Message just sent to >Star Tribune< staff reporter Eder Campuzano--- "Don't make the familiar mistake of letting the education establishment wag you like a dog wags its tail---"

March 21, 2022

Eder---

The education beat of recent vintage has featured particularly inept reporting.  Nothing that Erin Golden or Anthony Lonetree ever wrote dealt with the key vexations of locally centralized school districts throughout Minnesota.

From the ruses called the North Star Accountability System and the Regional Centers of Excellence (a particularly tragi-comic appellation) at the Minnesota Department of Education, to the endemic incompetence of administrators and teachers at the districts, the entire system is intellectually and morally corrupt.

The key vexations are academically vacuous curriculum as actually implemented in classrooms and poor teacher quality at the median.  You should never turn to someone like Cynthia Zwicky for insight;  as an education professor, she represents the worst culprits in a system traceable to Teachers College/Columbia University during the 1920s.  Teacher training programs send forth teachers imbued with the anti-knowledge ideology of education professors.

The Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) and other locally centralized school districts must make two prime and two ancillary moves to overhaul preK-12 education  >>>>>

 >>>>>   revamp curriculum as actually implemented for knowledge intensity;

 > >>>>  retrain teachers by inviting scholars to provide subject area knowledge sets to teachers, circumventing departments, schools, and colleges of ecucation;

>>>>>   then, having made those key moves, MPS and other districts must provide intensive tutoring to students languishing far below grade level;  and create a Department  of Resource Provision and Referral staffed with personnel comfortable on the streets and in the homes of students from families struggling with issues of finances and functionality.

You and Kim Hyatt must decide early on if you want to let the education establishment continue to play you, so that you dwell in the mediocrity still represented by Mara Klecker, or if you actually confront the key vexations that send young people at the urban core forth to mean streets leading to death or incarceration---

Please see my blog at http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com

Be well---

Gary

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph.D.

Author, 

>A Short History of Taiwan:  The Case for Independence< (Praeger, 2003)

>Tales from the Taiwanese< (Libraries Unlimited, 2004)

>Culture and Customs of Taiwan< ([with Barbara E. Reed] Greenwood,  1998)

>A Concise History of African America< (Seaburn, 2004)

>The State of African Americans in Minnesota 2004< (Minneapolis Urban League, 2004)

>The State of African Americans in Minnesota 2008< (Minneapolis Urban League, 2008)

Director, New Salem Educational Initiative

2507 Bryant Ave North

Minneapolis    MN     55411

http://newsalemeducation.blogspot.com