Introduction
I have been observing the performance of teachers and systems pertinent to K-12 public education ever since I began to coordinate tutors for Southern Methodist University Volunteer Services during my sophomore year in 1971, upon my decision to be a teacher of students living at the urban core; I began my formal public school teaching career in autumn 1973 at L. G. Pinkston High School, located near the subsidized housing projects in West Dallas.
I have taught in almost every situation imaginable, including four years at the university level while pursuing a master’s degree in Chinese history at the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in Taiwanese and Chinese history at the University of Minnesota. The great majority of my teaching experiences, though, have focused on students living in challenging urban environments; for 30 years I have served as the director of the New Salem Educational Initiative, a program of complete academic support and college preparation in North Minneapolis.
Beginning in summer 2014, while continuing to provide instruction to 45 students each week in the New Salem Educational Initiative, I also began an eight-year phase of activism and research that has produced a book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect, a 562-page tome that I began to circulate in autumn 2021. The book is divided into three parts, comprised of respectively over 350 pages of strictly factual information pertinent to the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS); approximately 100 pages of analysis of the deficiencies in curriculum and teaching at the district; and another approximately 100 pages focused on the history and philosophy of American public education. The history and philosophy of public education establishes the context for the dilemmas of preK-12 education witnessed in locally centralized school districts, of which the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools is typical.
During my eight-year period of intense activism and research relevant to the Minneapolis Public Schools, my stance regarding the MPS Board of Education and Davis Center (central office) staff became increasingly oppositional. I relentlessly revealed the ugly truths about approaches to curriculum and pedagogy at the district and singled out particular board members and Davis staff for grievous actions deleterious to the academic advancement of MPS students. By the time I produced the book on the Minneapolis Public Schools, I saw little chance that an objective account could be anything but scathing, a tutorial in the curricular and pedagogical approaches that must change, along with an indication of the needed transformation.
But upon the appointment of Rochelle Cox as interim superintendent in July 2022, an increasingly altered staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools began to make precisely the type of changes for which I had advocated for those eight years of intense research into the inner workings of the district.
Astonishingly, a quiet revolution appears to be in progress at the Minneapolis Public Schools. In just the first two and a half months of her tenure, Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox has created a substantially new cabinet that includes an entirely new contingent of associate superintendents who have been given a directive carefully to monitor academic programming and results at the specific schools for which each is responsible. There is a new math curriculum (Bridges/Number Corner) that for the first time in recent memory will be implemented across all grade levels at all schools. And for reading/language arts, a similar uniformity of implementation will be guided by the primary curriculum (Benchmark Advance), with students facing particular struggles at schools that have confronted such challenges for years receiving highly intentional skill development on the basis of programs known as Groves, PRESS (“Pathways to Reading Excellence”), and LETRS (“Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling”).
Just as significant, Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing, Deputy Senior Academic Officer Maria Rollinger, and Director of Strategic Initiatives Sarah Hunter are leading an effort to bring subject area substance to grades pre-K through 5, so that student verbal skills will be developed, as they should be, in the context of logically sequenced readings in history, government, geography, multi-cultural literature, and the fine arts; accordingly, students will develop vocabulary across a multiplicity of subjects that lie at the core of advanced reading development.
If Cox, her administrative staff, and teachers succeed with these highly promising initiatives, students at the Minneapolis Public Schools will be given the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete, logically sequenced subject area information necessary for lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction. And the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools will become a model for urban school districts across the nation.
I am a Saul Alinsky activist who persists during times of setbacks and victories. My personal mission is justified not in the victories but the correctness of the struggle; if I go six feet under having told the truth and done all I can do, then I will die happily and trust that others will complete the K-12 Revolution, as all great social and institutional revolutions have been completed as an effort of many people over decades, centuries, millennia.
What Rochelle Cox and staff seem on a course to accomplish, then, is for me a magnificent surprise, giving me a chance to witness far more of the revolutionary victory than I expect to see in my lifetime.
The poetic reflections in the sections in this edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, follows my personal trajectory of activism at the Minneapolis Public Schools, from relentless objective opposition to colleague offering my expertise and advice to Interim Superintendent Cox and staff as they endeavor to bring a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education of excellence to the long-waiting students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
In these poetic reflections, the reader will discern a shift from a stage at which the destructive phase of the Revolution gives way to the construction of a new order.
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