Introductory Comments >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, Volume VII, Number 3, September 2020

Introductory Comments

 

However Bad You May Think Things Are at the Minneapolis Public Schools,

They Are Much Worse Than Your Perception

 

And Thus I Am in the Process of Taking the Offending Systems

And Staff Apart Piece by Piece

 

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 school 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 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.

 

Thus am I going to take the Minneapolis Public Schools apart piece by piece, publishing my book on the district (Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, already entered in its entirety on my blog at http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com), making the media rounds, and doing heavy damage to the careers of those who academically abuse our children every day their feet hit the ground.