Adriana and Sharon---
I continue to be so very glad that the two of you won your seats on the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education. The fact that the two of you won your seats without backing from the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) is a very favorable development; you are not, as are the seven other members of the board, bought and paid for by the MFT/DFL cohort.
Now you must brace for the hard truths that lie behind the façade of each of the meetings that you attend in your new roles.
The truths are rarely told and in the lack of telling raise the question that abides for most major actors on the scene at MPS and in public education throughout the state of Minnesota >>>>>
1 >>>>> Are they ignorant?
2 >>>>> Are they in denial?
3 >>>>> Or are they clearly corrupt?
Among the hardest of the truths that you must face, many of these uncovered during my six years of research for and writing of my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect, are the following
>>>>>
>>>>> The public education establishment is an intellectual wasteland that originates in the classrooms of those college and university jokes: education professors; these campus low-lifes have for at least fifty years corrupted prospective teachers with an anti-knowledge ideology that pervades the thinking of MPS Superintendent Ed Graff; Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing; Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno; the entire 24-member staff of the Department of Teaching and Learning; and all principals and teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools. This means that all of those responsible for designing and implementing the academic program of the district are incompetent to do so, and that an overhaul of all staff and approaches of the district with regard to curriculum and pedagogy is of paramount importance.
>>>>> As daunting as this situation is, the locally centralized schools district is where the overhaul must take place. The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) is staffed by people making academic decisions who were also trained by education professors and are therefore ideologically corrupt. Examination of such programs as the Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs) and World’s Best Workforce (WBWF) are shams that have no chance of advancing knowledge-intensive, skill replete education for the students of the state or to assist struggling schools.
>>>>> Do not worry about MPS finance, operations, or technology; Ibrahima Diop, Karen Devet, and Justin Hennes are superb; Rochelle Cox is also a caring and thoughtful leader of special education. But all of those staff members mentioned in the first category of hard truths above should be dismissed in their current roles, including Superintendent Graff; Michael Walker and the staff at the Office of Black Student Achievement should also be dismissed, and the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education should be re-staffed with an emphasis on academic achievement.
>>>>> Senior Officer of Accountability, Research, and Equity (ARE) Eric Moore is a master of data but should not take part in curriculum design. Senior Human Resources Officer Maggie Sullivan needs to hire university and independent scholars to train teacher for subject area knowledge, of which they have little. Senior Executive Officer Suzanne Kelly should be evaluated for the value that she brings to the district in a role for which she should be advancing student academic progress in a position that pays in excess of $190,000.
>>>>> Elementary school teachers have little subject area knowledge. Teachers in middle school and high school are generally deficient in the knowledge pertinent to their fields; teachers know little of ethnic-specific or general history, literature, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics; their main 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 subject matter. The ideology and pedagogical approaches from the late 1970s forward have left our students and the general public devoid of knowledge and have particularly diminished life prospects of our economically most impoverished students, struggling with the dilemmas of life at the urban core.
>>>>> Think creatively. Most of discussion in the conversational ether is debased. Public education at MPS and throughout 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 schools 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.
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.
Face the reality.
Get to work.
Otherwise, our babies will live out their lives on the streets and in prison, rather than using their long-waiting brains in the fields of medicine, law, engineering, business, and scholarship.
The reality is daunting.
Your responsibility is great.
Go to work, my sisters---
Gary
Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.
Director, New Salem Educational Initiative
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