There is a poignant and farcical commonality to opposing views on thie Minnesota social studies standards, expressed by Katherine Kersten (“Woke revolution looms for schools,” Opinion Exchange, Feb. 7) and by Aaliyah Hodge (“Why we need new social studies standards,” Opinion Exchange, Feb. 11). The poignancy occurs when one considers that neither standards that give more attention to the abuse of Native Americans and other American minority groups in United States history, and the cultural contributions of those groups to American society, advocated by Hodge; nor currently prevailing, more traditional standards dating to 2004 and touted by Kersten; will be taught in the classrooms of most Minnesota school districts, including the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The standards created in 2004 were consistent with the movement at the time for measurable, objective, demographically disaggregated indicators of student performance; they were consonant with the goals of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a federal bipartisan legislative initiative that included then Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner and Democrat stalwart Ted Kennedy. The idea was to induce attention to fundamental mathematics and reading skills while establishing more rigorous curriculum across the liberal arts, imparted to students of all demographic descriptors.
But forces of both the left (including teachers unions and other members of the education establishment) and right (including former NCLB backers among Republicans who succumbed to pressure from constituencies who objected to federal intervention in local school district and state curriculum standards) eventually worked toward the demise of NCLB and associated standards. As Minnesota education establishment embarrassment mounted over massive student failure on the objective Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs), opposition to the MCAs and the standards increased. Nonwhite demographic groups and those on free/reduced price lunch performed particularly badly, but even students from school districts typically overhyped for educational quality, such as Edina and Minnetonka, performed poorly on a mathematics MCA that students in Taiwan and Singapore would find laughable for lack of rigor..
Editors at the Star Tribune joined the chorus for jettisoning NCLB, which under attack by more powerful political forces died a slow death and gave way to a kind of federal NCLB Light dubbed the Every Students Succeed Act (ESSA) and on the state level to such ineffective programs as World’s Best Work Force (WBWF) and Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs), emanating from intellectually corrupt staff at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE).
More importantly, resistance at the classroom level to the Minnesota state standards was immediate and ongoing. They were never taught in the Minneapolis Public Schools and most other school districts, nor were students ever prepared by aggressive provision of grade-level skills necessary to perform well on the MCAs. Education Minnesota and local affiliates such as the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) opposed the standards and the MCAs from the moment of their introduction; furthermore, even if there had been the inclination on the part of the education establishment to impart the knowledge and skills associated with the standards, most teachers are incapable of doing so because of low knowledge bases and pedagogical incompetence traceable to teacher training programs.
As to the impartation of themes pertinent to the experiences of Native Americans and other nonwhite demographic groups as advocated in new standards touted by Hodge, those will not be implemented either. The opportunity exists now for teachers to present such material to students, but they do not do so. Prospective elementary school teachers have the most academically insubstantial training of any students matriculating on a college or university campus; and few secondary teachers have mastery over the subject matter for which they are formally certified. Teachers are deficient in knowledge pertinent to history, literature, fine arts, mathematics, and the natural sciences. They have no mastery of the history, literature, and fine arts of Native Americans, African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, Hmong, or Somali students. 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.
Thus will the aims of both Kersten and Hodge be unattained. Kersten’s appeal for the presentation of factual knowledge and chronological events and people; and Hodge’s call for attention to themes pertinent to nonwhite cultures; are poignant for the passion exhibited by both writers; and for the farcical nature of the system that assures that neither knowledge-intensive curriculum nor ethnic-specific themes will be presented in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools and most other locally centralized school districts.
The establishment of academic and multiethnic curriculum will never be accomplished through national or state processes in the United States, given the nation’s mania for local control. The necessary overhaul of curriculum and teacher quality must become the goal of a locally centralized school district that can then become the model for such change.
My own efforts are to induce such an overhaul at the Minneapolis Public Schools.
You make sweeping comments about the knowledge base and pedagogy of Minnesota’s public school teachers in this article but provide no foundation for those comments, no details. As a recently retired high school ELA teacher I strongly refute your pronouncements. I and most teachers I know do not use worksheets because they do not foster analytical, creative thinking. We spend hours individually meeting with students to help them develop and support their own ideas. The problem social studies teachers had with the 2004 standards was the limited and rigid focus on dates and events to the detriment of fostering inquiry and thinking. Are there teachers who use worksheets? Yes, I have known some, but they are the exceptions—not the rule you proclaim. I am an International Baccalaureate examiner with a knowledge base and understanding of literature that has allowed me the privilege of examining student papers from around the world for over a decade, and I can tell you that my students could hold their own with any of them. I am proud of the professionals I called my colleagues. Your blog or opinion column shows a dramatic lack of thought and support, and would require revision before I would even grade it.
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