The Travesty That Is the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education >>>>> Members Whose Multiyear Ineffectiveness Makes Paramount Their Immediate Resignation
Jenny Arneson’s
Astoundingly Stupid Statements and Multi-Year Ineffectiveness Obligates Her to
Resign from the Board of Education
District 1 (Northeast and Southeast
Minneapolis Jenny Arneson is an enigma:
Arneson is the hardest working of the
members on the current Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education.
Arneson is a masterful accumulator of
factual detail on many aspects of the inner working of the district, notably
information pertinent to her Northeast Minneapolis stomping grounds and items
relevant to current district
finances. She also was an adept chair during
her term of service in that position, a knowledgeable manager of meetings per
Robert’s Rules of Order, a skill that stood her in good stead during fall 2020,
when she was chair of the finance committee.
But Arneson has no philosophy of
education, she is beholden to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, and she
is capable of astoundingly stupid statements:
>>>>> At an MPS Board of Education meeting in late spring 2019, Jenny
Arneson noted, as part of her final report at a meeting of the MPS Board of
Education (of the sort with which board members conclude each of their
meetings) that her son had been accepted by his first choice for college
attendance, Grinnell College in Iowa.
She then opined that “This proves that every student at MPS is College
and Career Ready.”
That statement was astonishingly
stupid, given that fewer than thirty percent (30%) of students on Free and
Reduced Price Lunch and those of several ethnicities who tend to fall in the
Free/Reduced category are not proficient in mathematics, reading, or
science; and that one-third (33%) of MPS
students who matriculate on college and university campuses need remedial
courses.
>>>>> At the Committee of the Whole meeting of Tuesday, 22 October,
Arneson conveyed the essence of a conversation that she had had with a student
who liked the idea of ethnic studies courses offered as alternatives to a
United States history course, because the high school course is just a repetition
of what students learned in a course focused on the same subject in grade
seven. Arneson accepted the student’s
view uncritically, thereby revealing appalling ignorance for a graduate of St.
Olaf College, albeit in the academically undemanding field of social work.
The pertinent truth is two-fold >>>>>
1)
The grade 7 course is typically taught via videos and through packets
that students fill out in the absence of teacher-imparted information or
comment and without class discussion.
And unless students take Advanced Placement (AP) United States History
in high school, the mode of teacher disinterested, unengaging instruction
evident at grade 7 abides also in the high school course--- and lamentably even in some AP courses,
taught as they often are by knowledge-deficient teachers.
2)
Limiting the number of United States history or any other courses in
core subject areas should be determined only as a practical matter, since the
number of such courses would be multiple if the amount of information to be
conveyed were the determinant. The
problem is not repetition but rather that students learn nothing of great
substance in either course because of the approach to curriculum and pedagogy; and on the basis of amount of information
important for conveyance, even multiple courses could not impart all that there
is to learn concerning American and United States history--- so that the decision as to how many courses
to offer is a matter of temporal practicality:
Repetition except as a matter of review as foundation for new learning
is a matter of teacher inadequacy, not intrinsic to the abundant knowledge sets
for mastery of American and United States history.
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