Mar 8, 2021

Anyone Who Cares About the Future of the United States Must Grasp That Overhauling K-12 Education is Paramount for Addressing the Dilemma of an Abominably Ignorant Citizenry

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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