Article #11 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Demise of the Promising Standards Movement, 1983-2008

In 1983 the United States Commission on Excellence in Education, having been charged by U. S. Secretary of Education T. H. Bell to assess the state of public education, revealed that state to be so abysmal as to entitle the document summarizing the Commission's findings, A Nation at Risk.

The Commision found teaching quality highly variable from school district to school district and frequently poor;  curriculum typically ill-articulated from grade to grade;  assigning of grades wildly inconsistent and often unreflective of achievement levels;  issuance of diplomas to a substantial proportion of students who lacked basic skills and in many cases were fuctionally illiterate;  and a cluster of conditions in urban districts that rendered public education of students, especially nonwhite, particularly.ineffective and discriminatory.

The report engendered a number of highly disparate, contradictory responses >>>>>

>>>>>   Those who misleadingly appropriated the appellation, "progressive," doubled down on the approach responsible for putting the nation at risk, arguing for more schools  in which curriculum was flexible, assessments by portfolio and demonstration, and classrooms presided over by teachers in the role of project guides, rather than bearers of knowledge.

>>>>>  Some, identifying as conservative and generally distrustful of government, argued for the design and implemenration of voucher systems that would allow students across economic class to attend private schools of their selection.

>>>>>  Others advocated for charter schools, publicly funded schools started and managed by citizens (community members, parents, students, teachers) so as to meet certain requirements but to gain exemption from many regulations.

>>>>>  And then there were those who wanted to address the problems identified in >A Nation at Risk< directly, by establishing grade by grade standards, objective assessments for determining student skill levels with data disaggregated by income and ethnicity, and consequences for schools in which students of various demographic descriptors failed to meet grade level standards.

Voucher advocates never got very far with their proposals.  Here and there putative progressives established new schools, in which students mostly did not demonstrate grade level skills across income and ethnicity.  Charter schools were launched.in Minnesota in 1991, over time evidencing even lower student achievement levels than those witnessed in conventional public schools.  

The standards movement gained great momentum throughout the 1990s and in the United States Congress gained legislative manifestation in the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), a bipartisan initiative led by Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Representative John Boehner.

This promising legislation mandated that states establish objectively measurable grade level standards, with appropriate assessments, and specifying consequences for schools in which students identified according to disaggregated data did not meet standards.  

State systems went into effect beginning in 2002 and for a half-decade offered great promise until rendered moribund by forces of both the political left and the political right by the year 2008.

Interlude >>>>> The Cluelessness Revealed in the Decision by Minneapolis Public Schools Officials to Seek Guidance from the University of Minnesora College of Education and Human Development

The recent decision by officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) to seek advice from staff at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) for addressing inequities in student achievement saliently demonstrates the incompetence of MPS academic decision-makers.

Education professors at the CEHD are the biggest culprits in producing wretched systems of public education such as that found in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

These are the people who have given us knowledge-bereft, slimly specified curriculum in preK-5 schools;  the notion of middle schools as centers of socialization rather than academic advancement;  high school teachers possessing lightweight Masters of Education (M.Ed.) degrees rather than M.A. or M.S  degrees in major academic disciplines;  invented spelling and whole language reading (over explicit instruction in phonics);  pseudo-philosophical notions such as metacognition and constructivism (rather than mastery of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, and probability); inefficient group projects rather than individual acquisition of logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets;  and portfolios rather than objective assessments.

These approaches are traceable to those advanced by Harold Rugg, Wiiliam Heard Kilpatrick, and others at Teachers  College/Columbia University from the 1920s, pedagogic features of which finally gained prominence in school districts across the United States during the 1970s.

At the Minneapolis Public Schools we witness the deleterious effects:  35% student proficiency rates in math, 46% in reading,with rates under 25% for many demographic groups;  and, among those who actually manage to graduate, students who walk across the stage woefully deficient in knowledge pertinent to mathemstics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, geography, economics, psychology, classic and ethnic-specific literature, English usage, music, visual art, and the vocations.

And across the landscape of the United States we witness an ignorant citizenry, at least a quarter of which is mired in superstition, vulnerable to all manner of fact-bereft explanations in lieu of data-replete information from carefully constructed scientific research.

The tenure of Ed Graff is viewed negatively by four of nine members of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  This recent linkage to failed approaches  emanating from the CEHD should be grounds for other board members to oust Graff and other academic decision-makers at MPS, acting then to bring forth scholars from key academic fields to design knowledge-intensive curriculum and the training of teachers capable of imparting such curriculum.  

There are lives in the balance at.the urban core and a nation at stake in the next decades of the 21st century.

Article #10 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Manifold Harm Inflicted By Knowledge-Deficient Publlic Education Observable During the 1990s

By the 1990s, multiple occurrences synchronous with education professor ideology could be witnessed across the landscape of the United States.  

In classrooms across the nation, ill-trained teachers of limited knowledge bases were imparting very little information pertinent to mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, geography, economics, literature, music, and tbe visual arts.  Curriculum tended to be determined by teacher and student whim.  Group activities typically constituted the pedagogical emphasis, with individual achievement given increasingly less attention.

The middle school movement had largely succeeded in achieving objectives of reconfiguring grade alignment from grades 7, 8, and 9 to 6, 7, and 8;  and moving from the junior high concept emphasizing academic training for high school to the middle school concept deempasizing academics (on the basis of the pseudoscientific notion that preteen and early teen brains had reached an intellectual plateau) in favor of social and psycho-emotional stage development.

There also arose by the 1990s the idea that praise was to be lavished on students, regardless of level of academic achievement and even in the absence of consistent good behavior.  Students were to be made to feel high self-esteem on the basis of praise, ratber than attainment of academic and behavioral objectives that would establish self-esteem on a firm and enduring foundation.

By the 1990s, terminal master's degrees of academic rigor for those in key disciplines who did not intend to study for a Ph.D. gave way to master's degrees of little subject area substance, bestowed by departments, schools, and colleges of of education.  Masters in mathematics gave way to the masters in teaching mathematics;  and the masters in teaching social studies, rather than masters in history, political science, geography, or economics;  and similar phenomena pertinent to other fields.  

Thus did knowledge-deficient high school teachers, charged with the four-year responsibility of giving students all tbe knowledge that they did not get in elementary and middle school, prove increasingly incapable of even approaching fulfillment of that responsibility.  Knowledge-challenged themselves, utilizing whimsical curriculum and employing the inefficient group project methods of their elementary and middle school counterparts, high school teachers and similarly trained administrators sent even those students who managed to graduate across tbe stage to claim a piece of paper that was a diploma in name only.

The 1990s constituted  a particularly bad time for the insidious notions of outrageously mislabeled "progressive" education to become so firmly embedded in public education   >>>>>

>>>>>  At the urban core, community maladies associated with the pervasive peddling and use of crack cocaine became painfully evident.  Gang and criminal activity reached unprecedented levels.  Welfare dependency had become endemic.  Cyclical poverty was a fixture of life.  The contrast in the two realities of African American middle class versus impoverished class life became starker than ever.

In response to the manifest consequences of knowledge-deficient public education, various reform movements developed.  

As we shall see, these movements were as much at odds with each other as with the reactionary pose of the now tragi-comedically.exposed education establishment.

And, despite vigorous advocacy for knowledge and skill based standards, the counter-push from others appropriating the reformist appellation and from the education establishment have bequeathed to us the still wretched quality of public education observable in 2021.

Interlude >>>>> Inducing the Exit of Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff--- Then Proceeding with the Necessary Overhaul of Curriculum and Teacher Quality

The Academic Hopelessness of the Ed Graff Tenure

Ed Graff was doomed to failure as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) from the beginning of his tenure on 1 July 2016.

Numerous duties pertain to the role of superintendent of a locally centralized school district;  among those duties, academic leadership, toward creation of knowledge-intensive curriculum and training of teachers capable of imparting such curriculum, is paramount.

Graff could never have been such a leader.  

His academic training is insubstantial.  

Graff's undergraduate degree (B. A, 

University of Alaska/Fairbanks) was in elementary education, entailing the most academically unsubstantial course of study on any university campus.  His graduate degree (M.Ed., University of Southern Mississippi) was in educationl administration---  an online professiional degree involving no substantial academic training.

Thus, despite Graff's commendable trust in superlative Senior Finance Officer Ibrahima Diop to put MPS

finances in order with structurally balanced budgets, and reliance on the strengths of Senior Operations Officer Karen Devet and Senior Information Technology Officer Justin Hennes in their respective areas, Graff has not overseen the development of the academic program that is at the core of the mission of any locally centralized school district.

The Unfortunate Decision to Install Aimee Fearing as Senior Academic Officer

No one with the proper qualifications has occupied the post at the top of the academic division during the tenure of Ed Graff.  His early decision to oust the incapable Susanne Griffin was correct, but Graff soon installed Eric Moore in the position.  

Oppositon to that move by inept staff in the wasteland known as the Department of Teaching and Learning could be construed as a compliment, but for entirely different reasons Moore was not the person for the role.  Moore's gifts, still utililized as Senior Accountability, Research, and Equity Officer, is in data collection and analysis, not in matters of curriculum design and teacher training.

Graff retreated for many months to a state of affairs in which he acted as senior academic leader, then he quixotically turned to former Wellstone International High School Principal Aimee Fearing, who for many months held the title of Interim Senior Academic Officer;  just a few weeks ago, Graff removed the interim designation.

Fearing has no training in any key academic subject (mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, geography, literature).  Her undergraduate training is in English as a Second Language (ESL);  both her master's and doctorate were conferred by education programs.

The Academically Insubstantial Program of Ed Graff

The four major components of Graff's acadenic program have been woefully inadequate from the beginning.  

The components are social and emotional learning (endeavoring to ensure that students are socially and emotionally prepared to receive academic instruction), multi-tiered system of support (MTSS, seeking to remove all nonacademic impediments to student learning and focusing instruction on each student's most critical needs), literacy, and equity.

But social and emotional learning, even if effectively implemented (which has not been the case) is only preparatory to academic learning.   

Multi-tiered system of support has been hazy as to detail and ineffective as to implementation.  

Literacy is an embarrassing low academic bar that has even more embarrassingly not been achieved (only 46% of MPS students at grade level in reading [with only 35% at grade level in mathematics]).  

Equity will only come by providing knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum to students of all demographic descriptors.

And while the MPS Comprehensive District Design (CDD) admirably rationalizes transportation routes, centrally locates magnet programs, and induces attendance at neighborhood schools, the academic section is full of education professor jargon and bereft of specifics as to curriculum and teacher training.

Ed Graff's failure is grievous and manifest.

He must go.

The Qualifications Needed in the Next Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools---

and the Imperative Overhaul of Curriculum and Teacher Quality

No one who possesses a superintendent's license is on the basis of that formal requirement likely to be the needed academic leader of the district  >>>>>

Her or his graduate training will have emphasized educational administration, not a key academic subject area.

Therefore, the next superintendent

must hire as senior academic officer a university-based or independent scholar to oversee 

>>>>>  the development of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum for logically sequenced implementation across grades preK though 12;

>>>>>  and the training of teachers capable of implementing such a curriculum.

The central office bureaucracy should be slimmed and refocused on the impartation of knowledge-intensive curriculum.  

The Department of Teaching and Learning should be disbanded, to be replaced by scholars selected for design of knowledge intensive curriculum in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts and for the training of teachers capable of delivering such a curruculum.  

Upon the basis of curriculum in history and literature that necessarily includes all cultures, the ineffective Office of Black Student Achievemen should be eliminated and the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education restaffed with academicians.

Included in bureacratic slimming should be the dismissal of associate superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno, with the return of Rochelle Cox to special education leadership.  

The position of administrator, office of the superintendent (currently designated for annual remuneration in excess of $190,000), should be jettisoned, entailing tbe dismissal or reassignment of Suzanne Kelly.

While diminution of central office bureauracy should proceed vigorously, a new Department of Resource Provision and Referral should be established, staffed with people comfortable on the streets and in the homes of students from families struggling with dilemmas of finances and functionality.  Current Director of the Office of Black Student Achievement Michael Walker is qualified to lead this new department.

............................................................

Ed Graff's tenure as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools must end.

A new program featuring knowledge-intensive curriculum and teacher-scholars must be implemented.

There are lives in the balance.

The time is now.

Article #9 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Terrible Toll of Knowledge-Deficient Education on Students at the Urban Core During the 1980s  

By the 1980s, the anti-knowledge ideology inflicted by education professors on curriculum and teacher training was taking a terrible toll on students in locally centralized school districts throughout the United States.

The toll taken could be observed in several sets of dichotomies categorizing the American public  >>>>>

>>>>>   Some of those who had been able, by nature of family influences, personal reading habits, and college or university matriculation, to gain a relatively strong base of factual knowledge developed a rational approach to life consonant with principles of the Enlightenment present in the thinking of the Founders at the nation's inception;  others, bereft of personal inclinations and influences external to their public education, developed an approach to life synchronous with that superstitious, irrational, fact-resistant strain that was also present from the early decades of United States history.

>>>>>   Some of those capable of rational thought and inclined toward scientific and logical analysis were able to observe and process the manifold advances in American life by women, African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, and Native Anericans so as to impel society toward more nonsexist, racially pluralistic modes of thought and action;  but others, variously cowered in resentment or openly hostile, expressed their opposition to the advancement of women and nonwhite groups either bluntly or in coded language.

>>>>>   And within the African American community there developed stark contrasts between those positioned to seize the opportunities provided by civil rights, fair housing, and equal employment legislation of the 1960s to attend universities, rise to positions as physicians and attorneys and business managers, and select from an array of residential options;  and those left behind, sullen and hopeless, at the urban core.

On these latter, the toll taken by wretched public education fell particularly hard.  

Denied knowledge and skills necessary to become culturally enriched, civically engaged, professionally satisfied citizens, those mired in cyclical familial poverty with no route of escape too often lived out their lives on mean streets leading to death or incarceration.  

Multiple deleterious phenomena gained witness at the urban core:  proliferation of crack cocaine;  the perceptible opportunity but ultimate disaster of easy money;  lives lived in a haze of addiction;  welfare dependency;  the decline in two-parent families;  tbe decrease in committed life relationships;  greatly increased gang activity;  rising rates of crime, inducing both Black-on-Black crime and ignorantly brutal police response.

Wretched, knowledge-bereft public education undergirded all of these unfortunate developments.

Widespead public ignorance produced both the three sets of dualities and the despair at the urban core. 

A major, data-abundant study published in 1983 found public education so indequate as to deem the nation's economic and societal future to be at risk.

The risk persisted and became more disastrously manifest in the years and decades thereafter.

Wretched public education renders the nation more at risk than ever in the year 2021.

Article #8 >>>>> The Origins and of Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Lamentable Triumph of Anti-Knowledge Ideology, Circa 1980

Tapping into the zeitgeist of the 1960's, education professors were during the 1970s increasingly successful in gaining adoption of the anti-knowledge creed that they had been advocating ever since the days of Harold Rugg and William Heard Kilpatrick at Teachers College/Columbia University during the 1920s.

Particularly in elementary schools, curriculum became extraordinarily week, knowledge-bereft as to government, history, geography, natural science, and quality literature.  In mathematics, student training in calculation skills for addition, subtraction, and multiplication languished, while long division was on the way to becoming a lost art.  Elementary teachers, many themselves math-phobic, began to introduce calculators as early as Grade 4.  

Math education professors, those intellectual lightweights possessing nowhere close to the mathematic ability and advanced training of professors in university departments of mathematics, were increasingly successful in pushing their insidious ideas, namely that

>>>>>  calculation skills do not matter;

>>>>>  students need to spend large amounts of time in "metacognition" examining their thinking process as they perform mathematicsl tasks;

>>>>>  students should be guided to construct the mathematic context in which their tasks are performed on the basis of their life experiences.

All of this nebulous verbiage, inflicted on students just in grades K-5, emanated from mathematically untalented education professors posing as grand philosophers.  Such insubstantive notions would leave generations unable to add, subtract. multiply, divide, or to work with fractions, decimals, and percentages.

Increasingly elementary teachers also succumbed to the pedagogy of "whole language learning," which deemphasizes explicit instruction in phonics and grammar while stressing natural acquisition of these skills via reading engaging material.  But reading material was typically unchallenging and academically insubstantive---  and little acquisition of English usage, properly advancing vocabulary, or spelling skills (further undermined by the fanciful notion of "invented spelling") occurred.

Concomitant with these developments was the increasing imposition of the ideas of the gadflies in the middle school movement, who advanced absurd notions of preteen brains at intellectual plateaus, in need of social skills more than academic substance---  and for grade realignment at 6-7-8 to replace the 7-8-9 configuration of more academically substantive junior highs. 

Thus did students increasingly arrive at high school needing to acquire 13 years worth of knowledge in just four years, but depending on curriculum and teacher quality incapable of imparting the requisite knowledge and skill sets.

No student fared well as the notions of education professors advanced.

But for those left behind at the urban core circa 1980, confronting midfle clzss flight, crack cocaine, and ascending gang activity, the specter of doom loomed.

Article #7 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Disastrous Implementation of Education Professor Ideology from the 1970s Forward

Thus did the very favorable developments during the 1960s, dramatically exposing the racism in United States history and contemporary society;  advancing the position of women;  activating African American, Latina/Latino, and Native American communities in assertion of full citizenship;  and providing enhanced public health care via Medicare and Medicaid---   nevertheless harbor ill for public education.

Truly progressive education at this juncture would have entailed further advancement of teaching as a profession, providing academic rigor in the undergraduate and graduate trainimg of elementary school teachers of broad and deep knowledge, requiring all middle and high school teachers to get master's degrees in legitimate subject area disciplines, and raising teacher emoluments for this professionalized teaching force to a truly professional level of remuneration.

But the distrust that young people harbored  for the adult white establishment found expression in ways that would ironically undercut such progressive development of the teaching profession for the implementation of knowledge-intensive curriculum.  

The knowledge sets that had for many decades been fixtures in the curriculum were essentially sound in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, government, economics, and geography.  

Curriculum in history and literature was also fundamentally well-conceived but incomplete, needing expansion to include the objective truth about the experiences and creative works of nonwhite cultures.

But the general distrust of the white male adult establishment induced an attitude that students must be given more voice, and in some formulations even the leading role, in determing curriculum.  Understandable in terms of historical and contemporary grievance, the notion of ill-educated young people deciding curriculum was and is objectively absurd.

The trends of the times, though, provided the perfect opportunity for the decades-long hopes of education professors to implement their falsely labeled "progressive" ideology, which held that curriculum should not be set but rather guided by student interest;  and that those presiding over classrooms should not be knowledge-imparting teachers but rather "guides" for students pursuing their own driving interests.

The anti-knowledge ideology of education professors has a certain facile appeal but in the guise of child-centeredness constitutes an abdication of adult responsibility to provide knowledge, wisdom, and ethical instruction to the genuinely loved child. 

The insidious ideology of education professors fell hardest on young people living at the urban core  >>>>>

>>>>>

Given fair employment and housing legislation, those from previously dispossessed groups who were positioned to stake their claim on the middle class dream very well might gain a highly remunerstive income and a residence in the suburbs.  

But left behind at the urban core were those mired in cyclical familial poverty.

For young people of the central cities from families facing grave challenges of finances and functionality, the only way to reverse decades of cyclical poverty and associated life circumstances was  the acquisition of knowledge and skill conducive to lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.

But given imposition of the education professors' anti-knowledge ideology in locally centralized school districts throughout the United States, 

few students would fare as well as they should;

for many the consequences would be grave;

and for young people living at the urban core, doomed to lives on mean streets or in prison, 

the decidedly unprogressive consequences of an errant and misnamed ideology would be disastrous.