Article #4
How We Got in This PreK-12
Education Mess
In the annual report from the Minnesota Department of
Education in September 2018 on the results of Minnesota Comprehensive
Assessments (MCAs) in math and reading for the 2017-2018 academic year we found
out that just 60 percent of Minnesota students were proficient in mathematics,
the same figure as that for 2016-2017;
for reading the comparable figures were 59 percent in academic year
2016-2017 and 57 percent in 2017-2018,a two percentage point decline.
Year after year, right up to academic year 2019-2020, we
get these same dismal results.
For the indicated academic year in the Minneapolis Public
Schools, reading proficiency rose a bit over those two academic years, from 43
percent to 45 percent, with math proficiency flat at 42 percent. In that school district, one-third of
graduates who matriculate at colleges and universities need remedial
instruction. And most graduates walk
across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only, so
deficient are they in key knowledge and skill sets in mathematics, biology,
chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, quality literature, English
composition, and the fine, vocational, and technological arts.
How did we get in this mess?
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Thomas Jefferson, for his many human failings, was a
visionary of citizenship in the democratic society who said that "I know
no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people
themselves; and if we think them not
enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the
remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."
The 19th century educator Horace Mann
developed this Jeffersonian notion of an educated citizenry by asserting the
need for common schools that would provide citizens with shared knowledge as
the basis for participation in democracy.
Across the nation, teachers in one-room rural and larger town and city
schools imparted knowledge and skill sets in reading, writing, arithmetic,
history, geography, and literature.
Often, teachers used the popular McGuffey
Readers that were by no means ethnically representative but did provide
substantive information and gave students experience with high-quality
literature.
Two views of education for African Americans came from
Booker T. Washington, who stressed vocational education and the development of
economic independence before insistence on full citizenship rights; and W. E. B. DuBois, who took a view
consonant with that of Jefferson and Mann and asserted that a “talented tenth”
of the African America population should lead the way to informed political
participation. And indeed, such African
American luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and DuBois
gave testimony to the power of knowledge as they held the ideals of the United
States constitution before a nation that was not living up to the ideals
expressed in that document; the speeches
of those three are replete with references to history, government, and
literature.
Schools in the United States at the 19th-20th
century divide were of widely varying quality.
Most students did not attend school past grade six. But by the first two decades of the 20th
century an increasing number of students were seeking attendance in high
schools that generally featured classical curricula in mathematics, natural
science, history, government, English literature and usage, and Latin. An intermediary institution, junior high,
also appeared in some urban districts, for students in grades seven through
nine, featuring academic preparation for the high school curriculum.
At that turn of the 19th into the 20th
century, normal schools offered formal preparation for some teachers; these varied widely in quality but in general
assumed that teachers would be instructing students in a rigorous academic
curriculum. But by the second decade of
the 20th century, teachers colleges located on university campuses
overtook the normal schools as institutions of teacher preparation. Education professors, now ensconced in
university settings among academic field specialists, began to emphasize
pedagogy over curriculum, with the assertion that the systematic acquisition of
knowledge was not important.
The writings of John Dewey, while full of internal
contradictions and often lacking clarity, typically asserted that education
should resonate with the experience of the child and offer practical
preparation for life. More clearly,
William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg advocated for a putatively progressive
approach to education that deemphasized the sequential acquisition of knowledge
and skill sets. Heard in 1918 penned an
article, “The Project Method,” and soon published a book of the same name; in 1928, Rugg, with coauthor Ann Shumaker,
published the book, The Child-Centered School.
In these two volumes we have the foundations for the “progressive”
education movement that, against the vigorous counter arguments of such subject
area proponents as William C. Bagley, became entrenched at the teachers
colleges, most influentially at the Teachers College of Columbia University.
This view of education took many decades to prevail in
the schools of locally centralized districts across the nation. Many teachers had trained as field
specialists. Many parents of immigrant
populations and African Americans relocating as participants in the Great
Northern Migration wanted a substantive education as a basis for scaling the
educational ladder to success. But
paradoxically in synch with a creed known as “progressive,” proponents of those
ideas absorbed and espoused racist precepts of the first decades of the 20th
century that expressed doubts as to whether the children of southern and
eastern European immigrants and African American migrants could master an
academic curriculum. Such populations
were typically tracked into vocational curriculum while decision-makers won to
the “progressive” creed begrudgingly provided an academic track to satisfy
expectations of university admissions offices.
During the late 1960s, the “progressive” creed thrived in
a zeitgeist with individual personal expression at the center; “progressive” ideology now dominated among
teachers and administrators, all trained by education professors in
departments, colleges, and schools of education.
This was terrible timing:
In ferocious irony, advances in civil rights made
possible the pursuit of the middle class lifestyle for African Americans
positioned to climb the economic ladder;
and fair housing laws made residential housing covenants less
likely: African American middle class
flight joined white flight as phenomena that at the urban core left behind the
poorest of the poor.
Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980.
Gang activity proliferated.
Urban school systems such as the Minneapolis Public
Schools were overwhelmed, with almost all-white middle class teaching staffs
faced with the duty to teach populations with which they had no cultural
affinity. And with the triumph of
“progressive” education, these teachers had little of substance to offer their
students that could assist them in ending the cyclical poverty that created the
conditions of inner city life. Mainly
white educational theorists touted critical thinking, lifelong learning,
projects and portfolios as measures of student learning, curriculum driven by
individual teachers and their students---
all in the absence of logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets
measurable by objective assessments, thus robbing students of the information
base upon which genuine critical analysis and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge
could proceed. The mantras of education
professors became excuses for teaching very little at all.
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By the late 1990s, a movement for academic standards and
objective assessments ultimately produced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002,
but telling disaggregated data results proved embarrassing to the education
establishment, which went to work on those Democrats (in Minnesota, the DFL) to
which the teachers unions give so bountifully;
and those on the right, supporters of Republicans, came to object to
strict federal mandates. No Child Left
Behind gave way to waivers under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top
moniker, which in Minnesota produced the murky Multiple Measurement Rating
System (MMRS); and then the Every
Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2016) produced the even murkier North Star
Accountability System (NSAS).
The latter system, rolled out by Brenda Cassellius and
staff at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in autumn 2018, like MMRS
relieves the pressure on school officials by relegating objective measures such
as the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments and the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) to status as just one factor among many--- including graduation rates, student
attendance, incremental academic progress over time, incremental progress of
English learners--- for rating school
and district programs. Cassellius and
the other North Star explicators at MDE asked the public to believe that six
Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs), each staffed with seven or eight members
(totaling 45 for all six centers), are going to provide the needed assistance
for addressing the abysmal academic performance of Minnesota’s students.
This North Star Accountability System continues to
prevail under new Education Commissioner Mary Cathryn Ricker, who was appointed
by newly elected governor Tim Walz during academic year 2018-2019.
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Charter schools and school choice programs have been part
of the educational landscape of Minnesota since the early 1990s. But charter schools are typically even worse
than the mainline public schools, and choice programs have been a diversion
from the fact that few schools in Minnesota provide true excellence of
education by comparison with the nations of East Asia and
those such as Germany, Finland, Canada, Poland, and
Australia that far outperform students in the United States on the Program of
International Student Assessment (PISA).
We got in this
K-12 mess in Minnesota, with unfortunate resonance throughout the nation, with
the unfortunate coincidence of an anti-knowledge approach to education,
residential patterns traceable to a racist history, unprepared urban school
districts that have never dedicated themselves to the education of students of
all demographic descriptors, and the growth of charter schools and choice
programs that exacerbated the problems.
We got in this mess for highly identifiable reasons.
Now we must get out.
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