Lisa Purcell Should Be Dismissed, Her Social Studies DPF Position Terminated, and the Entire Department of Teaching and Learning Disbanded

Lisa Purcell should be dismissed from her position as Social Studies DPF (District Program Facilitator), the position eliminated, and the entire Department of Teaching and Learning disbanded.

 

This department consists of staff members possessing lightweight education degrees who have very little in-depth knowledge of any field within the major subject areas of mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, political science, economics, or English literature.  Their advanced degrees, and even many of their undergraduate degrees, are in education, not legitimate disciplines.

 

Social studies is in the first place a lamentable classification advanced by Teachers College of Columbia University during the decades before the 1950s to replace the rigorous disciplines of history, government, geography, and economics.  As the ideological approach signified by the invention of social studies brought a host of other unfortunate initiatives from the late 1960s forward, our systems of public schools began to inflict knowledge-poor curriculum, especially at the elementary school level, that encouraged students to express their own feelings about their families and communities rather than learn solid subject area information that would make true anthropological investigations meaningful.  Curriculum at the middle school and high school level also is weak;  only if students opt for Advanced Placement courses---  and luck into having a teacher actually qualified to teach advanced courses in United States history, world history, or economics---  do they stand a chance of gaining much substantive knowledge from the woefully labeled and ill-conceived social studies category.

 

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Thus I seethe but am not surprised when I ask questions such as the following and get the expected student responses:

 

>>>>>  Did you discuss the Wednesday, January 6^th, insurrection at the United States Capitol in your social studies class (I ask this question to students at all grade levels and specify the social studies, history, or ethnic studies courses that I know the student is taking)?

 

>>>>>  What did your school do to recognize Martin Luther King Day;  what have you learned about Martin Luther King in your social studies class?

 

>>>>>  Did you follow the Wednesday, January 20^th Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

 

>>>>>  Did your teacher discuss the death of Hank Aaron and the significance of his life?

 

Typically, students got little or no coverage of these events from teachers in social studies classes.

If students did get some coverage, it came in the form of a video, followed by little or no class discussion.

 

Very tellingly, students have gained little over time or recently in the way of critical background knowledge for analyzing these events.  They understand nothing, until I teach them, about the Electoral College;  constitutional provisions for impeaching officials for high crimes and misdemeanors or anything else about the United States Constitution;  Martin Luther King’s childhood in Georgia, precocious early graduation from high school, matriculation at Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, pastorate at Ebenezer Baptist Church, surge to leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, role in inducing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, or the Poor People’s March that King was organizing when he made his fateful trip to Memphis in April 1968;  or anything about the Negro Leagues or Henry Aaron’s journey through those to a life of athletic triumph amidst racial slurs.

 

The reason that students do not discuss current events of great magnitude or gain critical information  pertinent to history, government, geography, and economics is that teachers train under no-nothing education professors who demean the acquisition of knowledge;  teachers do not believe in the conveyance of knowledge, nor do they have much of it.  

 

Teachers should be trained at the local school district by college and university or independent scholars brought in by the district to give classroom instructors what they did not get in their undergraduate or graduate training.

 

The insubstantial training of Minneapolis Pubic Schools social studies DPF Lisa Purcell is an illustrative case in point.  Be attentive to the fact that most of her training comes in education, not field-specific programs  >>>>>

 

Lisa Purcell, K-12 Social Studies DPF                      

M.A., Education  (University of Utah)

M.A., Education  (Harvard University)

B.S., Social Sciences  (Hope College)

                and History

                                        

Licensures:

 

Social Studies

English as a Second Language

Principal K-12

Clearly, social studies teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools are failing their students.  Social studies should be replaced by courses specified as government, history, economics, geography, and psychology.  Teachers should either get the training they need or resign.  Lisa Purcell must retrain and return to the classroom or depart the district altogether.  Her current position should be jettisoned, along with the Department of Teaching and Learning.  Knowledgeable teachers will need no putative guidance from such academic lightweights.  Imagine these characters being inflicted upon college and university professors.

 

We must be specific about the failures of particular staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools who receive substantial salaries for absolutely nothing of substance in return.

 

I am and will be over the course of the next months exerting enormous pressure for casting off bureaucratic weight exemplified by Lisa Purcell.

 

Our students are suffering.

 

That suffering must end.

 

There are lives in the balance.