Star Tribune staffer Mara Klecker’s “A Warm Welcome on a Cold First Day” (Star Tribune, 9 January 2021) focused on the return to physical classes by some of the youngest students at Jefferson Community School. Cited were remarks by and about relieved parents, wary parents, irritated MFT (Minneapolis Federation of Teacher) members, and students themselves.
A telling comment was attributed to Jefferson Community School Principal Holly Kleppe, reported as saying, “This week is all about those rituals and routines. That’s education and that’s what we do best.”
The reality is that Jefferson Community School School does not “do” education well at all. Jefferson Community School delivers a terrible quality of education. Kleppe did not comment, nor did Klecker inquire, about the abysmal academic proficiency rates of students at this Minneapolis Public Schools preK-5 school.
Those rates are
as follows for the most recent years ending as given, for which the Minnesota
Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) have been administered >>>>>
Jefferson
Community School Principal >>>>> Holly Kleppe
Math 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
17% 17% 16% 14% 13% 13%
(380) (369) (391) (323) (342) (296)
Reading 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
2019
18% 15% 17% 16% 19% 21%
(364) (363)
(385) (362) (343)
(294)
Science
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
11% 10% 12% 11% 11%
11%
(114) (129) (121) (112) (105) (93)
Student
Population
Enrollment: not tabulated as yet by MPS officials
Percentage
of Percentage of
Enrollment
Enrollment
at site Districtwide
Native American 3% 4%
African American
46% 36%
Asian American 3% 6%
Hispanic American 44% 20%
White American 4% 34%
English Learners
54% 24%
Receiving Free or 94%
63%
Reduced Price Lunch
Receiving Special 14%
14%
Education Services
Contact Information
1200 West 26th Street
Minneapolis MN
55405
Grades PreK-8
Principal: Holly Kleppe
Hours:
9:30 AM-4:00 PM
Phone:
612-668-2720
FAX: 612-668-2730
Email:
Holly.kleppe@mpls.k12.mn.us
Website: jefferson.mpls.k12.mn.us
Neither did either Kleppe or Klecker explain the key reason why such an abysmal record accrues >>>>>
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. They are mentally suffused with the anti-knowledge
ideology and pedagogical approaches conveyed by education professors from the
late 1970s forward, leaving our students devoid of knowledge and diminished
life prospects, particularly for our economically most impoverished students,
such as those at Jefferson Community
School, struggling with the dilemmas of life at the urban core.
Much was made in the article of reference about the subzero cold on the day (Monday, 8 January) on which the young students returned to school at Jefferson.
Below the surface of the article lurks the reality is that those temperatures might be taken as metaphor for the cold prospects in life--- the streets on and the prisons in which too many will live out this one earthly sojourn--- because of the wretched level of education delivered by Jefferson Community School and in classrooms across the Minneapolis Public Schools.
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