Article #26 of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner Heather Mueller is An Academic Lightweight Typical of the Education Establishment

 

In the same way that United States Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has not a single degree in a major academic discipline--  and the same holds for Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff;  Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing;  Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno;  the entire 26-member Department of Teaching and Learning---   Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner Heather Mueller has no  credentials worthy of an academician.

 

Mueller’s degrees and credentials are as follows

 

Associate of Arts, General Studies

(Arizona Western College)

 

B. Ed., Secondary Education and Teaching

(Minnesota State University, Mankato)

 

M. Ed., Educational Leadership

(Minnesota State University, Mankato)

 

Specialist’s Degree, Educational Leadership and Administration, General

(Minnesota State University, Mankato)

 

Ed. D., Education Leadership, with an Emphasis on Organizational Analysis and Change

(Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota)

 

These are academically vacuous degrees. 

 

Like all education establishment figures, Mueller has no serious scholarly interests:  She has no expertise in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, literature, history, government, economics, or the fine arts.

 

Thus, as is the case for Cardona, academic decision-makers at the Minneapolis Pubic Schools, and all members of the education establishment, Minnesota Education Commissioner Heather Mueller is an intellectual lightweight who is not positioned to envision and implement the needed overhaul for knowledge-intensive curriculum and the training of teachers capable of imparting that curriculum.

Education Professors and Their Acolytes at the Minneapolis Public Schools Bear Responsibility for the Context in Which Violent Incidents Transpire

Education professors and their acolytes at the Minneapolis Public Schools---  Superintendent Ed Graff;  Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing;  Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno;  the 26-member staff in the Department of Teaching and Learning;  and the overwhelming majority of the district’s principals and teachers---  bear responsibility for establishing the context in which the recent violent episodes in the city have transpired.

 

Stray bullets have in recent days injured ten year-old Ladavionne Garrett and nine year-old Trinity Smith, the latter of whom was joyfully jumping on a trampoline in her front yard of the Jordan neighborhood when she was felled;  six year-old Aniya Allen died of injuries sustained in a similar incident involving carelessly sprayed bullets.  Minneapolis has thus far witnessed 53 deaths due to such violence in the young year of 2021.

 

Violent incidents that have so recently put young children in harm’s way inevitably bring forth a confused assortment of responses.  At a time when police behavior is under intense scrutiny, many community members nevertheless call for an increased police presence.  Community leaders call for taking back the streets, some aligning actions with words by occupying street corners and setting up stations dispensing information pertinent to resources that can assuage the struggles of people experiencing adverse mental or physical health or issues of finances or familial functionality.  People in many quarters call for the diminution of guns and heightened attention to those people and groups with a past of perpetrating acts of violence.

 

Such actions may have mitigation value.  They may give community members some sense of control and self-assertion that alleviates their feelings of vulnerability.  But none of these actions goes to the core of the context in which these violent incidents occur:

 

People commit acts of violence in the context of a community environment in which unpreparedness for life and lack of a vision for future success leads those who are hopeless to strike out against others close at hand in some confused perception of offense, competition, and slight---  social constructions serving as outlets for frustrations but aiming far from the cause of misery.

 

The misery is actually caused by public education that fails to graduate a large proportion of students and leaves those who do manage to stroll across the stage no option but to clutch a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only.  Whether graduating or not, all students who have matriculated at the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized school districts go forth with slim knowledge bases and few skills applicable to post-secondary success.

 

Students from middle class families are able to draw upon ancestral histories of college attendance and professional success;  conversations ensue around the dinner table and in living rooms that provide vocabulary, knowledge, and future visions not gained at school.  But for those mired in familial cyclical poverty, resources are typically not available at home that are sufficient to provide knowledge, skills, and visions lacking in their public education.  Those forced to depend entirely on the wretched education dispensed by the Minneapolis Public Schools typically have not mastered even basic math or risen to a grade 7 level of reading.  They have little knowledge of history, government, economics, geography, biology, chemistry, or physics.  Even those who scramble onto a community college campus typically find that their knowledge bases are not sufficient for success even at that level, and despite necessary efforts at skill remediation.

 

Thus in the neighborhoods of our central cities, including North Minneapolis, there are too many rootless young people with little hope for the future.  They find themselves attracted to schemes for acquisition of fast money that frequently lead to prison or death at an early age.  They may drive the streets aimlessly, having little else to do.  They make themselves vulnerable to the acts of racist and ignorant police who have little understanding of the community or the conditions past and present that produce circumstances beyond their comprehension.  They may spray bullets carelessly, hitting innocent children who are even less their enemies than those of their false perceptions.

 

Education professors spout an anti-knowledge creed that leaves our children with abominably low information bases.  The administrators and teachers trained by education professors are people of low knowledge with no idea of how to construct knowledge-intensive curriculum.  The systems sustained by the education establishment send our children forth with little hope for culturally enriching, civically participatory, professionally satisfying lives.

 

For young people mired in cyclical poverty, hopelessness leads to behaviors inimical to their own futures and those of others.

 

People die.

 

Children do not live to see adulthood or even adolescence.

 

Education professors and academic decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools should feel a deep sense of guilt---  and a commitment to replace themselves with academicians who can construct knowledge-intensive curriculum and train teachers capable of imparting such curriculum.

 

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

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Note to Readers  >>>>>    I am off to Tucson, Arizona, for two weeks to visit my son, Ryan Davison-Reed.  Please use the time to review the 1700- plus articles on this blog, with particular attention to the 25 articles entered thus far detailing the intellectual corruption that pervades public education in the United States.

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Adriana and Sharon---

 

The two of you have now been members of the Minneapolis Public Schools MPS Board of Education for five months and thus should be settling in and accumulating observational details on the reality that I have conveyed in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, editions of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis Minnesota, opinion pieces for the Star Tribune, Public Comments, and over 1,700 articles on my blog, including my most recent multi-article series detailing the degradation that is public education in the United States, from the national to the state to the local level, saliently  in the latter case as found in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

You must grasp the brutal realities regarding public education in the United States and take action at the most important level of the locally centralized school district  >>>>>

 

>>>>>      You must understand that the dilemmas of public education are traceable to a corrupt ideology that developed at Teachers College, Columbia University, during the 1920s and became a fixture in public education from the late 1960s forward.

 

>>>>>      All academic decision-makers and teachers in the public education establishment are intellectually corrupted by the anti-knowledge creed of education professors. 

 

>>>>>      At the national level this intellectual corruption and academic insubstantiality includes United States Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona;  at the state level it includes Minnesota Commissioner of Education Heather Mueller:  Both are academic lightweights with no substantive academic training.

 

>>>>>      Those intellectually corrupted at the Minneapolis Public Schools include Superintendent Ed Graff;  Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing;  Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brain Zambreno;  the entire 27-member Department of Teaching and Learning;  the leadership of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and all rank and file teachers except those very few who via their own reading, research, and self-training have overcome the myriad obstacles that produce such wretched teaching at the median.

 

>>>>>      Along with the Department of Teaching and Learning, the Office of Black Student Achievement and the Department of Indian Education are enormous bureaucratic burdens;  the former two should be disbanded and the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education staff should be overhauled to become a serious engine of academic advancement for the academically abused Native student population.

 

>>>>>      Senior Finance Officer Ibrahima Diop, Senior Operations Officer Karen Devet, Senior Information Technology Officer Justen Hennes, and special education leader Rochelle Cox are superb in their areas of expertise, and General Counsel Amy Moore and Communications/Marketing Executive Director Julie Schultz Brown are also solid in their roles.

 

>>>>>      But occupying an intermediate position between the abominable academic decision-makers and the superb staff given immediately above are three positions that should be examine and monitored for effectiveness and areas of expertise     >>>>>

 

>>>>>      Senior Research, Equity, and Accountability Officer Eric Moore is an excellent analyst of student data but should not be making overall academic decisions;            

 

>>>>>      Suzanne Kelly has comprehension of insufficiency of MPS curriculum and teacher quality but needs to study harder and act more forcefully to accomplish the necessary overhaul;

 

>>>>>      Maggie Sullivan also comprehends the worst dilemmas vexing the district but has not mustered the courage or secured the assistance from university-based and independent scholars she needs to implement the necessary thorough retraining of the teachers.

 

>>>>>      The Comprehensive District Design contains no provisions for the necessary overhaul to design and implement a logically sequenced, knowledge-intensive, skill replete curriculum or to provide for the mandatory teacher training necessary to impart such a curriculum; nor does Graff’s four-point emphasis on Social & Emotional Learning, Multi-Tiered System of Support, Literacy, and  Equity  offer any hope in the absence of the curriculum overhaul and teacher training that could give reality to those programmatic features that are at present mere bromides.

 

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The MPS Board of Education membership other than yourselves consists of political hacks who are bought and paid for by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.  The strength of the two of you lies in recognition of many of the system’s woes and the fact that you are not corrupted by the MFT/DFL cohort.

 

But you two have a lot of reading, research, and fact-gathering that you must do.  You must be diligent in attaining full comprehension of the most acute dilemmas vexing the Minneapolis Public Schools, then you must act with courage and energy.

 

Otherwise, Adriana and Sharon, you will serve out your term or terms without making any difference in the lives of the long-suffering students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Take stock over the summer.

 

Take vigorous action as classes resume for the 2021-2022 academic year.

 

Or know that you will fail as have all previous members of the MPS Board of Education have failed,

 

and that you should feel that as a heavy moral burden that you cannot ethically bear.

 

Article #25 of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

Disastrous Public Failure to Tell the Truth About Academically Insubstantial Curriculum and Poor Teacher Quality  >>>>>  With Reference to the Tuesday, 4 May, Edition of the >Star Tribune< Opinion Pieces by Dick Schwartz and by Alan Page and Neel Kashkari

 

American and Minnesota societies are currently paying a steep price for the failure to face the truth about United States history.  The United States as a nation has many admirable traits, but the version of history that omitted police state conditions in the American South and de fact segregation and racial inequity in the North until at least 1964 has left us with a legacy of denials for which we are paying dearly.

 

Partial truth in the conveyance of history makes many objectionable conditions okay until, of a sudden, they are not.  When okay becomes not okay, affected groups rise up to say that a police officer shall not keep a knee on the neck of an African American male until the latter is no longer breathing;  overwhelming dominance by white broadcasters and televisions networks and white columnists in newspapers is racist; and multiple inequities pertinent to home ownership, health, and income must not continue.  Saying so forcefully enough induces city councils, media executives, and civic groups to scramble to make amends.

 

But very few people are positioned to recognize or confront the truth about public education.  Thus do we have feel-good opinion pieces such as Dick Schwartz’s “How Do You Spell Gratitude” (Star Tribune, May 4, 2021) and errant would-be solutions to the dilemmas of public education posited by Alan Page and Neel Kashkari in “Journey toward equity must begin at school” (also Star Tribune, May 4, 2021).

 

Schwartz thanks teachers and professors who called his attention to the importance of proper spelling.  Kashkari and Page vow that a constitutional amendment requiring a quality education for all students will bring equitable results across racial and class lines.  Schwartz’s message is platitudinous;  that of Page and Kashkari is preposterous.

 

In absolute numbers, our systems of public education in Minnesota and the United States feature many teachers who struggle heroically to overcome the deficiencies in their training, leveraging their ability to read, acquire the necessary knowledge base, and connect with students of all demographic descrptors to achieve excellence.  But such teachers are minuscule as a percentage of the teaching force:  Most teachers operate on a deficient knowledge base that they have no inclination to build on their own, and their pedagogy is inept.

 

Excellence in education cannot be legislated or established through constitutional amendments.  Given the mania for local control in the United States, fundamental change in public education cannot be mandated by national or state entities.  Rather, at the level of the fundamental unit, the locally centralized school district, the needed overhaul must come via the design of logically sequenced, knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum;  and the retraining of teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum.

 

None of this will happen by praising those statistical outliers who are excellent teachers.  And educational excellence cannot be achieved via nebulous legislation or constitutional amendments that require quality in education without defining the constituent elements of quality.

 

We are currently reckoning with our failure to tell the full truth about United States history.  Our failure properly to define educational excellence and establish a system to deliver well-defined knowledge and skill sets to students of all demographic descriptors has been our greatest untold moral failure.  To address this failure and make amends, we must be willing to tell the hard truths pertinent to teacher incompetence at the median, woefully knowledge-deficient curriculum, and administrative ineptitude.

 

Articles such as those by Schwartz and by Page and Kashkari do a disservice for lack of courage to tell the truth or failure to even pursue and embrace the truth about public education.  And this disservice is of a grave sort when we consider that until we design public education systems productive of a more informed citizenry, our best efforts on matters such as police reform and diversification of corporate and media institutions will fall far short of the goal of societal equity.

 

We will get nothing right until we overhaul public education at the level of the locally centralized school district, so as to produce a more informed and enlightened citizenry.

 

We should start with the Minneapolis Public Schools.    

Article #24 of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

United States Department of Education Leader Miguel Cardona Is An Intellectual Lightweight---  and the Phenomenon is Apparent Throughout National, State, and Local Systems of Public Education

Miguel Angel Cardona was selected by President Joe Biden to be his Secretary of Education.

Cardona's appointment is typical for designates for the top education position in the United States.  Betsy DeVos, Trump’s appointee, was not typical, inasmuch as her goal was to dismantle the public education system in the United States.  But being a much better appointment than Betsy DeVos is faint praise.

Cardona's typicality is rooted in the intellectual corruption he manifests as someone who has worked his way up the public education bureaucracy by accumulating insubstantial academic credentials acquired in programs administered by those campus lightweights known as education professors.

Cardona received his Bachelor of Science degree in education from Central Connecticut State University (1997), a Master of Science in bilingual and bicultural education at the University of Connecticut (2001), and an Ed. D. (Doctor of Education, 2011).  His dissertation was entitled, Sharpening the Focus of Political Will to Address Achievement Disparities.

Thus, Cardona has no substantive training in a major discipline (mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, political science, economics, literature, or the fine arts).  His professional experience has been as a fourth grade teacher, principal, and Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning in Meridien, Connecticut.  He also occupied the position of adjunct professor of education in the University of Connecticut's Department of Educational Leadership.  Despite Cardona’s very slim preparation in terms of any subject matter of academic importance, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont appointed Cardona that state’s Commissioner of Education in 2019.

Upon the recommendation of Linda Darling-Hammond, a major star in the intellectually corrupt world of the education professor’s firmament (and the same gadfly who recommended failed United States Education Commissioner Arne Duncan), President Joe Biden appointed Cardona United Sates Education Commissioner in December 2020.  Tellingly, Biden had considered education establishment mainstays and fellow academic lightweights National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. 

Thus does Biden operate in an environment dominated by the same sort of public actors that also includes his education professor wife, Jill Biden, all of whom are intellectual lightweights with no serous academic credentials.

Know, then, that the prospects for the imperative K-12 Revolution will never emanate from the United States Department of Education.

Advocacy for knowledge-intensive, skill replete curriculum, imparted by teachers possessing the pedagogical skill to deliver substantive education to students of all demographic descriptors, will only occur as a result of overhaul at the locally centralized school district, which can then serve as a model for other districts.

That district must be the Minneapolis Public Schools.