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 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
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 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%
Percentage of Students Graduating
2013 2014
2015 2016 2017
2018
Student
Category
African 44.8% 47.8%
52.8% 59.5% 56.9%
61.7%
American
American 38.1%
25.6% 36.3% 37.4%
29.8% 37.8.%
Indian
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/ 47.4% 49.7%
56.8% 56.9% 56.7%
61.4%
Reduced
Lunch
Homeless 26.1%
26.1% 37.3% 35.7%
40.1% 37.8%
Highly
Mobile
Advanced 85.6%
86.7% 90.4% 89.3%
83.3% 90.8%
Learner
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 56.1% 58.8%
65.1% 67.3% 66.0%
69.2%
Students
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.
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