Brutal Realties Observed in the Minneapolis Public Schools During My Ten Years of Intensive Investigation--- Revelatory of Public Education Throughout the United States

What an enriching experience my ten-year investigation into the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools has been.

For the most part, I now have more detailed information from the level of the locally centralized school district that reinforce my observations of the public schools over the course of forty-five years (dating from my volunteering and coordination of Southern Methodist University student volunteers for tutoring in the Dallas Independent School District beginning in the spring of 1970, and then deciding to become a teacher in spring 1971).

 

But the reinforcement of my essential observations has been especially illuminating in certain areas.

 

Most especially, I now have additional evidence for

 

1)  the wretched training that teachers receive in departments, schools, and colleges of education;

 

2)  consistent with the above, the intellectually impoverished approach of professors of education and the intellectual quality of those professors;

 

3)  the mediocrity at the median that describes all staff in the public schools with academic responsibility:  teachers, principals, and central office administrators;

 

4)  the incompetence and academically insubstantial level of staff that one finds in certain central office departments that purport to advance in some way the academic progress of students, with examples at the Minneapolis Public Schools being prominently Academic Core & Instruction, Office of Black Student Achievement, Office of Latine Student Achievement, and Department of Indian Education;

 

5)  the lack of suitable superintendents from the existing pools of candidates, so that the possibility of hiring a superintendent likely to improve academics approaches zero;

 

6)  the incompetence and poor intellectual quality of school board members;

 

7)  the lack of a locus of central officed decision-making, so that neither an acceptable level of administration or governance is accomplished, with neither the superintendent nor school board members taking prime responsibility for academic results and general administration of the schools;

 

8)  the resulting abominable academic program at the district, with incompetent teaching of the skills of basic reading and math and the knowledge-deplete nature of curriculum as actually implemented.

 

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Of the above, I am currently particularly pondering the incompetent teaching of basic reading and math;  and the matter of extreme incompetence of superintendents.

 

Perpend: 

 

Basic reading skill entails the phonetic rules to pronouncing the alphabet, two and three letter blends, the progression from simple to more complex words and then to beginning texts;  thereafter reading is no longer chiefly a skill but a matter of reading a wide variety of texts across all major subject areas.    

 

Basic math entails teaching initial numerical recognition, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, tables, and charts, with adequate applications;  thereafter, the student proceeds to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus.

 

The above basic skills stages for reading and math should be accomplished by the end of second grade in the case of reading and by the end of fifth grade in the case of math before proceeding to higher levels of verbal and mathematical knowledge acquisition.

 

None of this should be difficult for an adroit teacher, and yet the verbiage spent as to the best approaches to teaching basic reading and mathematics continues to accumulate.