Article #5
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.
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