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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