Incompetence of the Education Establishment Seen Clearly in Erin Adler's >Star Tribune< Article (17 June 2022) Focused on a Commissioned Report on American Indian Education in Minnesota

Unwittingly, methinks, Erin Adler in her “Schools lack skills, tools on Native topics” (Star Tribune, June 17, 2022) presents to the careful reader all of those flaws that produce the massive incompetence of the public education establishment.

 

Adler’s focus is on a new report commissioned by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC), which found that two-thirds of teachers who completed surveys for the report do not feel confident teaching subject matter pertinent to Native Americans and cite lack of curricular resources as the top challenge.  Odia Wood-Krueger, author of the report, laments that nothing in the teaching of American Indian culture and history is working particularly well.

 

Surveys conducted for the report indicate that educators want to improve;  similarly, a previous SMSC survey found that 90 percent of Minnesotans support teaching additional Native American content in K-12 classes.  But, Krueger says, we unfairly ask teachers why they are not teaching Native content while not supporting them in ways that allow them to feel confident and knowledgeable in imparting relevant information to their students.  Thirty-seven percent of those teachers surveyed say that they have never received professional development relevant to teaching subject matter relevant to Native American studies.

 

Teachers thus have not been teaching much about Native American history or culture, despite the fact that a 2010 Minnesota law requires that Dakota and Ojibwe language and culture be taught across all subjects in the state’s public schools.  Ramona Kitto Stately, chair of the Minnesota Indian Education Association, interprets the survey as indicating that teachers are “really afraid of teaching the wrong thing.”

 

Recommendations in the report include creating professional development sessions and accessible curriculum, expanding opportunities for Native experts to visit classrooms, involving tribal members  in creating new materials, and developing  a repository for teaching resources and an online “Indian Education for All” program.  The survey and report are part of the SMSC’s Understand Native Minnesota philanthropic campaign that was launched in 2019 and now has $5 million to fund educational resources and training for teachers and administrators on Native American content.

 

I happened to encounter this article just after having reread Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) , Anton Treuer’s Atlas of the Indian Nations (2013), and Native American Almanac (2016)

(cowritten by Yvonne Wakim Dennis, Arlene Hirschfelder, and Shannon Rothenburger Flynn).   My most intense academic investigation prior to rereading those books was a multi-reference review of algebraic series and sequences, graphing of complex equations, and division of polynomials for more efficient instruction of my several Algebra II students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. 

 

In the latter program I meet with my students in weekly two-hour sessions each to provide instruction that they either do not get or is ineptly provided by the teachers of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  I teach all grades (preK-12 and a number of college and university students, including adults seeking to resume their education).  I do any research that I need to do across all subjects to provide my students with a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.  I have always considered the acquisition of a firm knowledge base as an imperative at the many levels and across the many fields I have taught over a 51-year career, including twenty-nine years as the director of the New Salem Educational Initiative.

 

I have maintained this ethic ever since I first stepped into a classroom where I taught world history, American history, and government at L. G. Pinkston High School near the public housing projects on the Westside of Dallas, Texas.  But I have discovered over my years of teaching, and in my many years now of researching the history and philosophy of American education, that this ethic is counter to that of the public education establishment in the United States, wherein I toiled for much of my career.

 

The counter-ethic of the public education establishment is revealed in the Adler article.  Clearly, teachers have worked with a knowledge-deficient curriculum as actually implemented in the classroom, whatever state laws may mandate.  We observe that teachers gained certification after matriculation in college and university training programs that left them deficient in subject area knowledge.   Despite the “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning” mantras of anti-knowledge education professors, we observe that the students whom these campus embarrassments produce are not adept at lifelong learning enough to gain through reading or research the information that they need, in this case on Native American history and culture, to confidently present the pertinent material to their students.  And we must conclude that upon such thin knowledge bases as the teachers surveyed possess, they cannot engage their students in the critical analysis that the Native American experience certainly requires.

 

And we surveys conducted that are not likely to result in action.  We witness the call for better professional development (“PD,” in the parlance of the education establishment), which is inevitably an inept exercise, similar to the experiences teachers collect in pursuing meaningless master’s degrees in education (rather than in subject area disciplines) that move them further along the “step and lane” sequence toward higher pay for no additional knowledge acquired.

 

And we have millions of dollars that could be saved if teachers were comfortable making trips to public libraries to do the reading and research necessary for absolutely no cost at all.

 

Through academic year 2018-2019, Odia Wood-Krueger was a District Program Facilitator (DPF) in the legislatively mandated Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Department of Indian Education, a chronically ineffective bureaucratic entity that for that year failed to promote curriculum and teacher training sufficient to avert wretched academic proficiency rates for Native American students in reading (25% proficient), mathematics (18%), and science (17%).

 

Perhaps, instead of authoring reports unlikely to produce any improvement of curriculum as actually delivered, she should return to the MPS Department of Indian Education to inspire and seek teachers who are readers and researchers capable of accessing information available for free to any lifelong learner.