Introduction:
Origins and
Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States
We have in
the United States a corrupt system of public education.
The
corruption originated in the intellectually degraded approach to curriculum and
teaching training at Teachers College of Columbia University during the
1920s; in time, this intellectual
corruption became also moral corruption on the part of all of those inside and
outside the education establishment who are responsible for sustaining the
system as it is.
The current
series of articles goes to the core of our public education dilemma, providing
information on the origin of our corrupt system of public education and then
detailing the institutions and actors in Minnesota, as salient example of
degraded systems of public education throughout the nation, who every day their
feet hit the ground rob our precious young people of the knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete preK-12 education that they should be receiving.
Consider
first, the origins of the intellectual corruption that pervades the system.
………………………………………………………………………………….
How We Got in This PreK-12 Education Mess
In the annual report from the Minnesota
Department of Education in September 2018 on the results of Minnesota
Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) in math and reading for the 2017-2018 academic
year we found out that just 60 percent of Minnesota students were proficient in
mathematics, the same figure as that for 2016-2017; for reading the comparable figures were 59
percent in academic year 2016-2017 and 57 percent in 2017-2018, a two
percentage point decline.
Year after year, right up to academic year
2019-2020, we get these same dismal results.
For the indicated academic year in the
Minneapolis Public Schools, reading proficiency rose a bit over those two
academic years, from 43 percent to 45 percent, with math proficiency flat at 42
percent. In that school district,
one-third of graduates who matriculate at colleges and universities need
remedial instruction. And most graduates
walk across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only,
so deficient are they in key knowledge and skill sets in mathematics, biology,
chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, quality literature, English
composition, and the fine, vocational, and technological arts.
Consider the record of the Minneapolis Public
Schools for the years ending in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 >>>>>
MPS Student Academic Proficiency Rates
as Measured by Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) Results for 2014, 2015,
2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019
>>>>>
Math
2014
2015 2016
2017 2018
2019
African American
22%
23% 21% 18% 18% 18%
American Indian
23%
19% 19%
17% 17% 18%
Hispanic
31%
32% 31%
29% 26% 25%
Asian
48%
50% 50%
47% 50% 47%
White
77%
78% 78%
77% 77% 75%
Free/ Reduced
26%
26% 25%
24% 22% 20%
All
44%
44%
44% 42%
42%
42%
Reading
2014
2015 2016
2017 2018
2019
African American
22%
21%
21% 21%
22% 23%
American Indian
21%
20% 21%
23% 24% 25%
Hispanic
23%
25% 26%
26% 27% 29%
Asian
41%
40% 45%
41% 48% 50%
White
78%
77% 77%
78% 80% 78%
Free/ Reduced
23%
23% 23%
25% 25% 25%
All
42%
42%
43% 43%
45%
47%
Science
2014
2015 2016
2017 2018
2019
African American
11%
15%
13%
12% 11% 14%
American Indian
14%
16% 13%
17% 14%
17%
Hispanic
17%
18% 21%
19% 17%
16%
Asian
31%
35% 42%
38% 37%
40%
White
71%
75% 71%
70% 71% 70%
Free/ Reduced
14%
15% 17%
16% 15% 14%
All
33%
36% 35% 34% 34% 36%
Percentage
of Students Graduating
2013 2014
2015 2016 2017
2018
Student
Category
African
American
44.8% 47.8%
52.8% 59.5% 56.9%
61.7%
American
Indian
38.1% 25.6%
36.3% 37.4% 29.8%
37.8.%
Asian
69.7% 78.8%
83.3% 85.6% 82.5%
87.1%
Hispanic
42.8% 44.5%
57.6% 50.6% 56.7% 57.1%
White
75.8% 77.4%
82.5% 85.1% 86.0%
86.7%
Free/
Reduced
47.4% 49.7%
56.8% 56.9% 56.7%
61.4%
Homeless/
Highly Mobile
26.1% 26.1%
37.3% 35.7% 40.1%
37.8%
Advanced
learner
85.6% 86.7%
90.4% 89.3% 83.3%
90.8%
Female
60.3% 62.1%
69.0% 71.7% 69.3%
71.8%
Male
51.9% 55.6%
61.3% 63.0% 63.1%
66.6%
All Students
56.1% 58.8%
65.1% 67.3% 66.0%
69.2%
How did we get in this mess?
……………………………………………………………………………………….
Thomas Jefferson, for his many human
failings, was a visionary of citizenship in the democratic society who said
that "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but
the people themselves; and if we think
them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their
discretion."
The 19th century educator Horace
Mann developed this Jeffersonian notion of an educated citizenry by asserting
the need for common schools that would provide citizens with shared knowledge
as the basis for participation in democracy.
Across the nation, teachers in one-room rural and larger town and city
schools imparted knowledge and skill sets in reading, writing, arithmetic,
history, geography, and literature.
Often, teachers used the popular McGuffey
Readers that were by no means ethnically representative but did provide
substantive information and gave students experience with high-quality
literature.
Two views of education for African Americans came from Booker T.
Washington, who stressed vocational education and the development of economic
independence before insistence on full citizenship rights; and W. E. B. DuBois, who took a view
consonant with that of Jefferson and Mann and asserted that a “talented tenth”
of the African America population should lead the way to informed political
participation. And indeed, such African
American luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and DuBois
gave testimony to the power of knowledge as they held the ideals of the United
States constitution before a nation that was not living up to the ideals
expressed in that document; the speeches
of those three are replete with references to history, government, and
literature.
Schools in the United States at the 19th-20th
century divide were of widely varying quality.
Most students did not attend school past grade six. But by the first two decades of the 20th
century an increasing number of students were seeking attendance in high
schools that generally featured classical curricula in mathematics, natural
science, history, government, English literature and usage, and Latin. An intermediary institution, junior high,
also appeared in some urban districts, for students in grades seven through
nine, featuring academic preparation for the high school curriculum.
At that turn of the 19th into the
20th century, normal schools offered formal preparation for some teachers; these varied widely in quality but in general
assumed that teachers would be instructing students in a rigorous academic
curriculum. But by the second decade of
the 20th century, teachers colleges located on university campuses
overtook the normal schools as institutions of teacher preparation. Education professors, now ensconced in
university settings among academic field specialists, began to emphasize
pedagogy over curriculum, with the assertion that the systematic acquisition of
knowledge was not important.
The writings of John Dewey, while full of
internal contradictions and often lacking clarity, typically asserted that
education should resonate with the experience of the child and offer practical
preparation for life. More clearly,
William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg advocated for a putatively progressive
approach to education that deemphasized the sequential acquisition of knowledge
and skill sets. Heard in 1918 penned an
article, “The Project Method,” and soon published a book of the same name; in 1928, Rugg, with coauthor Ann Shumaker,
published the book, The Child-Centered School.
In these two volumes we have the foundations for the “progressive”
education movement that, against the vigorous counter arguments of such subject
area proponents as William C. Bagley, became entrenched at the teachers
colleges, most influentially at the Teachers College of Columbia University.
This view of education took many decades to prevail in the schools of
locally centralized districts across the nation. Many teachers had trained as field
specialists. Many parents of immigrant
populations and African Americans relocating as participants in the Great
Northern Migration wanted a substantive education as a basis for scaling the
educational ladder to success. But
paradoxically in synch with a creed known as “progressive,” proponents of those
ideas absorbed and espoused racist precepts of the first decades of the 20th
century that expressed doubts as to whether the children of southern and
eastern European immigrants and African American migrants could master an
academic curriculum . Such populations
were typically tracked into vocational curriculum while decision-makers won to
the “progressive” creed begrudgingly provided an academic track to satisfy
expectations of university admissions offices.
During the late 1960s, the “progressive’
creed thrived in a zeitgeist with individual personal expression at the
center; “progressive” ideology now
dominated among teachers and administrators, all trained by education professors
in departments, colleges, and schools of education.
This was terrible timing:
In ferocious irony, advances in civil rights
made possible the pursuit of the middle class lifestyle for African Americans
positioned to climb the economic ladder;
and fair housing laws made residential housing covenants less
likely: African American middle class
flight joined white flight as phenomena that at the urban core left behind the
poorest of the poor.
Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980.
Gang activity proliferated.
Urban school systems such as the Minneapolis
Public Schools were overwhelmed, with almost all-white middle class teaching
staffs faced with the duty to teach populations with which they had no cultural
affinity. And with the triumph of “progressive”
education, these teachers had little of substance to offer their students that
could assist them in ending the cyclical poverty that created the conditions of
inner city life. Mainly white
educational theorists touted critical thinking, lifelong learning, projects and
portfolios as measures of student learning, curriculum driven by individual
teachers and their students--- all in
the absence of logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets measurable by
objective assessments, thus robbing students of the information base upon which
genuine critical analysis and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge could
proceed. The mantras of education
professors became excuses for teaching very little at all.
………………………………………………………………………………………..
By the late 1990s, a movement for academic
standards and objective assessments ultimately produced No Child Left Behind
(NCLB) in 2002, but telling disaggregated data results proved embarrassing to
the education establishment, which went to work on those Democrats (in Minnesota,
the DFL) to which the teachers unions give so bountifully; and those on the right, supporters of
Republicans, came to object to strict federal mandates. No Child Left Behind gave way to waivers
under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top moniker, which in Minnesota
produced the murky Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS); and then the Every Student Succeeds Act
(ESSA, 2016) produced the even murkier North Star Accountability System (NSAS).
The latter system, rolled out by Brenda Cassellius
and staff at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in autumn 2018, like
MMRS relieves the pressure on school officials by relegating objective measures
such as the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments and the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) to status as just one factor among many--- including graduation rates, student
attendance, incremental academic progress over time, incremental progress of
English learners--- for rating school
and district programs. Cassellius and
the other North Star explicators at MDE asked the public to believe that six
Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs), each staffed with seven or eight members
(totaling 45 for all six centers), are going to provide the needed assistance
for addressing the abysmal academic performance of Minnesota’s students.
This North Star Accountability System
continued to prevail under new Education Commissioner Mary Cathryn Ricker, who was appointed by newly elected governor
Tim Walz during academic year 2018-2019;
and now will be maintained by Heather Mueller, who will replace Ricker
in the aftermatof the latte’s resignation in early March 2021
………………………………………………………………………………….
Charter schools and school choice programs
have been part of the educational landscape of Minnesota since the early
1990s. But charter schools are typically
even worse than the mainline public schools, and choice programs have been a
diversion from the fact that few schools in Minnesota provide true excellence
of education by comparison with the nations of East Asia and those such as
Germany, Finland, Canada, Poland, and Australia that far outperform students in
the United States on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).
We got in this K-12 mess in Minnesota, with
unfortunate resonance throughout the nation, with the unfortunate coincidence
of an anti-knowledge approach to education, residential patterns traceable to a
racist history, unprepared urban school districts that have never dedicated
themselves to the education of students of all demographic descriptors, and the
growth of charter schools and choice programs that exacerbated the problems.
We got in this mess for highly identifiable
reasons.
Now we must get
out.
