The Most Anti-Education Groups in Minnesota >>>>> Creatures of the Education Establishment

June 30, 2021 

Reply to an inquirer---

 

I hope that this note finds you well, that those in your personal universe are fully vaccinated, and that you are poised to enjoy a careful but perhaps more relaxed summer 2021 than was 2020.

 

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The questions that you posed to me a few days back are interesting  >>>>>

 

>>>>>     Who are the most anti-education groups and state legislators in Minnesota?

 

>>>>>     What are your thoughts on the current budget debate?

 

I take such questions very seriously, considering them upon the basis of which they were posed, and from my vantage point as one who has researched K-12 education more thoroughly than anyone of whom I am aware, conceptualizing the issues very differently from the conventional formulation.

 

I will, then, comment upon the questions first from the standpoint of what is truly important and then according to what I perceive to be the spirit in which you made the inquiry  >>>>>

 

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My Answers Based on The Actual Dilemmas of K-12 Education

 

>>>>>     Who are the most anti-education groups and state legislators in Minnesota?

 

College and university based education professors are the most anti-education presences on the scene.  All of the most vexing issues pertinent to K-12 education are traceable to these lightly regarded campus gadflies who embrace an anti-knowledge creed and preside over academically insubstantial teacher training programs, the creed of which is derived from Teachers College of Columbia University during the 1920s.

 

Next come the administrators and teachers whom education professors train, those central office and site-based putative educators who provide such little education that the great bulk of graduates stride across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only.

 

Then we have board members such as those of the the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education, most of whom are sycophants of local unions such as the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT).

The MFT itself comes next, protecting as it does many teachers who are incompetent and should have departed teaching a long time ago.

 

And then among the worst of the remaining greatest offenders are those who are or have been in a position to advocate for change but do not do so, either while they have their position or after they have departed.  This includes all former MPS Board of Education members, reporters for the Star Tribune, and DFL legislators who are bought and paid for by the unions.  And it includes high-profile public figures who have misrepresented themselves as education advocates, including R. T. Rybak, Don Samuels, former Minneapolis Foundation President/CEO Sandy Vargas, and all past governors, both Republican and Democrat.

 

Further, local districts and staff operate in an intellectually corrupt cast of characters and policies at the national and state levels:  this includes Miguel Cardona at the U. S. Department of Education;  and Heather Mueller at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE);  the MDE is an abomination (check out, for example, my articles on the North Star Accountability System and the preposterously named Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs).

 

 

>>>>>     What are your thoughts in the current budget debate?

 

There are many budget debates, none of which end very happily for students in the classrooms of Minnesota.  Republicans and Democrats are both culpable, but not for the reasons usually cited.  Year after year, budgets provided vehemently debated funding but with no structural changes necessary to construct knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum imparted by teachers knowledgeable to impart such a curriculum.

 

Special education and English Language Learners (ELL) constitute categories for which funding is

inadequate;  but per pupil allotments and other general student population categories receive adequate funding.  Funding is actually generous for students on free/reduced price lunch;  impoverished students are hurt the worst by the failure of those in many quarters to advocate for and implement the needed structural changes pertinent to curriculum and teacher quality.

 

At MPS, Senior Financial Officer (SFO) Ibrahima Diop is one of the three best at his position in the nation.  Do not worry about MPS finances with him as leader:   Budgets are structurally balanced and the reserve fund is being rebuilt after years of irresponsible SFO predecessors.

 

 

My Answers Based on More Conventional Assumptions

 

>>>>>     What are the most anti-education groups and state legislators in Minnesota?

 

There are those who would like to see public education become privatized.  To identify these, look for advocates of vouchers and even many of those who take public funding for launching charter schools but really have little interest in advocating for the general student population and who start and operate such schools for pecuniary reasons.

 

Republican legislators are the most likely to favor privatization and the many varieties of “school choice”;  they also espouse local control and family options in their guise as defenders of freedom and liberty.

 

In conventional terms, these are the most anti-education groups---  but I return you to the more serious culprits detailed under my first bold heading.

 

>>>>>     What are your thoughts in the current budget debate?

 

Republicans are not as generous at budget formulation time as are Democrats.  They have been less enthusiastic about early childhood education, tending to think that is a familial, by which in sexist terms they mean a motherly, matter.

 

At the state level, Governor Walz seems likely to prevail with his generous education funding proposal, and COVID funding from the federal government has been a windfall.

 

The current debate over private fundraising efforts at schools in poorer versus affluent communities is a distraction from the main issues of curriculum and teacher quality.  There are inequities, but the real issues are insubstantial curriculum and poor teacher quality at the median.

 

Otherwise, at MPS, trust SFO Ibrahima Diop---  and return to my comments under the first bold heading.

 

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Read my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

 

Read my academic journal, Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis Minnesota.

 

Read the 1800 articles on my blog---   the recent ones, at the very least.

 

Don’t get distracted.

 

Stay focused on the most  vexing issues pertinent to curriculum and teacher quality.

 

 

My very best to you---

 

Gary

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph.D.

Director, New Salem Educational Initiative

Article #2 in a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Exposure of the Academic Abuse Heaped on Children at the Minneapolis Pubic Schools >>>>>

Note to my readers  >>>>>

>>>>>  Student names given in this and the following articles are data privacy pseudonyms.

 

Importance of a Well-Established Body of Knowledge As Witnessed in Student Academic Sessions of 11 June 2021

 

On Sunday, 20 June 2021, I presented certificates to all of my students who attend New Salem and could be in attendance at sanctuary service that day.  As I wrapped up my sessions for academic year 2020-2021, I presented each student and family a banquet-like array of food of my preparation (oven-simulated barbecue chicken [tastes quite like off the grill with my alternating of high-heat baking and brief, intense broiling in a meticulous sauce of hickory, honey, lemon, molasses, garlic, salt, and pepper]), macaroni and cheese, and a sweet ‘n’ sour cucumber & carrot salad);  along with personal notes written to students and to their families (at least two notes, then, in each case).  Although we have not been in a position to perform my compressed Shakespearean play or the individual displays of student knowledge and skill, with the presentation of the certificate I achieved much of my goal of honoring students nearly as fully as when we were able to stage the banquet.

 

One student who does not attend New Salem but lives just a few blocks down from the church was not present but may be at a later date when I will honor some other young people from the church who could not make service on Father’s Day Sunday.  In all, five students and their families were nored on Sunday, 20 June, and approximately the same number will be honored a later date.  That leaves a substantial number of non-church students;  in their cases, I reviewed with them their accomplishments when I presented them with the notes and food, and made sure to convey my appreciation to their parents personally.

 

Thus, in all, as was the case last year, I have achieved much of the banquet effect, have       honored the students appropriately, and have gotten abundant expressions of love and gratitude (and excellent reviews for the food) in return.

 

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Among the students be honored, one on 20 June, another at a later date, are two students with whom I work on Friday.  I have known each of these students since they were in early elementary school (I bring smiles to their faces by telling them that I remember them when they were “Ga-ga-goo-goos”). Sherisha Mallard was out of town and thus will receive her certificate at a later date;  Carl Bedford and his mom are members but not frequent attendees---  whom I convinced that Father’s Day Sunday would be a good time for one of those infrequent appearances.

I never take lightly what my presenting certificates highly specific to a student’s performance and conveying my personal appreciation for their particular achievements means to the students and their families.  I was very poignantly intrigued when I visited the home of four multi-year participants and found that their mom had framed and hung all of their awards (including hers---  I give certificates to supportive parents) on the living room wall.

 

As with all of my students, Sherisha and Carl represent individually notable and illustrative cases:

 

Sherisha (Grade 7) attends Ascension, a Catholic private school, the deficiencies of which I detailed in a previous article.  Sherisha will come to me on a given Friday wanting to know more about the Spanish-American War or World War I or some such, having been introduced to these conflicts and been given (chills up my spine) packets of worksheets but not having gained any factual content that she could comprehend from class (much of the time, the teacher’s knowledge base is slim in the extreme, and what is presented is done in such a cursory manner as to render comprehension unattainable).

 

So I launch into one of my mini-lectures that inevitably demands side ventures into political concepts and background information not in the student’s store of knowledge.  Think of each of the conflicts mentioned above and the bevy of information pertinent to European imperialism and the myriad vocabulary and terms needed to comprehend the forces driving the powers into one of the most brain-boggling stupid wars of the 20^th - 21^st century phase of human endeavor.

 

And then there is math, for which Sherisha has natural talent and an abundant of foundational knowledge of my provision but which her teacher manages to make abstruse. Thus do we cover order of operations;  positive and negative integers;  factoring and applications of the distributive property;  equations and inequalities;  and many other topics from the grade 7 curriculum, which is quite acceptable at Ascension despite being so poorly taught.

 

Sherisha has been frustrated enough at Ascension to contemplate a move to Franklin Middle School in the Minneapolis Public Schools for grade 8.  I rarely counsel a student to switch schools but neither will I dissuade her:

 

The drama at Franklin is not as great as was once the case, and I can give Sherisha the education that she should have.

 

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Carl Bedford provides one of the best examples I have ever had of the E. D. Hirsch premise that with a strong knowledge base and a store of facts available for instant recall, to the point of what he terms, “automaticity,” a person of average intelligence can perform as well as a person of high intelligence quotient (IQ).  Whatever formal testing would show in Carl’s case, I assign him an IQ of 100 for being right on average;  I by now have such a strong feel for individual natural intelligence that I have very high confidence in the similar designations that I have given for other students, who in my assessment feature IQs ranging from 95 to 135 (maybe higher in the latter case, who I am conceptualizing at the moment at very high but not genius level intelligence, but will continue evaluating as the months and years roll by).

 

I have worked with Carl (grade 9, North High School/MPS) since he was in grade 2, inculcating an understanding and full mastery of the four basic operations, fractions, decimals, percentages,

 

ratios, proportions, and simple probability;  multiplication table mastery was a multi-year exercise, even with my refined technique, but by grade 6 he knew the fundamental table as well as he knew his name.  Such foundational knowledge and disciplined learning became, then, the basis for learning all of the pre-algebra and Algebra I skills necessary.  Carl finished with an “A” in Algebra I and was a fixture on the “B” honor roll;  he has a 3.2 GPA.  At North High, this means very little, except that Carl is doing what he needs to do for school and getting his real education from me.

 

Carl likes geography.  I have taught him the major items from the world and national maps and led Carl through a chart of the 196 recognized nations (UN) that includes capitals, population, land area, GDP/capita, literacy rate, and life expectancy.  Carl also likes reading the newspaper with me, preferring articles that have to do with race & ethnicity, school issues, or other community issues recognizable in his personal universe.  I springboard from those to weighty national and international issues.

 

Carl possesses very much less than a driving intellect, a desire to know.  But I will make sure that he will have viability at any post-secondary option he selects.  He may very well go a vocational route (and has mentioned being a chiropractor)---  but whatever he decides, his strong knowledge and skill base built over numerous years will give him very high chance of success---  academically, vocationally, and as an informed citizen.

Charter Schools Have Worsened the Existing Wretched K-12 Education System in Minnesota >>>>> The Errant Approach of Joe Nathan and the Center for School Change

Terrible K-12 education in Minnesota was made worse with the unfortunate advent of charter schools in June 1991, errantly celebrated by Aaliyah Hodge and Joe Nathan in their article, “30 years into the charter school movement” (Star Tribune, June 12).

 

The early 1990s could have been a promising time for the improvement of public education in Minnesota.  In 1983, the federally commissioned study, “A Nation at Risk,” had called attention to the academic failings of public education in the United States, giving considerable attention to the disparities that existed in terms of ethnicity and class.  Widely varying calls for reform ensued.  A major force among those calling for public school change came from those who wanted to institute annual objective testing and the production of disaggregated data specifying how students performed on academic assessments by ethnicity and economic status.  This push for rigor and equity eventually resulted in No Child Left Behind legislation (2003) and a system by which schools were held responsible for results pertinent to students in all ethnic and economic categories.

 

But another, very different, major force among those advocating for reform came from those calling for school choice.  In Minnesota, this induced locally centralized public school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools to offer ranked options to students across residential boundaries.  A lawsuit filed by the NAACP, settled in 2000, opened the way for students from families perceiving inequities to transfer to suburban districts.  Others called for vouchers, whereby students could gain governmental subsidies to move from public to private schools. And then there were those, such as Joe Nathan (director of the Center for School Change since 1988), who advocated for the creation of charter schools.

 

To understand why all of these approaches calling for school choice are lazy and misguided, first consider the following:

 

Excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum to students of all demographic descriptors.  An excellent teacher is a professional with deep and broad knowledge, possessing the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.  Curriculum should be logically sequenced, grade by grade, to allow for review without excess repetition.  At grades preK-5, curriculum should be uniform for all students, with an emphasis on the key areas of mathematics, natural science, history, government, geography, economics, literature, English usage, and the fine arts.  At the middle school (grades 6-8) level, those subjects should also be emphasized, with increasing access also to world languages and the technological and vocational arts.  Upon the foundation of a rigorous preK-8 education, most students should be able to focus on Advanced Placement courses in high school and to exercise multiple elective options according to driving interest.

 

With such a curricular approach, students will go forth at graduation upon a shared base of knowledge necessary for an informed citizenry, prepared to live as culturally enriched, civically engaged, professionally satisfied adults.  Having gained knowledge and skill sets across the liberal, technological, and vocational arts, students will be in a position, particularly by their last two years in high school, to focus on those subjects for which they have developed an informed interest and are consonant with their vocational and professional goals.

 

School choice is a lazy way to go about education change and almost always denies to students the commonly shared bodies of knowledge afforded by the above-described approach.  All of the school choice plans tend to hope that some situation other than the one that a student is in will somehow be better.  But suburban school systems, particular those of the near suburbs, are just as wretched as those of Minneapolis and St. Paul.  There will never be enough public funding to pay for widespread student attendance in private schools.  And charter schools are widely variant in quality;  most, operating with limited curriculum and ill-paid teachers, are even worse than traditional public schools.

 

We should put aside our American exceptionalism and realize that the best school systems of the world (Taiwan, Singapore, Finland) focus on providing high-quality instruction in the mainline public schools;  uniform academic excellence across demographic groups is the emphasis, not student choice.  In the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized districts, the most critical problems have to do with knowledge-deficient curriculum and ill-trained teachers, the latter of whom go forth from abominable college and university based programs operating upon a philosophy that devalues knowledge and creates teachers largely bereft of same.

 

Charter schools have been a distraction from those most vexing dilemmas of curriculum and teacher quality:

                       

We would have been much better off without charter schools, focusing our attention instead on the schools of locally centralized districts, staffed with retrained, knowledgeable teachers capable of imparting to all of our precious children a commonly shared body of knowledge, on the basis of which those students exercise options in high school that allow them to express their personal creativity and pursue their driving interests.

Article #1 in a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Exposure of the Academic Abuse Heaped on Children at the Minneapolis Pubic Schools >>>>>

Salient Student Academic Sessions on Thursday, 10 June 2021

 

I am grateful for the many ways I have for unsettling the education establishment, with my multiple venues, tactics, and strategies.  My ability to tell members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education that my work with students ensures that I will ever be ”the guy that you will never fool” gives me leverage that others working (much more nebulously and ineffectively) for change cannot match.

 

One of the poignant realities of public education is the phenomenon of so many parents living at the urban core who opt to send their children to suburban schools (especially to schools in the near suburbs [Robbinsdale, Brooklyn Park] or to parochial or charter schools, assuming that they will get a better education.  What they get is less drama but no better education in terms of curriculum and teacher quality.  Most of the parents of my students have very little awareness of how shortchanged are their children by the teachers and administration at the Catholic school of Ascension or at near suburban schools such as Cooper High School and Armstrong High School.

 

Consider three such students  >>>>>

 

Celine West is a grade 8 student at Ascension.  She and others in her household started studying with me in October of this academic year 2020-2021.  She had been a very good student at grade 7 and prior years but was not thriving under Covid-19, online conditions. Celine has a propensity to fall asleep whenever there is any sort of lag and even when the matter at hand is fairly engaging; her overnight sleep habits are also not good.  Even under the conditions of study with me, with my constant banter and utterances designed to bring a smile to student faces and to keep them focused, work with Celine on certain days was a battle first to keep eyes open to engage with the assignment from school (so busy was I catching her up on homework that we rarely got to the preferred material of my own design) before her and then use her considerable intellect to get the task accomplished.

 

My first work with Celine focused on Math (actually fairly ambitious as a curricular matter at Ascension but terribly taught), her assignments for which she quickly caught up and mastered.  Thereafter we tended to concentrate on English/Language Arts and Religion, the latter of which is an important part of the curriculum at this Catholic K-8 school.  Catch-up work for English/Language Arts matched the pace of our work in mathematics, so that in the course of time our work has concentrated on Religion.

 

Celine’s grade 8 Religion assignments featured a wide gap between quality of assignments and level of instruction.  The assignments were of very high quality but the teaching was wretched.  Celine would have an assignment, say, that focused on Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus as conveyed in Apostles of the New Testament, then offered selections from Romans and Corinthians I and II that emphasized Paul’s message.  Happily, the passages tended to be Paul at his best, with discussion of love and community, rather than his abysmal takes on social class and gender.

 

But Celine never had any context for any of this.  Her teacher had not discussed any details of the life of Jesus as conveyed in the Gospels and thus the message that literally hit Paul like a flash of lightning;  nor did Celine have any knowledge of the Christian communities around the Mediterranean to which Paul traveled, in which he preached, and to which he wrote his Epistles.

 

The shame of all of this is that Celine is an apt thinker and a good heart;  once she understood the passages and the material, she came up with thoughtful responses that spoke to how she could live an enhanced moral life and give more love to her own family and friends.

 

After eight months of study with me, Celine is in good position as to math, and she has a much better appreciation for the structure of the Bible, the key teachings and events of the Gospels, and broadening vocabulary and knowledge base.

 

She got none of this at school---  no more than she would have in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

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Celine’s grade 4 brother Rayshon (Ray) West also began studying with me in October 2020.  He is enormously bright but is given very little at school that challenges his intellect.

 

I have zoomed Ray on ahead to grade 6 mathematics, introducing fairly intricate operations with fractions, decimals, and percentages.  I also have engaged him with books that activate his considerable imagination, broaden his knowledge base, and increase his vocabulary, the latter of which is underdeveloped for all students based on the level of reading that they do at school.  At every slight excuse, I hop to the world map in my room to give Ray a firm grasp of the continents, the nations within those continents, the oceans and the seas, and some feel for the languages, religions, and cultures of people across the globe.

 

Ray gets none of this at school.

 

None.

 

Zilch.

 

The Mediterranean, China & Japan & the Koreas & the nations of Southeast Asia as part of that continent, any sense of the states of the USA & their capitals & their physical & cultural features, any knowledge of Paris & London & Rome (not to mention Bangkok/Khrungtep or Cairo or Teheran---  all this is as lost on Ray and other students at Ascension as they are to students attending the lousy public schools of Minneapolis.

 

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At 6:00 on Thursday evenings I meet with Victoria (Vicky) Ballard, an absolute kick of a grade 9 student and a person who spends way too much time on social media, with little informational remediation at Armstrong High School in the suburb of Plymouth.

 

Vicky’’s most driving immediate need has been in her geometry class, for which she had poor preparation after a terrible experience in Algebra I.  Under my tutelage Vicky has received a bevy of information on pre-algebra math fundamentals (early use of calculators had left her bereft of multiplication tables, division was a foreign species, and the meaning and constituent elements of decimals with correlates in fractions and percentages were much stranger to her than the mermaids and subterranean communities she encounters on social media);  and then we have gone forth to master the theorems and properties of plane geometry, the Pythagorean Theorem, the unique qualities of the 30-60-90 triangle, and all manner of applications regarding perimeter, circumference, area, and volume.

 

Vicky has also gained from me the historical context and governmental background information into which to situate her many opinions as to race and gender and class.  She has been confronted with the need to better consider her social media sources and to seek out quality websites such as CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomington News, Wall Street Journal, and the Economist.  I have introduced her to the physical newspaper via the Star Tribune.

 

Vicky is that type of student for whom I have long had a particular liking.  She expects the worst from teachers and brings forth many bad habits learned from atrocious school settings.

 

Then she meets me.

 

She is for the first time in her life having to engage with a teacher whose knowledge base runs the gamut across mathematics and the liberal arts.  She comes to understand the impoverishment of her vocabulary and the dearth of her knowledge and how far she has to go to reach her goals for university education and law school.

 

 One evening I said to Vicky:

 

 “Kiddo, I really like you.  I understand where you’re coming from.  I have always liked those students who challenge teachers and call them at their debased game.  Tell me this, how many times have you had a teacher say to you, either in precisely these or effectively these words:

 

 ‘Vicky, sit down and shut up’---

 

and then you look at them as if to say, ‘Okay, what you gotta say, what you gotta teach me?’”

 

Vicky’s eyes shown bright and her smile suggested the breadth of Lake Superior.

 

And her face told me, “Oh, my goodness.  This is something different.  This guy knows the score.  I got a lot to learn from him.”

 

And in her ritzy Plymouth school, to which she buses from North Minneapolis, none of her teachers had ever offered any of what I was offering to her.

The Poignancy of Serving the Needs of a Student Who Enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative While Doing Time in a Texas Penitentiary

On a 97-degree day in August 1982, a hot and lonely and drugged Cicero Falkland ignored his bedridden grandmother’s exhortations to stay home.

 

He needed money. 

 

His little brother was hungry.

 

His father has been in prison for 16 years, his mother for seven.

 

His job pushing a broom for Safeway got Cicero nowhere near the money that he needed to feed and clothe the family. 

 

So Cicero Falkland departed the dilapidated family residence at 4:45 PM, giving himself plenty of time to survey an ample dinner crowd at a chicken shack a few blocks across I-75/Central Expressway in Dallas, Texas.  One dude, approximately 46 years old, looked vulnerable.  He was above average height, skinny, hands full of sacks of chicken and accompaniments.  Cicero was heavier, hands less burdened, carrying no sacks but wielding the great equalizer.

 

“Drop those sacks and give me your wallet,” directed Cicero.

 

The man dropped the sacks but panicked and stretched his hand out, found the barrel of Charles’s pistol, and then felt the explosion In his chest.  Whether some tugging action on the part of the victim or Charles’s independently moving fingers had caused the triggers to be pulled remains in dispute.

 

But having failed to abide by the provisions of probation for a burglary charge, and with a host of juvenile offenses on his record, Cicero was sent up in December 1982 for third degree murder, probation for the burglary charge was revoked, and he was incarcerated at a maximum security facility in West Texas, given by the standards of draconian Texas penal standards the relatively light sentence of Life with possibility of parole.

 

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Cicero was among the first African American students to attend Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in North Dallas, bused in from his all-Black neighborhood near downtown Dallas.  He dropped out after his grade 7 year. 

 

In prison, Cicero found GED courses ill-taught and intimidating.  He mostly eschewed the minimal formal education classes that were offered but became an avid reader---  novels, political tracts, works of sociology.  He had a few rough incidents within his first six years  of incarceration .

Since then he has been a behaviorally model prisoner.  Nevertheless, he has been denied parole eight times, including recently, in May 2021.  Parole board members, of eight possible reasons typically cited, give “nature of offense” as the official reason for denial.  But victim’s rights weigh heavily in Texas, and for each of Cicero’s parole hearings, two and sometimes three members of the victim’s family have argued emotionally and emphatically against Cicero’s release.  Such objections are given heavy consideration and are very frequently decisive.

 

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I first met Cicero in 1998 when I was doing research on a school run by a friend of mine from the Southern Methodist University (SMU) days in Dallas.  She had been a tutor of Cicero during our years at SMU, lost touch as she was starting her school, then reengaged when she found out that he had been sentenced to prison.  Cicero has had little family support and now has none;  my friend has been Cicero’s main human contact on the outside all of these years.  I also have kept in contact during the new century and have recently adopted an attorney’s role in the case, endeavoring to find the best possible strategy for overcoming the objections of the victim’s family and for presenting the most vigorous case for Cicero’s successful prospects upon release.

 

Cicero is well-read in certain fields but his vocabulary is still a work in progress.  His writing is error-laden and grammatically challenged.  His mathematic skills do not go beyond addition and subtraction, and even those are still to be developed fully.  I have now for Cicero’s use worked up a special adaptation of the mathematics chapter in my book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, which covers fifteen academic subjects to give citizens the education that they never attained in public school institutions.

 

I also have sent Cicero my English usage chapter and have assigned him essays of utmost topical interest to him, including making his best case for release from prison.

 

 I find myself in the familiar position of providing the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education that Cicero never got---  as most of my students are not getting---  in the public schools.

 

For Cicero, who will either gain some time to live freely or continue to endure an adulthood and then death entirely within prison walls, the acquisition of knowledge and skill to work and function successfully is a life or death matter.

 

But then that is true for everyone, especially those most academically abused by the wretched Minneapolis Public Schools and other systems for which MPS is a salient example.