Apr 13, 2021

Fourth Open Letter to Minneapolis Public School Board Members Adriana Cerrillo and Sharon El-Amin

April 13, 2021


Adriana and Sharon---

 

In this fourth letter to the two of you since you began your tenure on the Minneapolis (MPS) Board of Education in January 2021, I stress the critical role that you two must play in advocating for the changes actually necessary at the school district.

 

I have been entering on my blog for these last many days a multi-article series that details all of the most vexing dilemmas facing preK-12 education in the United States, in Minnesota, and at the Minneapolis Public Schools specifically, representative as MPS is as a wretched locally centralized school district of the type so prevalent in the United States.

 

As you scroll on down the blog, you will have the opportunity to read my analyses of the intellectual corruption that applies to your fellow MPS Board of Education members Jenny Arneson, Kim Ellison, and Nelson Inz;  similar articles will appear in the next few days detaining the like hopelessness of Kim Caprini and Ira Jourdain and the faint chances that Siad Ali and Josh Pauley can become acceptable members of the board.

 

Thus are your important roles apparent:

 

If the needed overhaul at the Minneapolis Public Schools is going to gain contribution from MPS Board of Education members, that contribution must come via the advocacy of the two of you.

 

Be reminded of the following  >>>>>

 

 >>>>>            I have detailed the needed change in my 562 page book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.  The book is currently in the hands of Federal Reserve Minneapolis President & CEO Neel Kashkari and many others who have opined on matters pertinent to equity and excellence in public education, as well many of those responsible for sustaining the current abominable system.

 

The two of you should have read and studied the facts, analysis, and philosophical and historical context that I provide in this book, resolved then to act accordingly.

 

None of the usual bromides, such as “transparency” or “accountability,” will get very far in advocating for the needed overhaul. 

 

We must be precise in identifying the problems, as follows  >>>>>

 

>>>>>             The education establishment is pervaded by a degraded philosophy that dates to the 1920s at Teachers College of Columbia University.  By the 1970s this philosophy had taken hold and now corrupts everyone who has trained under those campus low-lifers know as education professors.  The intellectual corruption runs deep, so that from national through state through local public schools systems we have academic lightweights making academic decisions that result in knowledge-deficient curriculum.

 

>>>>>             Thus from U. S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner Heather Mueller to MPS administrators Ed Graff, Aimee Fearing, Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno you will find no one with a legitimate,  substantive, academic master’s degree;  this is true, too, of that 27-member (now, having recently added two members) intellectual wasteland dubbed the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning. 

 

Not a single scholar. 

 

Not one.

 

>>>>>             The Office of Black Student Achievement (OBSA) and the Department of Indian Education are similarly devoid of scholars.  The OBSA should be nixed and Director Michael Walker should be moved to a new Department of Resource Provision and Referral, staffed with people comfortable on the ground and in the homes of students from families struggling with dilemmas of finances and functionality.  We are stuck with the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education but this bureaucratic entity should be overhauled so as to be staffed by academicians.

 

>>>>>             You have supreme talents in Finance Senior Officer Ibrahima Diop, Information Technology Senior Officer Justin Hennes, Operations Senior Officer Karen Devet, and Associate Superintendent for Special Education Rochelle Cox.

 

Just let those staff members alone and let them do what they do so very well.

 

The problem concerns the academic program, with no help forthcoming from the MPS Comprehensive District Design or Ed Graff-‘s longstanding, ineffectual four-point program.

 

Focus on the overhaul needed to bring knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum and teacher training so as to produce professionals capable of imparting such a curriculum to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.

 

Mine is a hard message, delivered after 49 years as a teacher in tough urban environments and after seven years of painstaking research into the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Heed my message---

 

Go to work---

 

The lives of our babies, and thus our own future, is at stake---

 

Love & Peace---

 

Gary

 

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.

Director, New Salem Educational Initiative

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