Numerous articles, editorials, and opinion pieces focused on public education have appeared in the Star Tribune within the last two weeks. None of them identifies the actual dilemmas or indicates the nature of the overhaul needed to address the most vexing issues of the public schools.
The Sunday February 7, 2021, edition of the Star Tribune is illustrative. Patrick Condon’s article, “Flanagan, Walz push to improve Native history for school kids,” indicates, consistent with the gubernatorial administration’s education policy as recorded in other articles, that emphasis on ethnic-specific curriculum is seen as a way to address low academic proficiency rates for students in certain demographic categories.
This is an extremely questionable strategy that fails to address certain issues relevant to curriculum and teaching in the public schools. The actual problems with curriculum and instruction are traceable to the way that teachers are trained and the knowledge-aversive ideology of education professors.
If teachers were trained properly and if subject area knowledge were valued, none of the ethnic-specific push of the Walz administration would be necessary. Students would receive broad coverage of multicultural history, literature, and fine arts from prekindergarten through grade twelve. The curriculum would be presented in grade by grade sequence, building a strong knowledge base in those and all subject areas, so that by high school students would be prepared to take elective courses according to driving interest.
But the reality is that elementary school teachers have little subject area knowledge, social studies (a problematically defined and conceived category in any case) teachers are woefully knowledge-deficient, and students at present learn very little of the history, literature, or fine arts of any culture. To the point of the Condon article, Flanagan’s vow that great academic progress will come for Native American students with more culture-specific curriculum is gravely called into question by the performance of students at a school such as Anishinabe Elementary in the Minneapolis Public Schools: For the academic year ending in 2019 (the most recent for which the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments [MCAs] were administered), only 11% of students in this culturally focused school were proficient in mathematics, 12% in reading, and 8% in science; performance is frequently even worse at alternative schools focused on Native American and other culture-specific groups.
Problems abide, too, in Katherine Kersten’s (“Woke revolution looms for the schools”) lament that leftist ideology rather than solid subject matter is guiding the development of new social studies standards. She need not worry. Those standards most likely will not be implemented any better than the more traditional standards developed in 2004; students in the Minneapolis Public Schools and other districts should be considering the issues raised by those currently developing standards, just as they should be learning the sequence of events that have determined the course of American and world history. But teachers know little of ethnic-specific or general history, literature, and fine arts; their main recourse is to distribute boring worksheets, assign individual and group projects with little background information, and to show videos that go explained and undiscussed as to reason presented and pertinence to subject matter.
James Brewer Stewart’s “Slavery was only the beginning” admirably focuses on the much-neglected matter of the collapse of Reconstruction and the disappointment of life in the urban North, replete with multifaceted discrimination. But Stewart typically fails to stress any details in the failures of public education and most likely does not grasp the ideology and pedagogical approaches from the late 1970s forward that were particularly injurious to the life prospects of those struggling with the dilemmas of life at the urban core.
Public education in Minnesota will not be improved by constitutional amendments, ethnic-specific curriculum, or individualized instruction. The overhaul actually necessary would result in knowledge-intensive, subject-focused, logically sequenced curriculum that necessarily includes multi-ethnic history, literature, and fine arts, imparted by retrained, knowledgeable teachers. The overhaul would necessitate the jettisoning of most of the people currently making academic decisions for the Minneapolis Public Schools and other public school districts, the dismantling of many superfluous offices and departments at these locally centralized school districts, and the hiring and training of staff comfortable on the streets and in the homes of students from families struggling with the dilemmas of finances and functionality.
But such an overhaul will only come with a commitment to understand the reality of knowledge-deficient curriculum and low teacher quality that abides in the public schools. Specious fixes and interminable bromides come easier, but they merely deny excellent education to any of our students and hurt those mired in generational poverty the worst.
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