In his opinion piece, “Schools need more ideas, not more goals”(Star Tribune, February 1, 2021), Ted Kolderie is errant in his definition of quality education but offers much opportunity for identifying the actual dilemmas of public education in Minnesota.
Kolderie is concerned with the proposal of Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota President Neel Kashkari and former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page to amend the state Constitution so as to make quality education a paramount duty of the state. Kolderie focuses on the “how” of achieving quality education, which he notes Kashkari and Page leave for the “people” to decide.
Kolderie then makes references in each paragraph to important aspects of the public education dilemma that give evidence of his own failure to grasp the actual vexations pertinent to the achievement of excellent education:
He writes that journalists asking how quality education is to be achieved rarely get a response. In fact, journalists typically merely report the latest pronouncements of education policy or school district activity without asking that fundamental question; education reporting is inept in the extreme.
Kolderie then notes that school districts, school board and administrator associations, and Governor Walz have all been silent on the proposed amendment, and that Education Minnesota president Denise Specht has not modified the union’s objection to the amendment. The important point here for readers to grasp is that the people and entities mentioned by Kolderie are among the many culpable parties for the state of public education in Minnesota, and that they have no more idea than Kolderie as to the constituent elements of educational excellence, so that their silence is for the better and their objections no surprise.
Next the author moves toward consideration of student motivation, including reference to Gallup polling indicating a decline in student engagement during the middle and high school years. By way of explanation, Kolderie writes that “Students find conventional schools too large and impersonal, lacking in close relationship with teachers, insensitive to their races and cultures, knowing and caring little about what interests and what is relevant to them." Kolderie then asserts that Minnesotans know how student motivation can be achieved, having liberated teachers for engaging students in alternative and charter schools.
The analysis given immediately above is entirely faulty as to the reasons for declining student interest as they move through the public schools system. The reality is that students weary of teachers who have low knowledge bases in the subject areas to which they are assigned and have little ability to conduct engaging discussions for simulating student interest. Teachers hand out too many boring worksheets, assign too many group and individual projects for which the students have little informational background, show too many videos for unexplained purposes, and give too many “free days,” even in schools at which most students academically lag many years below level of school enrollment. Alternative and charter schools offer no solutions: They are typically even worse than the mainline public schools.
Kolderie then gives his own definition of educational excellence, to be achieved through personalized learning that requires no subject matter beyond reading and basic math. This is a faulty and irresponsible definition of educational excellence,
Excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting specified knowledge and skill sets in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts in grade by grade sequence across the preK-12 years. An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors. The purpose of public education is to send forth citizens to lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.
We are now paying dearly for the lack of such a system of public education and such a citizenry. The paramount responsibility of any school district is to impart to students the information in history, government, economics, biology, chemistry, and physics that they need to make informed judgments as citizens; to enrich their lives with quality experiences in literature and the fine arts; and to provide them with the skills necessary to be successful in their postsecondary education.
The United States now lacks a generally informed citizenry. Too many people make judgments on the basis of emotion and belief, rather than fact. Quality education should produced citizens with an abundant, shared body of knowledge of the kind that will both ensure more satisfying individual lives and better decisions for the common good.
No comments:
Post a Comment