A number of staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Davis Center now are in possession of my 562-page (not including appendices) book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect.
The book covers the many topics that I have long identified were forthcoming, and about which I have written in articles entered on this blog, recorded in monthly editions of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and mentioned during Public Comments at monthly meetings of the MPS Board of Education and other speaking venues.
The book runs in three parts, the 353-page Part I: Facts, a telling indictment of the district strictly on the basis of factual information; and Parts II and III, each running approximately one hundred pages, giving Analysis and Philosophy respectively. In the analysis section I give powerful evidence of the corruption that extends from college and university teacher training programs, through the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), and pervading all areas of the education establishment of teachers and administrators who academically abuse our precious young people every day their feet hit the ground.
Discerning readers will comprehend that the shibboleths we read and hear so often at best only identify symptoms, not root causes of the preK-12 dilemma; at worst, such bromides are harmful distractions.
Thus be disabused.
None of the following have any merit as key problems vexing the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized school systems: transparency, accountability, culturally irrelevant curriculum, out-of-school suspensions, equitable funding, and issues pertaining to language immersion programs.
Information is readily available and efficiently provided by staff involved with MPS Data Requests; and by leaders such as Senior Finance Officer Ibrahima Diop, Senior Operations Officer Karen Devet, Senior Information Technology Officer Justin Hennes, and Senior Human Resources Officer Maggie Sullivan: Transparency at the Minneapolis Public Schools is not a problem.
Public school funding in Minnesota is essentially equitable from district to district and, in fact, there are generous outlays for students on free and reduced price lunch and facing challenges due to poverty and familial functionality; special education and language learner programs are underfunded, but this is true across all school districts.
Other issues are intimately connected to the fundamental vexations of curriculum and teacher quality. There has not been accountability in the sense of providing students with knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum, imparted by teachers of broad and deep knowledge. And there has been too much recourse to out-of-school suspensions, too much inconsistency in quality of language immersion programs, and lack of information pertinent to the history and culture of a great diversity of populations. But the fundamentally vexing matters here are curriculum and teacher quality.
Out-of-school suspensions occur because students have fallen behind academically or bear life circumstances ill-understood and unaddressed by MPS personnel. Shortcomings in the language immersion programs are subsets of the general problem relating to curriculum. And the lack of information pertinent to various cultures is part of the overhaul dilemma of knowledge-deficient curriculum.
All of the problems and the manifold shibboleths so often repeated without much specification would be addressed via the impartation of knowledge-intensive curriculum by broadly and deeply knowledgeable teachers; and in the context of a new Department of Resource Provision and Referral, staffed with people comfortable on the streets and in the homes of families struggling with finances and functionality.
If these approaches were taken, all issues relating to accountability, culturally irrelevant curriculum, out-of-school suspensions, equitable funding, and language immersion programs would be addressed. Knowledge-intensive curriculum with history, social science, and humanities components ranging across the diversity of the nation and the globe would necessarily be culturally relevant. The behaviors that give rise to out-of-school suspensions would cease if students were academically prepared in progressing from grade level to grade level, if curriculum was substantive and delivered by teacher-scholars pedagogically able to impart knowledge and skill sets to students of all demographic descriptors, all of whom have had their life needs addressed by caring and compassionate staff. And if such an education was delivered to all of our precious young people, the system would have become accountable across a range of factors.
Thus understand the following.
Think as hard as necessary to gain comprehension.
Rise above your too-ready recourse to bromides and shibboleths.
Look away for a long moment from the symptoms and internalize the solutions to actual dilemmas vexing the Minneapolis Public Schools and all locally centralized school districts throughout the nation.
The root problems that engender all of the secondary and tertiary problems are
>>>>> knowledge-deficient, skill-deplete curriculum;
>>>>> knowledge-deficient, pedagogically inept, and culturally insensitive teachers and
administrators;
and >>>>>
woeful lack of staff able to reach out to students and families right where
they live, so as to ensure that all students come to school ready to receive curriculum redesigned for knowledge intensity, delivered by newly trained teacher-scholars.
As my new book on the school district circulates and I mount pressures of increasing intensity, the needed overhaul will occur inexorably, so that all staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools will know, as many already know >>>>>
Your decades-long abomination of academically abusing the students of the Minneapolis Public Schools is over.
The emperor has no clothes.
There is no cat and no cradle in the cat’n the cradle.
Exposed.
On the run.
Nowhere to hide.
Ineptitude
identified,
analyzed,
historically
and
philosophically
contextualized.
Read, comprehend, depart, or be ousted.
The policies of the past are doomed.
Provision of knowledge shall empower students of all demographic descriptors.
Those incapable of the provision shall be cast away, as I take the Minneapolis Public Schools apart, piece by corroded piece.
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