May 5, 2021

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.    

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