Apr 8, 2021

Article #15 of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

The Travesty That Is the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education

 

Jenny Arneson’s Astoundingly Stupid Statements and Multi-Year Ineffectiveness Obligates Her to Resign from the Board of Education

 

District 1 (Northeast and Southeast Minneapolis Jenny Arneson is an enigma:

 

Arneson is the hardest working of the members on the current Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education.

 

Arneson is a masterful accumulator of factual detail on many aspects of the inner working of the district, notably information pertinent to her Northeast Minneapolis stomping grounds and items

relevant to current district finances.  She also was an adept chair during her term of service in that position, a knowledgeable manager of meetings per Robert’s Rules of Order, a skill that stood her in good stead during fall 2020, when she was chair of the finance committee.

 

But Arneson has no philosophy of education, she is beholden to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, and she is capable of astoundingly stupid statements:

 

>>>>>    At an MPS Board of Education meeting in late spring 2019, Jenny Arneson noted, as part of her final report at a meeting of the MPS Board of Education (of the sort with which board members conclude each of their meetings) that her son had been accepted by his first choice for college attendance, Grinnell College in Iowa.  She then opined that “This proves that every student at MPS is College and Career Ready.”

 

That statement was astonishingly stupid, given that fewer than thirty percent (30%) of students on Free and Reduced Price Lunch and those of several ethnicities who tend to fall in the Free/Reduced category are not proficient in mathematics, reading, or science;  and that one-third (33%) of MPS students who matriculate on college and university campuses need remedial courses.

 

>>>>>    At the Committee of the Whole meeting of Tuesday, 22 October, Arneson conveyed the essence of a conversation that she had had with a student who liked the idea of ethnic studies courses offered as alternatives to a United States history course, because the high school course is just a repetition of what students learned in a course focused on the same subject in grade seven.  Arneson accepted the student’s view uncritically, thereby revealing appalling ignorance for a graduate of St. Olaf College, albeit in the academically undemanding field of social work.

 

The pertinent truth is two-fold  >>>>>

 

1)  The grade 7 course is typically taught via videos and through packets that students fill out in the absence of teacher-imparted information or comment and without class discussion.  And unless students take Advanced Placement (AP) United States History in high school, the mode of teacher disinterested, unengaging instruction evident at grade 7 abides also in the high school course---  and lamentably even in some AP courses, taught as they often are by knowledge-deficient teachers.  

 

2)  Limiting the number of United States history or any other courses in core subject areas should be determined only as a practical matter, since the number of such courses would be multiple if the amount of information to be conveyed were the determinant.  The problem is not repetition but rather that students learn nothing of great substance in either course because of the approach to curriculum and pedagogy;  and on the basis of amount of information important for conveyance, even multiple courses could not impart all that there is to learn concerning American and United States history---  so that the decision as to how many courses to offer is a matter of temporal practicality:  Repetition except as a matter of review as foundation for new learning is a matter of teacher inadequacy, not intrinsic to the abundant knowledge sets for mastery of American and United States history.

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