March 9, 2021
Adriana and
Sharon >>>>>
I will be thinking of the
two of you at the occasion of your third meeting this evening as members of the
Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education since your election in
November 2020.
The two of you bear
enormous responsibility >>>>>
As I work to induce overhaul at the district via
my many public platforms, you two are among the very few who have some chance
of bringing change from the inside. You
must think in unconventional terms, coming to understand that the academic
condition of the Minneapolis Public Schools is much worse than you most likely
imagine.
If you cannot or will not
take the time to look below the surface of media reports that merely observe
the façade erected by MPS officials for public consumption, you will not be successful
in bringing the needed change.
You must go beyond buzz words such as transparency, accountability, and collaboration to realize that finance and operations of the district are in good hands with Ibrahima Diop and Karen Devet, as is technology with Justin Hennes and special education with Rochelle Cox.
But all of those making
key academic decisions are incompetent to do so, for reasons I have explained
in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis
Public Schools: Current Condition,
Future Prospect; in many editions,
especially that of September 2020, of my academic periodical, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis,
Minnesota; the 1,700 articles on my
blog; and in my public appearances.
Remember especially the
following >>>>>
The Intellectually Corrupt
Context in Which MPS is Embedded
>>>>> The Minnesota
Department of Education is full of intellectually corrupt
members of the education establishment
This includes notably Commissioner Mary Cathryn Ricker and staff hacks such as Michael Diedrich. I called Diedrich out when under the
leadership of Brenda Cassellius, the MDE brought out its fanciful North Star
Accountability System, and the Regional Centers of Excellence by which a total
of 45 staff members spread over six locations as supposed to guide all of
Minnesota’s failing schools to academic health.
Diedrich knows that these RCEs will not work; Ricker and the others establish and maintain programs
that purport to be consonant with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) but present
these merely to meet formal legislative requirements .
There is a great show now of revising social studies standards,
and Star Tribune mediocrity Erin Golden
has dutifully reported committee efforts, just as Mara Klecker does fluff pieces
such as her journalistically frivolous feature on the academically abominable Jefferson
Community School reopening for in-person classes. But state-mandated standards are never
implemented by the Minneapolis Public Schools and most other locally
centralized school districts in Minnesota.
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 the 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 ineffective programs, such 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. The standards 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.
Education professors have created a
vast wasteland of administrators and teachers >>>>>
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, Latino/Latinas, 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.
The establishment of academic, 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---
and this must be th goal of the two of you, as well.
Focus on Academic Perforamance
and the Actual Reasons for Stark Failure of the Minneapolis Public Schools
Be aware every day your
feet hit the ground of 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
African American
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
22%
23% 21% 18%
18% 18%
American Indian
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
23%
19% 19%
17%
17% 18%
Hispanic
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
31%
32%
31% 29%
26% 25%
Asian
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
48%
50%
50% 47%
50% 47%
White
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
77%
78%
78% 77%
77% 75%
Free/Reduced Lunch
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
26%
26%
25% 24%
22% 20%
All
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
44%
44%
44% 42%
42% 42%
Reading
African American
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
22%
21%
21% 21%
22% 23%
American Indian
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
21%
20%
21% 23%
24% 25%
Hispanic
2014
2015 2016
2017
2018 2019
23%
25%
26% 26%
27% 29%
Asian
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
41%
40%
45% 41%
48% 50%
White
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
78%
77%
77% 78%
80% 78%
Free/Reduced Lunch
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
23%
23%
23% 25%
25% 25%
All
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
42%
42%
43% 43%
45% 47%
Science
African American
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
11%
15%
13% 12%
11% 14%
American Indian
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
14%
16%
13% 17%
14% 17%
Hispanic
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
17%
18%
21% 19%
17% 16%
Asian
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
31%
35% 42%
38%
37% 40%
White
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
71%
75%
71% 70%
71% 70%
Free/Reduced Lunch
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
14%
15%
17% 16%
15% 14%
All
2014
2015
2016 2017
2018 2019
33%
36%
35% 34%
34% 36%
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
You will not be effective
members of the MPS Board of Education if you get distracted by stock phrases and
meaningless bromides.
Know that the 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.
You must advocate for the
development of 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.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Understand the Incompetence of Those Making Academic Decisions
The public education establishment is an intellectual wasteland of academic decision-makers 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.
The overhaul should include elimination of the Office of Black Student Achievement, led by Michael Walker; the latter could be tapped to lead a new Department of Resource Provision and Referral, staffed by people comfortable on the streets and in the homes of students struggling with dilemmas of familial finances and functionality. The legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education should be overhauled to consist of staff with advanced academic credentials outside of education departments.
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.
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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