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.