Article #27 >>>>> Conclusion to a Series >>>>> Origin and Consequences of the Wretched System of Public Education Throughout the United States

The Current Teachers Strike is Playing Out as Theater of the Absurd---   With Catastrophic Consequences for Students Who Will Continue to Sustain Academic Abuse

A theater of the absurd is playing out at present in the form of the strike waged by members of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and Education Support Professionals (ESP) at the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Demands for psychological support and counseling staff, smaller class sizes, and increased remuneration for teachers and teacher’s aides have nothing to do with the key vexations of the Minneapolis Public Schools, which are knowledge-deficient curriculum as actually implemented in the classroom and poor teaching quality at the median.

This is a district that between autumn 2020 and autumn 2021 lost 2,909 students (declining from 31,598 to 28,689), a district that for many years has featured academic proficiency rates for African American, American Indian, and Hispanic students below 25 percent, a district in which those rates for all students have been essentially flat, falling between 40 and 45 percent for both reading and mathematics during academic years ending in 2014 through 2021.

Students at the preK-5 level master no rigorous, systematically imparted knowledge sets pertinent to natural science, history, government, geography, quality literature, or the fine arts. Middle school features more courses in those areas but those courses are knowledge-deficient.  At the high school level, only Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses have the potential for academic substance but are often taught by teachers who do not possess the requisite knowledge base.

Not a single administrator and very few teachers are positioned to articulate or implement changes that would improve the knowledge-deficient, skill-deplete educational program at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Although they are on opposite sides of contractual issues pertinent to the current strike, key academic decision-makers at the Davis Center (central administration) and principals and teachers at school sites have all been trained in abominable departments, schools, and colleges of education. 

Academic decision-makers and teachers have all matriculated in classrooms presided over by education professors who oppose established knowledge and skill sets in favor of ad hoc curriculum formulated according to teacher and student whim at any given moment.  Both administrators and teachers have moved through the step and lane system toward higher remuneration by acquiring graduate degrees in such education programs, rather than in key subject areas:  There are very few scholarly academicians operating either in the Davis Center or at school sites.

The key changes needed to implement an academically substantive program in the Minneapolis Public Schools rarely gain a place in the public discourse.  Those changes pertain to the design of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum and to the training of teachers capable of imparting such curriculum.  State standards are widely disregarded, so that what actually matters is that objective subject area information pertinent to the key academic disciplines, informed by college and university scholarship, is actually imparted to the students of the district;  and that teachers are retrained for capability to impart logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets throughout the preK-12 years.

Median teacher pay at the Minneapolis Public Schools is $71,500;  Educational Support Staff (ESP) typically receive between $15.45 and $26.00.  Median per capita annual income in Minnesota is $37,625, median annual household income is $71,306, and the median hourly wage is $30.07.  Properly retrained ESP staff should be considered candidates for an hourly wage in accord with that latter figure, but in the absence of such retraining the current wage range is reasonable.  As for teachers, given the abysmal academic performance of the district, the current salary far above median per capita and very close to median household income is actually more than the typical teacher deserves.

If MFT leaders and rank and file members were to agree to retraining, so that teachers become bearers and conveyors of knowledge, then teachers thus professionalized would be well-placed to argue for much higher remuneration;  imbued, however, with the ideology of education professors and reflexively resistant to systemic change, teachers would only give assent to such an agreement at that point at which sustained activist agitation compels the district to move forward with the needed overhaul of curriculum and teaching quality.

Meanwhile, the strike will play out as theater of the absurd, yielding no improvement in a quality of education that sends even those who manage to graduate across a stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only---  and, in far too many cases, to mean streets leading to early death or to lives spent under conditions of incarceration.