Article #28 in A Series of Highlights from My Book, >Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect<, Concerning Staff and Systemic Overhaul at the Davis Center and at MDE That Will Occur Due to My Revelations >>>>> The Five-Point Program for Transforming the Minneapolis Public Schools into a Model for the Locally Centralized School District >>>>> Programmatic Emphasis #4 >>>>> Family and Community Outreach Via Resource Provision and Referral

4)  Family and Community Outreach

Via

Resource Provision and Referral

 

For many years, community outreach at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) was handled mainly by the woefully understaffed Office of Student, Family, and Community Engagement.

 

This was in 2016 led by Executive Director for External Partnerships Courtney Cushing Kiernat, then Family Partnerships Director Lynnea Atlas-Ingebretson;  soon after Ed Graff became MPS superintendent, the department was disbanded.  Up until that time, the department had been comprised of the following members:

 

Lynnea Atlas-Ingebretson, Director of Family Partnerships

Patti Peterson, Account Specialist
Ahmed Keynan, Family and Community Inclusion Specialist
Briana MacPhee, Cultural Liaison-Latino Community and Families
Damon Gunn, Community Partnerships Executive Office Coordinator
Desean Smedley, Parent Academic Facilitator
Deqa Sayid, MPS Family and School Advocate
Elisa Iha, Community Partnerships Manager
Jason Bucklin, Out4Good Coordinator
Kaylie Burns Gahagan, Volunteer MPS Coordinator
Mitchell Roldan, Parent Academic Facilitator

 

By contrast the Department of Teaching and Learning at that time had a bloated forty-two (42), down in 2019 to a still-bloated 30 staff members, earned a total of $2,820,703 in salaries; the Office of Student, Family, and Community Engagement had only the eleven (11) staff members earning a total $737,266. And whereas the Department of Teaching and Learning had three (3) staff members who received over $100,000 and twelve (12) who received over $80,000, in the Office of Student, Family, and Community Engagement no staff member received over $100,000;  Ms. Atlas-Ingebretson earned $91,463, one staff member earned $76,944, and all other staff members in the Office of Student, Family, and Community Engagement earned between $52,812 and $64,731.

 

The Department of Student, Family, and Community Engagement should be replaced by a Department of Resource Provision and Referral, staffed by people comfortable on the streets and in the neighborhoods and homes of students and their families.  In order to reach students from economically impoverished or dysfunctional families, we must shift staffing priorities at the Minneapolis Public Schools toward those people of multiple ethnicities who are comfortable in environments characterized by the challenges of people living at the urban core and who can connect with students and their families right where they live.

 

Comprehending the Problem in Historical Context

The life of people who live in poverty is fundamentally different from people who live in circumstances of the middle and upper economic classes.

History created the circumstances of poverty in the United States as a result of differential treatment of people according to race, nation of origin, and natal family economies:

During the 16th to 18th centuries, approximately 12,500,000 people of African descent were hauled across the Middle Passage to insular Caribbean or mainland American locales and forced into slave labor; about 500,000 of these slaves were sold in what became the United States.  Liberation from involuntary servitude came when the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1866.  But Reconstruction (1865-1877) failed and African Americans, who formally gained full citizenship and voting rights via the 14th and 15th Amendments, fell victim to Supreme Court justices who disregarded the Constitution;  and to a racist white society in the American South that imposed conditions of sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, and vigilante brutality.  Between the years 1877 and 1965, 4,600,000 people were lynched in the United States;  a third of these were white victims in the Wild West;  the remainder, over 3,000,000 people, were African Americans lynched mainly in the South.  Both of these lynching figures exceed the number of people who lost their lives in the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 9, 2001 (9/ 11).

Until the early 20th century, public school education ended for most students with the completion of grammar school in 6th grade; a very few students went to high schools, the rigor of which matched the name.  As more people sought schooling beyond grammar school, an intermediate institution known as junior high, also rigorous in academic content, came into being for grades 7 through 9.  For students in grades 10 and 11 (the last grade in most high schools well into the 20th century), great status accrued to those who graduated from these institutions during a time when college or university matriculation was not common.

At the same time that African Americans escaped from the violence and discrimination of the South from 1915 forward on a Northern Migration, great waves of immigrants came ashore, especially from eastern and southern Europe.  As these immigrants and others increasingly sought education at the levels of junior and senior high school, new demands were placed on systems of public education in the United States.  Eastern and southern Europeans frequently were more impoverished than were their counterparts from Scandinavia, Germany, and other nations of northern and western Europe. They presented greater challenges to public education systems and were stereotyped as less academically capable.  In the schools of the United States there developed a bifurcated approach to education whereby impoverished and stereotyped populations were tracked into vocational education that ended before high school graduation, while wealthier and systemically preferred students proceeded through college preparatory study toward high school graduation.

African American students were generally tracked along the lines of those immigrant populations that bore heavy discrimination, and they bore the additional burden of attending mostly segregated schools. Here and there in the American South, African American teachers actually disseminated considerable knowledge and skill sets to students under difficult circumstances, but on the whole African American students into the 1950s received low quality and truncated education. Desegregation as a result of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision advanced the ideal of equality but had little favorable academic impact.  African Americans were still stuck in lousy southern schools or tracked in the manner of 20th century immigrant populations.
 

Congressional passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and equal employment and fair housing legislation during the late 1960s opened a pathway for African Americans who had the wherewithal to pursue middle class educational and professional aspirations. But African American middle class flight coalesced with white flight from the urban core, leaving behind the poorest of the poor.

Riots along Plymouth Avenue in the summers of 1966 and1967 accelerated the movement of Jewish and other people of European origins out of North Minneapolis, coinciding with in-migration of additional African American populations from challenged urban areas in Southside Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Gary, Indiana.  In the Minneapolis Public Schools, within which there were less than 20 African American teachers and other personnel throughout the 1970s, teachers confronted unprecedented classroom challenges that they were ill-equipped to face.

Crack cocaine came to North Minneapolis and other inner city areas by the early 1980s and gang activity increased apace.  Drugs and gangs placed severe additional burdens on inner city communities and the schools that served them.  Many historical forces have operated centrifugally to propel males away from their nuclear familial units;  by the 1980s, this very much included the well-intended but operationally deleterious Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).

From the time of those turbulent 1980s, so full of challenges for people living at the urban core, nine superintendents (Richard Green, Robert Ferrera, Peter Hutchinson, Carol Johnson, Thandiwe Peebles, Bill Green, Bernadeia Johnson, [Interim Superintendent] Michael Gore, and now Ed Graff) have headed the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Not one of those prior to Bernadeia Johnson effectively addressed the needs of the most challenged urban populations.  Bernadeia Johnson launched promising programs with Shift, High Priority Schools, and Focused Instruction but departed before rooting these deeply into the program of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Gore made little headway with any of these programs.

And thus does Superintendent Ed Graff and staff now face the challenge of imparting an excellence of education historically denied to most students in the United States and never offered to the overwhelming majority of the African American population---   nor to those Native American, Hispanic, Hmong, and African immigrant populations that have now also arrived at the challenged urban core.

 

We need staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools who comprehend the historical dimensions of the problems of inner city youth and their families--- and who are at least as comfortable in the communities and homes of these students as they are roaming the sterile hallways of the Davis Center at 1250 West Broadway.

Staffing the Minneapolis Public Schools with People Comfortable at the Urban Core

People abused by history, overwhelmed by poverty, and situated in communities wherein violence and illicit drug sales are realities of existence are constantly on edge: 

Most impoverished African American extended families have to contend with the reality that some member or members, especially males, have been, are, or will be caught up in the maelstrom of the criminal justice system.  Many must depend on federal government food stamps, WIC (Women, Infants, and Children supplementary nutrition program), Medicaid, low-income Section 8 housing assistance, and welfare (with AFDC as of 1996 replaced by TANF [Temporary Aid to Needy Families]). The latter program requires adult heads of household to secure employment and sets a five-year limit with the worthy goal of curtailing welfare dependency but creating practical problems pertinent to child care.

Many families living at the urban core feature numerous adults who are not high school graduates and contain very few members who have successfully matriculated at a college or university.  Low levels of education and high levels of poverty typically result in households with few books or electronic sources of the written word.  Impoverished and ill-educated adults are not well-placed to manifest the habits of reading, well-informed discussion, or sophisticated vocabulary usage.  Many have had aversive experiences in school and regard teachers and school administrators as intimidating figures.  They may of necessity involve themselves when their children are involved in conflictual situations, but they are not well-prepared to advocate for their children’s academic interests.

We need community and family outreach personnel at the Minneapolis Public Schools who by experience and training understand these historical and contemporary forces that exert pressure and circumscribe the lives of families dwelling in challenged inner city communities.  We must have a large contingent of employees at MPS who are comfortable walking the streets and visiting the homes of children living in families facing the challenges of poverty, dysfunction, or both.

We need outreach workers who comprehend the insecurity that attends gunshots in the middle of the night, yards cordoned off for police investigation, high-speed chases involving multiple law enforcement vehicles, and the possibility that a cracked taillight or lapsed license plate sticker might result in a driver being thrown up against the hood of a car amidst unsavory name-calling.

These community outreach staff members also need to confer with social workers as necessary to provide resource referral when families are thrust into any of the many possible dilemmas of life at the urban core:  spousal abuse, child abuse, electrical power or running water curtailment, landlord issues, roof leaks, pest infestation, low food supplies, inadequate winter clothing, chronic unemployment---  for starters.  Well-trained community outreach workers need to assist families with any problems getting children to school, whether these are rooted in transportation issues, skewed familial schedules, sleep habits, or medical issues.

The overpowering message that we need to send to all of our families is that their children attend schools in which all people of all ethnicities and economic circumstances are valued equally; that the education of every child is considered vital;  and that staff members of the Minneapolis Public Schools are dedicated to the school attendance, familial connection, academic success, and the present and future of every single child.

We need to create a group psychology of love, hope, and trust in which all students and families anticipate joyful experiences every day, knowing that there are staff members in place who will remove any impediment to the expected joy.

We must in the Minneapolis Public Schools establish a model of the locally centralized school system for the delivery of an education of excellence to every child, thus leading the nation toward the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.

For that to happen, we must prioritize outreach to families for the resolution of any difficulty preventing the delivery of an excellent education.  In establishing priorities, we must construct budgets and create staff positions accordingly.

Article #27 in A Series of Highlights from My Book, >Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect<, Concerning Staff and Systemic Overhaul at the Davis Center and at MDE That Will Occur Due to My Revelations >>>>> The Five-Point Program for Transforming the Minneapolis Public Schools into a Model for the Locally Centralized School District >>>>> Programmatic Emphasis #3 >>>>> Academic Remediation and Enrichment

3)  Academic Remediation and Enrichment

 

Astonishingly, there is no comprehensive, consistently administered tutoring program at the

Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) to ensure that students struggling below grade level in reading and math are given the help that they need to reach grade level performance.   Failure properly to serve struggling students has been manifested in both private and public efforts.

The Private Vendor Fiasco under No Child Left Behind

 

I have written in many places of the favorable features of the No Child Left Behind law passed as a bipartisan initiative in both houses of Congress in 2001, stressing objective testing that in Minnesota meant a state-designed grade 9 assessment for writing and Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) for students at grades 3-8 and 10 for reading, grades 3-8 and grade 11 for math; disaggregation of data according to student demographic characteristics;  objective identification of schools that continually failed students in certain demographic categories;  and gradations of punitive sanctions ultimately resulting in staff restructuring at schools that failed students for five successive years.

 

But No Child Left Behind regulation mandated private market interventions to help low-income, low-achieving students rise to grade level in reading, math, and writing.  What should have been a tutorial initiative organized and delivered by the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized school districts to confront their own failures fell to private businesses, under the notion that competition to raise student performance would achieve what the public school system had not.

This was a disastrous failure.

During an approximately eight-year phase that began during the 2004-2005 academic year, numerous commercial vendors competed to provide tutoring services to struggling students as mandated by No Child Left Behind legislation.  The private market for tutorial services was fraught with corruption and achieved nothing substantial in behalf of low-achieving students.  Some vendors promised students and their families gifts of computers and other items if they signed up for their programs.  All but a very few commercial tutoring enterprises evidenced far more concern in enrolling students for tutorial sessions costing typically between $30 and $75 an hour, as opposed to interest in student achievement.

Officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools in the Office of Funded Programs attempted to coordinate the private market effort by fifty or more vendors per year, but MPS staff rarely visited the academic sessions run by the private companies, so that any regulation pertained to invoice submissions and accounts payable.  Much of payment rendered by MPS for these private services was subsidized by the federal government via Title IX funding, but the school district itself bore costs that subsidies did not cover, and a great deal of staff time was invested in the monumentally unsuccessful private market tutoring effort.

When Minnesota Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius and other officials at the Minnesota Department of Education successfully gained a waiver from No Child Left Behind regulations in the autumn of 2012, private tutoring activity waned.  For two years beyond the approval of the waiver, administrators under Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s direction at MPS opted to maintain private tutoring activity, but thereafter this failed experiment came to an end.

And officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools have offered no viable, well-coordinated effort to address the problems that federal officials vainly hoped would be solved by the private market.

Failure to Design and Implement a Viable Tutoring Program at the Minneapolis Public Schools

Tutoring efforts at the Minneapolis Public Schools constitute an ineffective hodgepodge.

 

R. T. Rybak departed the reformist nonprofit agency Generation Next before that organization delivered on its promises to enroll a bevy of tutors to help struggling public school students in Minnesota.  This was after officials at Generation Next committed two years of staff time to arrive at the obvious conclusion that aggressive remedial instruction should be rendered to ensure that all students are reading and performing mathematical operations at level of school enrollment by grade three.
  

Students at K-5 and K-8 institutions in the Minneapolis Public Schools receive some help through the Beacons after school program.  But academic assistance in Beacons is not high quality or properly measured for effectiveness, and students spend as much after school time in recreational pursuits as they do in striving to achieve academic proficiency. 

 

Those wishing to sign up as volunteers for the Minneapolis Public Schools may sign up under categories that include Community Volunteers, Elementary Literacy Tutor Program, and Adult Education Volunteers.  Other programs included on the MPS website for prospective volunteers that have relevance to tutoring include Math Corps, Reading Corps, City of Lakes Americorps, and

VISTA.  Not all volunteers render academic instruction, and there has been no major effort to place a sufficient number of tutors working to advance the academic prospects of all students needing remedial instruction in all schools.

 

At schools formerly classified as High Priority, efforts were made to assist struggling students for designated periods of the regular school day, as well as after school;  but these initiatives were nascent in development, and overwhelmingly student performance has not reached the goal of grade level performance.

Summer school and specialized summer tutorial assistance programs at the Minneapolis Public Schools are inadequate and feature notable teacher ineffectiveness.  Further, leaders of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers have often voiced opposition to aggressive remedial efforts in summer and after school programs.

This combination of private enterprise and public school failure is stark, given that the problem is so clear and the program for action so logically apparent.

We must do better, according to a program with features given below:

Toward a Coordinated Effort at the Minneapolis Public Schools for Addressing the Needs of Students Struggling Below Grade Level in Reading and Mathematics

The Minnesota Department of Education still formally abides by Minnesota State Academic Standards legislated in 2004.  The standards establish the skill sets that students are to have at each grade level and applies to all students.  And indeed all students should be expected to learn knowledge and skill sets given in curriculum consistent with state standards.

But only 44% of MPS students meet state standards in math, while a similar 43% of students meet state standards for reading. This means that over 55% of students at MPS need remedial instruction that is not currently being rendered in any comprehensive way from school to school.

Staff in the Department of Teaching and Learning should be dismissed and the department dismantled.  Aimee Fearing’s employment should be terminated and she should be replaced at the head of the Academic Division by a college, university, or independent scholar with a Ph. D. in a key academic discipline (e.g., mathematics, physics, history, English literature, music) there needs.  The program given above for teacher training must be implemented, so that teachers have the requisite subject area knowledge.  Staff energy must then be marshaled in skill remediation for academically struggling students--- a majority of students in the Minneapolis Public Schools.  There should be a clearly identified tutorial point person for elementary school (grades K-5) students, a clearly designated person for middle school (grades 6-8) students, and another for high school (grades 9-12) with responsibility for implementing a district-wide tutorial program.

In math during the K-5 years, students need to progress through skill acquisition that includes pre-math positional terms (up, down, under, over, and the like), time telling (analog and digital), units of money, the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, data representation (graphs, charts, tables), and introductions to geometry and algebra.

In reading during the K-5 years, students need to progress through alphabet recognition, phonemic awareness, vocabulary of ascending syllables and degrees of abstraction, sentence construction and recognition, paragraph construction and comprehension (with use and understanding of topic sentences), and reading of a variety of fictional and nonfictional works of thematic variety and topical diversity, allowing for an expanding and ever-richer vocabulary.

One hour a day should be set aside for students to work on enrichment activities connected to the skill level that each student is manifesting:

For students who have mastered grade level skills, this will mean working on advanced material that challenges students to solve intriguing math problems or read for the enhancement of literary appreciation or knowledge acquisition.

For students who are lagging below grade level, this will mean working one on one with a well-trained tutor until the necessary math and reading skills are acquired.  Work with a tutor should be viewed as an opportunity to master important math skills and to read an array of interesting and high quality fictional and nonfictional material.  Students should receive positive feedback for progress made;  tutors should convey a sense of joy in learning and delight in the opportunity to spend time with the young person.

Over time, most struggling students will gain the basic skills that they need in the course of remediation during the K-5 years.  But enrichment classes should be available at the middle school (grades 6-8) and high school (grades 9-12 levels) also, so that students have both the chance to ascend to academic challenges either for mastery at grade level or advancement from already secured grade level position.

Enrichment sessions of both types should be available after school also, with priority given to students who are struggling below grade level;  but students evidencing grade level performance and

above should also be given after school opportunities for knowledge and skill ascendance in the form of human and material resources for research and specialized study of topics of driving interest, and for training of the type needed for success on ACT and SAT exams.

Both in-school and after-school programs for skill and knowledge enhancement should be administered in the spirit of challenging students to know all that they can know and to become all that they can be.

Once the program for academic enrichment (advanced and remedial) is well integrated into academic culture at the Minneapolis Public Schools, administrative staff and teachers at the building level can take responsibility for implementation and improvement, with successes and innovations shared across the district.  Involvement of central office personnel will be critical at the initial stages;  over time, though, well-trained teachers and tutors at the building level can implement enrichment activities as a primarily site-based responsibility, subject to oversight from central office personnel.

The program will also require a great increase in the number of tutors and very careful training of these tutors.

An aggressive program of volunteer solicitation should secure high quality talent among college students, workaday professionals, and academically astute and pedagogically adept parents and retirees.

But expansion of professional staff hired for the express purpose of tutoring will also be necessary.   

Academic enrichment (advanced and remedial) should be a budgetary priority of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Article #26 in A Series of Highlights from My Book, >Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect<, Concerning Staff and Systemic Overhaul at the Davis Center and at MDE That Will Occur Due to My Revelations >>>>> The Five-Point Program for Transforming the Minneapolis Public Schools into a Model for the Locally Centralized School District >>>>> Programmatic Emphasis #2 >>>>> Teacher Training

2)  Teacher Training

 

Teachers are abominably trained.

After an initial discussion of the current state of teacher training I detail in this article my program for teacher training at the level of the locally centralized school district as represented by the Minneapolis Pubic Schools.

 

The most important features of that program include the following:

1) >>>>>   Teachers aspiring to teach at the grades K-5 level will earn a Masters of Liberal Arts degree organized by officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools. This will involve a 34-week intensive course of study during one full academic year, followed by a summer of research, writing, and defense of a master’s thesis.

2) >>>>>   Teachers aspiring to teach at the grades 6-8 and 9-12 levels will earn field-specific, non- education master’s degrees giving them expert knowledge relevant to the classes that they will teach.

3) >>>>>   Teachers aspiring to teach at all grades (K-5, 6-8, and 9-12) will serve a full year of internship before gaining consideration for employment in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Thus, all teachers aspiring to teach in the Minneapolis Public Schools will earn a master’s degree in a rigorous academic program and then serve one full year of internship.

Before proceeding to further discussion of my program for teacher training, I give here a summary of prevailing teacher training programs:

The Currently Abysmal Training of Prospective Teachers for Grades K-5

Programs that train large contingents of prospective teachers include the University of Minnesota/ Twin Cities, Augsburg College, and the Universities of Concordia, Hamline, St. Catherine, and St. Thomas.

 

At most of these institutions, prospective grades K-5 teachers major in elementary education. Hamline is unique among the metro area institutions offering teacher preparation programs in requiring its aspiring K-5 teachers to earn bachelor’s degrees in legitimate disciplines (e. g., mathematics, chemistry, history, economics, English, fine arts).  At most other institutions, teachers aspiring to teach at grades K-5 get a degree in elementary education.  For such a degree, students take courses that include Educational Psychology, Diversity and Education, Theory to Practice, Schools and Society, and Exceptionality.

The only meek nod to subject area specificity is in courses such as Social Studies, Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science Instruction in the Elementary Grades.  Education professors, not subject area experts, teach these courses.

Students at the University of Minnesota who aspire to teach, both at grades K-5 and grades 6-12, are strongly encouraged to get a master’s degree.  Students in the College of Education and Human Development typically do their coursework during the summer and fall terms;  they student teach in the spring, also taking two education courses online.

The route to the Masters of Education degree takes just three semesters.  Once the college or university certification program is complete, prospective teachers must take exams that include a basic skills exam, a content-focused pedagogic exam, and a mathematics exam.  Upon passing these exams, licensure is granted.  The license is permanent, given the teacher’s ongoing demonstration of professional development through certified participation in teacher-in-service days, workshops, conferences, and the like;  and with the option to pursue an advanced degree, typically a Masters of Education in teaching elementary education (remembering that a master’s degree is strongly encouraged by officials in the College of Education and Human Development for students who seek teacher certification via the schedule of courses at the University of Minnesota).

The Need to Retrain Teachers at the Level of the Locally Centralized School District

Teacher training programs are cash cows for colleges and universities:

Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education are academically insubstantial but huge revenue generators for institutions of putative higher learning.  The ruse pulled by officials the University of Minnesota in encouraging students to pursue both of these empty degrees for certification constitutes irresponsible philistinism of the worst sort.

 

Over the long haul, we need to dissolve our departments, colleges, and schools of education and come to a consensus on a new approach to training teachers:

The transformation nationally will require much time to confront entrenched interests of the many adults in the education establishment who benefit from the current system that is so deleterious to the interests of excellent teachers and students waiting to receive a substantive education.  The program designed for the Minneapolis Publics Schools could be implemented immediately, given full focus and dedication to the task, before that time when we can expect to dismantle departments, schools, and colleges of education.  The immediate task is to retrain teachers newly certified after participating in current, useless programs of teacher preparation.

As to veteran teachers, my abiding estimate is that no more than 10% of the teachers presently on staff in the Minneapolis Public Schools are truly excellent;  15% are so terrible that they never should have been allowed in a classroom;  and the remainder fall in the broad 75% that are intolerably mediocre.  The terrible teachers in that 15% category will most likely always be terrible and in almost all cases will have to be jettisoned.  Most teachers in the 75% category of mediocrity should be given the option to retrain and prove their mettle for retention.

In my program for retraining teachers of the Minneapolis Pubic Schools, teachers aspiring to teach at the K-5 level will have to undergo an intensive full year of weekly, all-day training leading to a high-quality Masters of Liberal Arts degree;  followed by a full academic year internship.

The Masters of Liberal Arts Degree for Aspiring Minneapolis Public Schools Teachers at Grades K-5

Teachers at level K-5 should be broadly and deeply knowledgeable scholars, at home in the intellectual worlds of mathematics, natural science, history, literature, and the fine arts.  The key components of the academic program leading to this degree are described below.  It is expected that the courses taken for the Masters of Liberal Arts will be taken intensively, five days a week, during one full school year, from late August until early June.  Over the summer, the aspiring teacher studying for the Masters of Liberal Arts degree will write her or his master’s thesis, then the remaining months of the master’s program will be spent as a classroom intern undergoing a full academic year of classroom observation and teaching under the guidance of a teacher identified as highly competent.  The latter teacher will be chosen for manifesting as much excellence as we dare hope, given current realities with regard to teacher quality.

 

Officials in the Minneapolis Public Schools should embrace these components and set about establishing a program in conjunction with one of the universities in the Twin Cities.  Those representing the Minneapolis Public Schools should articulate exactly what they want from the degree-granting institution.  From the degree-granting university, this will mean embracing the details of the program given below, providing the professorial expertise required, and following through on the administrative aspects leading to the granting of the Masters of Liberal Arts to the K-5 teachers of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

The program and requirements for the Masters of Liberal Arts degree for prospective teachers at levels K-5 are given as follows:

Mathematics

During the full academic year of retraining of teachers at grades K-5, professors of mathematics should be brought in by decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools to give educators of the very young a thorough overview of mathematics up through calculus.  Teachers at grades K-5 need a fundamental readjustment of the way that they view themselves.  They must regard themselves as capable learners and practitioners in the full range of human knowledge.  We cannot abide the level of math phobia that often abides in the hearts of many current K-5 teachers.  The way for an aspiring teacher to overcome mathematical phobia and prepare to launch the young student on the K-12 mathematical experience is for everyone involved to know what is ahead on this exciting quest for numerical, algebraic, geometric, trigonometric, statistical knowledge, and calculus.

 

University of Minnesota Mathematics Professor Jonathon Rogness has commented to me, “It is always advisable that a teacher have knowledge far beyond the concepts that he or she immediately covers in class.”

 

If teachers themselves had a substantive education in either high school or as undergraduates at a college or university, then reviewing previously learned mathematical concepts will not be difficult:  Much of the information is either lying latent for reawakening or, even more happily, is actually operating nearer the surface to be pulled upward into the brightness of mental reflection, ready for application.  But for those teachers who have done what our K-12 schools and universities too often encourage, somehow muddling through math courses without really understanding for lack of teachers capable of giving them clarity, then the process will be more arduous.

And since we want them to be teachers who most certainly never themselves abet the muddling through approach to mathematical education, we want them to have confidence as capable mathematicians.

Over the course of ten (10) weeks, aspiring K-5 teachers studying for the Masters of Liberal Arts degree will pursue the following topical schedule for mathematics:

Week #1 >>>>> Fundamental Math
Week #2 >>>>> Algebra I
Week #3 >>>>> Geometry
Weeks #4 and #5 >>>>> Algebra II .
Weeks #6 and #7 >>>>> Functions, Statistics, and Trigonometry (FST)
Weeks #8, #9, and #10  >>>>> Calculus (corresponding to a full year of college-level calculus)

Natural Science

Prospective teachers at K-5 should also be highly confident in themselves as students of natural science, one of the five key subject areas emphasized during the K-5 years. The three natural science fields that should dominate their own study in route to the Masters of Liberal Arts degree are biology, chemistry, and physics.  Professors in these fields should teach compact courses of about two weeks each, during which the prospective K-5 teachers review (ideally) or learn well for the first time (as too often will be the case) the most important concepts pertinent to these important fields of natural science.

Over the course of six (6) weeks, aspiring K-5 teachers studying for the Masters of Liberal Arts degree will pursue the following topical schedule for natural science:

Week #1 and Week #2 >>>>>  Biology
Week #3 and Week #4 >>>>>  Chemistry
Week #5 and Week #6 >>>>>  Physics

History

 

Teaching for all subjects in our current system of K-12 education is mediocre.  

 

Knowledge of history is particularly unskillfully imparted to students.

 

And what is true generally is especially true at the K-5 level. In our K-5 schools, history is subsumed under an amalgamation known as “social studies,” in an innervated curricular approach that is entirely consistent with the “constructivist” precepts under which teachers have been trained.  There is a great deal of focus on the lives of the students, in which they are asked to reflect about their own families and community, in the absence of any social scientific context in which to compare their own family mores and structures with others that prevail in the general society.  Nothing is learned of any substance in the way of sociology, psychology, economics, and government--- and certainly nothing very coherent in the way of history.

Under our new curriculum, history will be the subject identified for study at the K-5 level.  History as an appellation is used rather than “social studies,” because humankind’s experience over time has produced the life that we live today, and when we study history in depth, we also learn a great deal about sociology, psychology, economics, and government.  For that matter, great discoveries in mathematics and natural science are contextualized in a study of history, and knowledge of the essence of those discoveries is gained.

 

Hence, history is key to full understanding of all subjects germane to the liberal arts.

Over the course of eight (8) weeks, aspiring K-5 teachers studying for the Masters of Liberal Arts degree will pursue the following topical schedule for world and American history:

Week #1 >>>>>  Prehistory and Developments Through Earliest Civilizations (Beginnings to 700 B. C.)
Week #2 >>>>>  Classical Period (700 B. C to 500 A. D.)
Week #3 >>>>>  European Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Contemporaneous World       

                             Development (500 A. D. to 1500 A. D.)
Week #4  >>>>> The Rise of the Nation-State and the Importance of the European Enlightenment (1600 to 1800)
Week #5 >>>>>  Imperialism and the Industrial Revolution (1600 to 1900)
Week #6 >>>>>  Major Events of the 20th Century and Early 21st Century (1900 to 2016)
Week #7 >>>>>  American History through the 18th Century
Week #8 >>>>>  American History from 1800 through 2016

                                                     
Language Arts

 

Over the course of six (6) weeks, aspiring K-5 teachers studying for the Masters of Liberal Arts degree will pursue the following topical schedule for language arts:

Week #1 and Week #2 >>>>> 

 

Classical Greek and Roman Literature; Classics of World Literature;

Premodern and Renaissance Classics of Europe; Shakespearean

and Elizabethan Literature

 

Week #3 and Week #4 >>>>> 

 

Modern and Contemporary British and American Literature

 
Week #5 >>>>> 

 

African American Literature and the Literature of Other Major Ethnic Groups in the

United States

Week #6 >>>>> English Grammar, Syntax, and Written Composition

Fine Arts

Over the course of four (4) weeks, aspiring K-5 teachers studying for the Masters of Liberal Arts degree will pursue the following topical schedule for fine arts, which adopts a chronological approach for presenting the history of the visual arts, architecture, and music:

Week #1 >>>>> 

 

The Prehistoric World (Beginnings to 3,000 B. C);

The Ancient World (3,000 B C. to 700 B. C.)

Week #2 >>>>> 

 

The Classical World (700 B. C. to 500 A. D.);

The Medieval World (500 to 1500 A. D.)

Week #3 >>>>> 

 

The First-Stage Modern World (1450 to 1750); The Second-Stage Modern World (1750 to 1945);  The Contemporary World (1945-2016)

Week #4 >>>>> 

 

Survey of Musical Forms and Composition

Composers and Music in the Western Classical Style;   

Blues, Blues-Based, and Blues-Inspired Music

in the United States;  

Folk and Country Music;

Musical Instruments

Additional Requirements for Prospective Teachers at Grades K-5

Teachers aspiring to teach at grades K-5 will, after completing the above-given course of study during a full academic year, research, write, and defend a master’s thesis in the course of the following summer.

Then, during the succeeding academic year, aspiring K-5 teachers will serve a full year of internship before gaining consideration for employment in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Revolutionizing Training for Teachers of Students in Grades 6-8 (Middle School) And Grades 9-12 (High School)

Teachers of students at grades 6-8 and at grades 9-12 will, in the revolutionized curriculum in this program for achieving academic excellence, of necessity be first-rate scholars possessing broad and deep knowledge of the subject areas that they will teach.

As with teacher aspirants at the grades K-5 level, master’s degrees in education will not be recognized. Teachers aspiring to teach at the grades 6-8 and 9-12 levels will earn degrees in departments relevant to their teaching fields (e.g., mathematics, physics, economics, world literature, Spanish).

As in the case of K-5 teachers, teacher aspirants at the secondary level (grades 6-8 or 9-12) will serve a full year of internship before undergoing evaluation for employment in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Thus, for both teacher aspirants at the K-5 level and those at grades 6-8 and 9-12, the entire program in the aftermath of earning a bachelor’s degree will typically take three years.

 

Such teachers will thereby gain professional status via academic training as rigorous as programs in law and medicine.  They should be paid accordingly, with median salaries rising to around $85,000 from the currently prevailing median of $71,000.