Introductory Comments >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota< >>>>> Volume IX, No. 12, June 2023

Introductory Comments             

Throughout the United States, public students receive a terrible quality of public education. 

 

Further, alternatives to the public schools are inconsistent in quality and as a whole lack coherence as to philosophy, curriculum, and teacher quality.  Most charter schools are even worse than conventional public schools.  Church-affiliated schools are tremendously variable in quality.

 

Private schools also vary as to curriculum and teacher quality;  the best do serve as college preparatory institutions and send forth students who matriculate at colleges and universities of high reputation.  But even in college preparatory schools and in the colleges and universities of the United States, the delivery of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum that imparts depth and breadth of knowledge across the subject areas of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, history, geography, government, economics, psychology, English/world literature, and the visual/musical fine arts is lacking.  Students at best graduate from colleges and universities with considerable knowledge of their majors and a smattering of exposure to other fields of study.  Graduate students by definition focus on field specialties.

 

Thus, at no level of the American educational system do we produce citizens who are genuinely culturally enriched or civically prepared;   most are not professionally satisfied, and many languish in cyclical poverty that gives them no chance to live in the fullness that should be the case on this one earthly sojourn.

 

In this edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, I present the reasons for the intellectual corruption and inadequacy of our system of public education in the United States.  I detail the nature of institutions at the national and state levels that render those rungs of governance incapable of providing the change needed in preK-12 education.  And I explain why, therefore, the locally centralized school district must be the level at which those intending to achieve educational transformation must focus their efforts.