Article #3
Second
Message to My Friends Adriana Cerrillo and Sharon El-Amin,
On the
Occasion of Their Second Regular Tuesday Meeting of the Minneapolis Public
Schools Board of Education
Prior to their first meeting as members of
the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education in January 2021
(following their electoral victories in November 2020), I wrote an open letter
to my friends Adriana Cerrillo and Sharon El-Amin and entered that missive on
my blog. I followed that letter with
another, entered on my blog prior to their second meeting in March 2021. In these letters, I impressed up Adriana and
Sharon the necessity to look below the surface of media presentations, to avoid
the usual buzz words, and to think creatively, beyond inadequate advocacy for
reform--- and toward the real dilemmas
and the effective solutions suggested in this and other articles in this
edition of Journal of the K-12
Revolution: Essays and Research from
Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Perpend
>>>>>
…………………………………………………………………………………….
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 school 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) reveal them 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.
>>>>> 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 (ineptly led by Jennifer Rose Simon) 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 teachers
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, or
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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