools need remedial instruction once matriculating on a college or
university campus; and all students go
forth from thirteen or fourteen years in the schools of MPS with very little
knowledge in any key subject area.
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