Anyone who cares about the future of the United States must grasp that we must transform the current abominably ignorant citizenry with a well-informed body politic, and to bring about this transformation the overhaul of K-12 education is paramount.
Readers must recoil from stock phrases such as accountability and
transparency and focus instead on the real dilemmas at the district.
In a nation with a mania for local control, the needed K-12 overhaul must begin with one locally centralized school district that can become a model for other public school systems. I intend to make the Minneapolis public Schools that school district.
To grasp the brutal reality that abides at MPS now, readers must focus,
as if a surgeon making a critical incision in a life or death case, on the
wretched record of the Minneapolis Public Schools before and during the tenure
of Superintendent Ed Graff >>>>>
MPS Academic Proficiency Rates for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018,
and 2019
(as indicated by Minnesota
Comprehensive Assessment [MCA] results for spring of the given years)
Math
Math
2014 2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
African 22%
23% 21% 18%
18% 18%
American
American
23%
19%
19% 17%
17% 18%
Indian
Hispanic
31% 32%
31% 29%
26% 25%
Asian
48% 50%
50% 47%
50% 47%
White
77% 78%
78% 77%
77% 75%
Free/
26% 26%
25% 24%
22% 20%
Reduced
All
44% 44%
44% 42%
42% 42%
Reading
Reading
2014 2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
African 22%
21%
21% 21%
22% 23%
American
American
21%
20%
21% 23%
24% 25%
Indian
Hispanic
23% 25%
26% 26%
27% 29%
Asian
41% 40%
45% 41%
48% 50%
White
78% 77%
77% 78%
80% 78%
Free/
23% 23%
23% 25%
25% 25%
Reduced
All
42% 42%
43% 43%
45% 47%
Science
Science 2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
African 11%
15%
13% 12%
11% 14%
American
American
14%
16%
13% 17%
14% 17%
Indian
Hispanic
17% 18%
21% 19%
17% 16%
Asian
31% 35%
42% 38%
37% 40%
White
71% 75%
71% 70%
71% 70%
Free/
14% 15%
17% 16%
15% 14%
Reduced
All
33% 36%
35% 34%
34% 36%
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
Readers must also put away distractions such as constitutional
amendments mandating excellent education, main reliance on early childhood education,
and redesigning academic standards that in the absence of local school district
overhaul will not be followed anyway, focusing instead on the he
actual dilemmas at the Minneapolis Public Schools are the following >>>>>
>>>>> Curriculum
is abysmally weak.
The problem is not lack of cultural relevance as such but overall
knowledge-deficiency. You must advocate for curricular overhaul for
the logical sequencing of subject area knowledge in mathematics, biology,
chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, and world and
ethnic-specific literature and fine arts from kindergarten forward through
grade 5, continuing into middle and high school, with increasing emphasis also
at those levels on the technological and vocational arts.
>>>>> Teacher
quality is low.
Senior Human Resources Officer Maggie Sullivan must invite outside
scholars to come to MPS for the development of knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete curriculum and the training of teachers capable of imparting that
curriculum.
>>>>> There
is no effective program of skill remediation for those students disastrously
behind academically. Officials
at the Minneapolis Public Schools must develop such a program during and after
the regular school day and during summers.
>>>>> Superintendent
Ed Graff, Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing, and the entire
academic staff of the Department of Teaching and Learning are academic
lightweights, as are Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray,
Ron Wagner and Brian Zambreno; and Office of Black Student Achievement Director
Michael Walker and Department of Indian Education Director Jennifer Rose
Simon.
These staff members should be jettisoned or in a few cases
reassigned, while the aforementioned outside scholars must be brought in to
design curriculum and train teachers.
>>>>> As
curriculum is redesigned and teachers retrained, the Department of Teaching and
Learning and the Office of Black Student Achievement should be disbanded and
the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education reorganized for the
installation of academically competent staff.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Senior Financial Officer Ibrahima Diop is one of the three best in
the nation at what he does; trust him fully and give him strong backing. Know
also that Senior Operations Officer Karen Devet, Senior Information Technology
Officer Justin Hennes, and Special Education head Rochelle Cox are supreme at
what they do.
Senior Officer for Accountability, Research, and Equity Eric Moore
is highly valuable as a gatherer and evaluator of data but has no business
making overall academic decisions. Maggie Sullivan is bright and
perceptive but needs to focus more aggressively on the issue of low teacher
quality. Senior Executive Officer in the Office of the
Superintendent Suzanne Kelly has good grasp of many of the abiding dilemmas but
must face these more frankly or be evaluated for the propriety of her
$190,000-plus salary.
………………………………………………………………..
Face the brutality of the facts.
Confront those who are culpable.
Doing anything else is to send forth more ignorant citizens and
too many of our precious young people to early deaths or lives spent in
incarceration.
………………………………………………………………………………….
These truths are told nowhere else but on
this blog, 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) reveals the programs to be shams that have no chance of
advancing knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education for the students of the
state or to assist struggling schools.
>>>>>
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.
>>>>> Readers
msut learn to 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.
Our responsibility is great.
We must go to work---
now.
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