Article #2 in a Series >>>>> Selecting a New Superintendent for the Minneapolis Public Schools: Unprecedented Opportunity for the Transformation of Public Education

Article #2

Facing the Dilemma of Ineptitude in the Public Education Establishment  >>>>>

The Intellectual Damage Inflicted by Education Professors and the Incompetence of the Teachers and Administrators Whom They Train

 

All problems of the locally centralized school district in the United States are traceable to wretched teacher and administrator training programs. 

 

We have known for at least 35 years that we must transform our systems of K-12 educational delivery in order to give citizens of all demographic descriptors an excellent education.  In 1983 a federally commissioned study, A Nation at Risk, signaled the crisis in schools of the United States, with implications for many facets of life in the polity, given the critical importance of education to the quality of life in a nation of advanced economic status and world leadership.

 

By definition, we have not cared enough to make the needed changes.  People do those things about which they care deeply or to which they are addicted.  In the United States, people get married, and secure the most remunerative employment possible.  They have children and angle for the best possible lives for their own particular progeny.  People buy houses, automobiles, electronic goods, and consumer items of many sorts at the upper ranges of what they can afford.  They tweet and text and stare at computer screens.  They ensconce themselves in front of television sets to dance with the stars, identify their favorite new singing voice, and immerse themselves in the reality of other people’s vapid lives.

 

All of this is more important to people as of the year 2022 than the education of our precious children. 

 

Rarely does any child in the United States get an excellent education.  As a nation we do not believe enough in the importance of knowledge-based lives to even imagine an excellent education for our children.  We go to war because in our episodic propensities going to war at the time seems the right thing to do, or we are told by people of our political affinity that it is the right thing to do, not because citizens as a whole have the knowledge base in history and international relations to make considered judgments of their own.  Whether or not, and for how long, the Federal Reserve should pour money into the economy is a policy decision evaluated by people on the same episodic and self-focused basis, not because the typical citizen has a whit of knowledge concerning macroeconomics.  The reality of climate change is evaluated by the typical person not on the basis of any depth of scientific knowledge but on what scientists themselves say, at best, and in view of religious and personal biases, at worst.

 

The unit of delivery of excellent K-12 education in the United States must be our locally centralized school districts.  In public education systems of East Asia and the European social democracies, curriculum and policies are centralized at the national level, but in the United States

people claim an attachment to local control.  So in this nation, any progress that will be made in

transforming K-12 education must be made at the level of the locally centralized school district.  We cannot and should not pin our hopes on charter schools or vouchers.  Most charter schools are worse than conventional public schools.  There are not enough excellent private schools to accommodate the masses of K-12 students, even if a thoroughgoing voucher system could be instituted.  And in any case, should we ever aspire to the quality of education found in East Asia and the European social democracies, we need to find a way to approximate the coherence of curriculum found in those educational systems. 

 

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Mediocrity of K-12 education in the United States originates in departments, colleges, and schools of education wherein professors do not believe that systematically acquired and mentally stored knowledge of the liberal arts is important.  They believe, instead, in so-called “constructivist” approaches that begin with the knowledge base and life experiences of the student as a foundation for seeking information that is relevant to the particular young person. 

This so-called “progressive” approach to education is implemented upon the assumption that the systematic, sequential accumulation of knowledge in math, natural science, social science, history, literature, and the fine arts is not important.  Only those topics that passionately drive a given student, for which a teacher serves as “facilitator” or guide in accumulating this particularistic information, are important.  As to accumulated knowledge from the human inheritance, one can always “look it up.”

But this view of education and the teacher is deeply flawed.  Imagine going to a cardiologist with complaints about chest pains and being told that the doctor would have to take a moment to look up what is known about arterial blockage, because this was not covered in medical school.  Consider describing to an attorney an experience whereby police officers broke into one’s home without a search warrant and being told by this lawyer that this sounds like an interesting predicament that would have to be researched, because such instances were not part of the law school curriculum.

Taught by such professors promulgating the “constructivist,“ “progressive” approach to knowledge and pedagogy, our K-5 teachers, especially, enter our classrooms woefully underprepared.  Those who teach at the grades 6-12 level are a bit better trained, because most receive bachelor’s degrees in legitimate disciplines (e. g., physics, math, history, economics, English literature, fine arts).  But low licensure requirements mean that those who enter our middle schools and high schools are not always truly masters of their fields.  Graduate programs for teachers, in the meantime, provide programs for easily attained master’s degrees that are financial spigots for universities.

Teachers unions act in ways to protect such unprepared teachers.  Most central school district and school building administrators are too busy protecting their sinecures of substantial remuneration to contest teacher union power, and thus the status quo prevails.  Our children walk across stages to receive diplomas in name only.  Most could not tell you the difference between debt and deficit;  the Roman and Byzantine Empires;  Newtonian and Einstein’s physics;  Ego and Superego;  or the literary styles of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.  And they could not tell you the essential differences, as we give nominal focus on Black History each February, in the approaches to the African American dilemma in the early 20^th century as espoused by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey.

Constructivist ideology and systemic flaws operate in highly similar ways from state to state, so that teacher preparation programs and institutions of K-12 education maintain the status quo of mediocrity in Minnesota and throughout the nation.   But we cannot afford to wait for the needed overhaul of teacher preparation programs on college campuses, nor can we depend on action taken mainly at the state level to produce the needed institutional change.

The needed overhaul of K-12 education will ride the waves of energy emitted by local school district activists who take seriously the great accumulated wealth of knowledge that defines the human experience, working to retrain teachers and revamp curriculum to ensure that children of all ethnic and economic descriptors receive this knowledge as their rightful inheritance.

 

Teachers unions and administrators with their own group affiliations may struggle together over contracts, evaluations, and job assignments, but teachers and administrators at all levels espouse the views that they imbibed from those campus embarrassments known as education professors.

 

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Education professors came to profess a belief in a “constructivist," "child-centered” approach to education that minimized the value of imparting logically sequenced, commonly shared knowledge sets, in favor of giving great scope to the child’s own life experiences and interests, with the presiding classroom presence transformed from teacher into “guide” or “facilitator.”  Student mastery of well-defined knowledge sets, education professors maintained, was not important.  In addition to preparing for one’s vocational and civic responsibilities, the student should learn to think critically about topics of immediate personal and societal importance and to access information as a lifelong learner.

Emphasis on the individual interest of the student as the driver of what was to be learned fit well with the zeitgeist of the 1960s.  Over the decades since the 1920s, parents, teachers, and local communities had often objected to the views of education professors, but during the years from the 1960s to the present year of 2022, the ideology of the education professor has been dominant in our schools.  When a student gets to high school, she or he may scramble quickly to make up for lack of knowledge by taking substantive Advanced Placement (AP) courses;   but even the most ambitious college-bound student graduates with large gaps in the knowledge and skills necessary to make the most of the college or university experience.

 

Although this key anti-knowledge message took different forms as pedagogical fads came and went, the essential core of the message has never changed.  That message is entirely consistent with the contemporary education professor’s insistence on the ability to think critically and to become an enthusiast of lifelong learning as the key components for students in K-12 schools.  The education professor maintains that the acquisition of specific knowledge and skill sets is not important, for those can always be looked up or learned as necessary.

So never think that such pap is new or “progressive,” although education professors appropriate the latter appellation.  Such harmful jargon has been the consistent usage of education professors for a century.

Professors of cognitive psychology demonstrate through research published in professionally refereed journals that knowledge builds on knowledge, freeing up limited short-term memory for quick retrieval in the pursuit of knowledge sought in the moment.  Adept and informed critical thinking depends on knowledge.  Love of learning most often happens when students pursue knowledge systematically as a matter of acquired habit, a labor of love.  Critical thinking and lifelong learning are functions of knowledge purposely pursued;  they are not efficiently or effectively demonstrated in the absence of systematically acquired knowledge.

Teachers unions and administrators with their own group affiliations may struggle together over contracts, evaluations, and job assignments, but teachers and administrators at all levels espouse the views that they imbibed from those campus embarrassments known as education professors.

 

Education professors have done much harm in seeking to make a place for themselves at colleges and universities, where they occupy the lowest rung with regard to professorial status.  They send forth ill-trained teachers, particularly at the K-5 level, who know very little about mathematics, natural science, history, economics, psychology, literature, English usage, or the fine arts.  Middle school teachers are little better, and most high school teachers are not capable of serving as instructors in advanced courses such as those for Advanced Placement.

 

Thus do we get abominable performance by students in the United States on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment);  and by students in Minnesota on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments.

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Education professors are objectionable generally.  Mathematics education professors are objectionable particularly.  A mathematics education professor is someone without the intellectual mettle to pursue a degree in mathematics, thus retreating to a similar-sounding credential.  Many mathematics education professors lack the intellectual discipline to master the intricacies even of algebra and geometry, much less calculus, differential equations, linear and advanced algebra, topography, and the ever-ascending challenges in a legitimate mathematics masters or doctoral program.  

 

Because mathematics professors are themselves mathematically challenged, they are forever contriving ways to make what is simple seem difficult, so as to avoid what is truly difficult.  Notice that their gimmicks are never applied to mathematics at the higher levels;  their ruses would never be applicable to Advanced Placement courses at the high school level.  The schemes of mathematics professors always come with a pretension of philosophical depth, always focused on relatively simple mathematics at the K-5 level. But simple does not mean trivial.  The operations and concepts pertinent to addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, fundamental probability, ratios, proportions, graphs and tables are vitally important.

 

Students in the New Salem Educational Initiative inevitably come to me for academic assistance because they have not been taught these skills in their classroom.  This is especially true for K-5 students, but the point is also that until I teach them these skills most high school students have never acquired the requisite ability in the fundamental operations and basic skills to succeed at higher mathematics.   I teach them skills, then we ascend to college preparatory mathematics.

 

Students of the Minneapolis Public Schools and other school districts perform so wretchedly in mathematics because mathematics education professors have been playing with their lives, in order to survive pseudo-professionally.

 

They must stop.

 

The pseudo–profession of education professor should be no more.

 

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As we agitate for the elimination of departments, schools, and colleges of education, though, we must move ahead with teacher training at the level of the locally centralized school district.  We cannot allow our students to be subjected to the abuse heaped on them by education professors and their harmful anti-knowledge creed.

 

In the search for the new superintendent, we must find an administrator who, while fulfilling the necessary licensure requirements, is willing to move beyond her or his own insubstantial academic training to seek a new senior academic officer who will in turn bring forward field specific scholars to design academically substantive curriculum delivered in grade by grade sequence throughout the K-12 years.

 

In facing the dilemma posted by the nature of training in departments, schools, and colleges of education, we must realize that all of those in the Academic Division, notably the 28 members of the Department of Teaching and Learning have been ruined by the nature of such training;  that not a single member of the Office of Black Student Achievement holds an advanced degree in a key subject area;  and that this is true, too, for staff in the Department of Indian Education.  As curriculum design overseen by subject area scholars proceeds, the Department of Teaching and Learning and the Office of Black Student Achievement should be disbanded, and the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education should be overhauled, current members dismissed, and the focus of the department directed toward raising academic proficiency rates for Native American students.

 

Once we have faced the dilemma posed by the anti-knowledge creed of education professors and dismissed those tainted by that ideology, we can proceed to focus on the key tasks in the overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools:   curriculum redesign by academic field specialists and the training of teachers capable of imparting knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum.