Chip Scroggins, in his “A Super Bowl Trophy for North Minneapolis,” (Star Tribune, February 9, 2021) extols Tampa Buccaneer wide receiver and Super Bowl ring-holder Tyler Johnson for his status as a role model for students at his alma mater, Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) North High School.
Key Northsde presences Larry McKenzie (Johnson’s former basketball coach) Charlie Adams (football coach at North) rave about what Johnson means as a role model for students at North and in North Minneapolis generally.
“How cool is that?” Mackenzie gushed, referring to Johnson and his status as a Northsider who trod a noble life path all the way to the Super Bowl. “Here is a guy who has shown that if you have positive people in your life, if you listen and you do the right things, you can get to the top of the world.”
“This is the best thing for the city,” remarked Adams. “He [Tyler Johnson] has a following like you wouldn’t believe.
Johnson is to be commended for deferring his participation in the NFL draft until after his senior year so that he could graduate and receive his bachelor’s degree. He also is by all accounts (to me personally as well as those mentioned in the article) a positive moral presence and a humble mentor to young Northsiders.
Extolling Johnson as a role model, though, and crediting him for saving North High School from dismantling, are overwrought.
North High School remains a wretched high school.
Here are the percentages of students proficient in mathematics, reading, and science for academic years ending in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019--- the last for which the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) were given, and mean score for students taking the ACT >>>>>
North Academy of Arts and Communications
Mean Score on ACT >>>>> 15.6
Percentage of Students Proficient on the
Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments
(MCAs),
Academic Years ending in 2014, 2015,
2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
North High School Principal >>>>> Shawn Harris-Berry/ Mauri Fristleben
(North Academy of Arts and Communications)
----- 16% 2% ----- 2% 2%
(-----) (57) (38) (-----) (42) (44)
Reading 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
23% 9% 5% 11% 2% 11%
(66) (57) (36) (66)(55) (85)
Science 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
----- 10% 5% ----- 2% 0%
(-----) (57) (38) (-----) (42) (85)
Note that out of 85 students taking the science MCA in the academic year ending in 2019, not a single student was proficient. Proficiency rates for mathematics were just 2% and for reading only 11%. That mean ACT score of 15.6 indicates barely a middle school level performance.
This is the school that Tyler Johnson putatively saved.
For all of his success at collegiate and professional football, Johnson should not be considered a role model. The percentage of high school athletes receiving athletic scholarships is minuscule; of those who do, graduation rates are low. Colleges and universities abuse African American youth as cash cows. The chances of being drafted by the NFL are extraordinarily low and of having a professional football career even lower. Of those who do play five, ten, or fifteen years the odds of having brain injury argue for abolishing professional football.
We will know that North High School deserved to survive as an institution when student academic proficiency rates approach 100% and mean ACT scores rise to at least 21. We will observe credible roles models when successful professionals return to their alma mater as physicians, attorneys, business leaders, professors, and teachers--- the latter at a level of excellence that does not describe the current staff at North High School.
At North, as
for other MPS high schools, students languish because of knowledge-deficient
curriculum, lack of effective skill remediation for students lagging well below
grade level, and low teacher quality are the key reasons for low academic
proficiency rates. Prospective
elementary school teachers have the most academically insubstantial training of
any students matriculating on a college or university campus. They are deficient in knowledge pertinent to
history, literature, fine arts, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Their main pedagogical recourse is to
distribute boring worksheets, assign individual and group projects with little
background information, and to show videos that go unexplained and undiscussed
as to reason presented and pertinence to topic studied.
Below the surface of Scroggins’s article lurks the reality that many students now matriculating at North High School will end up living out their one earthly sojourn on the streets or in prisons because of the wretched level of education delivered by North High School and in classrooms across the Minneapolis Public Schools.
When Tyler Johnson
tells the truths conveyed above, we might consider him to be the role model
that at present he is not.
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