As we look toward the meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, 13 October 2015, I urge Interim Superintendent Goar, all administrators at MPS, and all members of the school board to consider very carefully the following actions necessary in any program of effective education for all of your students--- and what I intent to do if you do not take those actions:
First >>>>> Recognize the weakness of your curriculum and
begin working immediately to define a logical
grade-by-grade knowledge-intensive sequence.
Scroll on down to other articles on my blog for details of the weakness of your curriculum, how I observe the consequences for your students when I am training them to take the ACT and to read serious academic material with genuine comprehension, and why I am writing a new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, to atone for the deficiencies in your K-12 curriculum.
The level of knowledge that your students possess as they move across the stage at
graduation--- if they graduate at all--- is unacceptable and must change. Revive Focused Instruction and proceed to define the necessary logically sequenced skill and knowledge base that your students must receive as their right to an excellent education.
Second >>>>> Know also that you must assume responsibility for training
the teachers capable of delivering such a knowledge-intensive
curriculum.
As I have also detailed in past editions of my academic journal, Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, the knowledge level of your current teaching staff is inadequate for delivering the knowledge-intensive curriculum that your students must have to be the beneficiaries of an excellent K-12 education. They came to you undertrained, because of the abysmal nature of the training that all prospective teachers receive in departments, schools, and colleges of education.
Your K-5 teachers are particularly knowledge deficient: This is the reason why I can ask any student who comes to me after having spent six years in your schools and find them unable to answer any questions of substance in matters pertinent to history, government, natural science, fine arts, literature, or English usage.
You should be ashamed, and you must recognize that you must thoroughly retrain your teachers at all levels, most particularly your K-5 teachers, if you are going to succeed in sending forth students possessing the high level of knowledge that they must have as they move across the stage at graduation and into the world of postsecondary education.
I can imagine that most of you have not taken advantage of my journal, my various articles, or the instruction that I offer on my television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, 6:00 PM, Channel 17, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN] every Wednesday--- and on YouTube at Holly4Grace)--- in order to understand the training that you must provide for your teachers, so I will in the coming days offer you a summary of my recommended program.
Third >>>>> Eschew false steps and misguided policies--- and know what I am going to
do to maximize your chances of getting things right.
Because you, Interim Superintendent Goar and others at MPS with the futures of our young people in your hands, have no firm idea of the constituents of an excellent K-12 education, you are forever making distracting and ineffective motions of activity with no positive result.
Quit throwing “Hail Mary” passes to Community Partnership Schools, creating task forces to study problems to which you should already know the solutions, and saying that you are going to get things right this time when you have never demonstrated an ability to get things right.
I am going to continue the investigation of your processes at Minneapolis Public Schools, reminding you that your salaries are paid by the public, and that you must respond to your students, families, and their advocates with humility, respect, and effective action.
I will support those of you who respond positively to your students and those close to them, and those of you who set about doing what is necessary to provide the young people at your schools the excellent education that they must have.
For those of you who don’t, I will be advocating your removal from your current positions in my publications and my media resources, and organizing community efforts aimed at getting the curriculum and the people we need to organize and deliver knowledge-intensive education.
I will proceed as I have already begun--- with huge nods to my models in the work of Saul Alinsky, Mao Zedong, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Gloria Steinhem--- patiently, persistently, with the goal of transformation of hearts and the conversion to just action, as well as victory.
The time is now. You must respond.
Sep 29, 2015
Sep 28, 2015
Seventh Snippet from >Fundmentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education >>>>> Living Lives of Accomplishment in the Face of Injustice
This snippet from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, is from Chapter Seven, African American History. The section given as the snippet here is entitled, "Living Lives of Accomplishment in the Face of Injustice."
The section given comes after a section describing the slave trade and slavery and before another on the Civil War and Reconstruction. I particularly like this section for the astounding accomplishments that are described for both slaves and free blacks, who typically studied under self-education scenarios and succeeded at the highest levels prevailing in their fields, often recording achievements far beyond those of white members of their communities who started life with far more advantages.
After you read this snippet, scroll on down to the next article (actually posted earlier) for the fullest explanation that I have given to date with regard to my motivation for writing Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
And then, as you scroll on down through my blog, you'll find the six other snippets posted thus far, posted amidst other articles that I trust will be of keen interest, as well.
Here is the snippet from Chapter Seven:
Although the life of the slave was laborious and the working hours long, there was some time left over for recreation, amusement, and personal accomplishment. Many slaves became superb hunters and fishers, planted masterful gardens, and played tunes on homemade instruments that would prove to be the progenitors of the blues and jazz genres that are at the soul of American music. Some resourceful slaves cultivated reputations for good behavior that won them off-plantation passes from lenient masters; given access to a wider circle of associations, some slaves learned how to read and write. This knowledge might also come from a comparatively compassionate member of the master’s family, either with or without the master’s permission.
Free blacks also often reached out to their fellow African Americans by providing instruction in reading, writing, and subjects for which those skills served as gateway. African Americans of free status occasionally founded schools, as did those among the white population who opposed slavery and sought to elevate the educational and cultural level of slaves and former slaves. A free black by the name of Elias Neua, who had been born in France, operated a school for African Americans by 1704. Records indicate that a couple of slaves whose given names were Harry and Andrew (surnames unknown) ran a school for basic reading and writing instruction in South Carolina during the early 18th century. For a period beginning in 1751, missionary and teacher Joseph Ottolenghi taught slaves in Georgia at the behest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Quaker Anthony Benezet ran an evening school for African Americans out of his home during 1750-1760; a group of Quakers also came together in 1774 to run a school for African Americans in Philadelphia. And in 1787, the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves established the New York African Free School, generally credited as the first full-curriculum school for African Americans. Most African Americans eventually became Christians, although some, especially at first, incorporated animistic beliefs into their new faith. They also very notably drew upon African music to enliven standard Christian hymns and to create spirituals unique to African American people. From the African American Christian tradition came much of the impetus for blues and jazz motifs that in turn shaped all music that is American in origin.
For a mostly enslaved people, contributions in many fields were mighty:
In 1721, a Massachusetts slave named Oneissimus taught the famous religious leader Cotton Mather how to inject a patient with a small amount of the small pox virus to create a vaccine effect. A South Carolina slave named Caesar developed antidotes to rattlesnake venom. Also in South Carolina, the slave Wilcie Elfe gained medical knowledge from an owner-doctor, opened a successful pharmaceutical practice in Charleston, patented effective medicines, and sold his curatives throughout the state. Similarly, the slave James Derham studied under owner Dr. Robert Dove, from whom he purchased his freedom and then set up his own medical practice. During the 18th century, former slave David K. McDonough gained fame for his skill as a vision and hearing specialist, displayed at his own Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York.
According to the census of 1860, there were 488,070 free blacks in a total African American population of 4,441,770 (with the slave population, therefore, at 3,953,700 [having grown from 697,897 since 1790]). Hence, free blacks constituted about 11% of the total African American population in the United States just prior to the Civil War. Over half of these free African Americans lived in the South.
Freedom had come in a variety of ways. Some white masters freed offspring that resulted from intercourse with black slaves, thus hoping to avoid social censure. Once in a great while, a slave was so enterprising as to secure off-plantation wage labor, in addition to her or his toil as human chattel, and make enough money to purchase freedom from masters implicitly more lenient and empathetic than most. As the abolitionist movement gained momentum, some southerners felt the tweak of conscience that could give a slave her or his freedom, as reward for faithful service, or just because it seemed the right thing to do. Other slaves were freed by the terms of wills. Some survived the mad dash for freedom, moving across fields and through woods just ahead of sniffing dogs and scurrying agents of the master, against the intent of the fugitive property provisions of the United States Constitution and statutory law.
Some free African Americans themselves owned slaves. Some of these were carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors who bought slaves and made them apprentices. The 1830 census recorded 753 slaveholding African Americans. The 1850 census recorded that 19% of black tailors in Charleston, South Carolina, owned slaves. Slaves worked for free blacks as maids or day laborers and, in a few cases, they worked the fields picking cotton or harvesting, much as they did for white slave owners. William Johnson, a freed slave living in Natchez, Mississippi, became a multi-business entrepreneur, running barbershops, purchasing and renting out property, and superintending a money-lending business; hiring managers to run businesses selling toys, wallpaper, coal, and sand; renting carts and other vehicles; offering a service watering down the streets of the hot southern city of Natchez; and accumulating 350 acres of land on which he put fifteen slaves to work chopping down timber and farming the fields. New Orleans merchant Cecee McCarty trained slaves as salespeople who peddled imported dry goods across the state of Louisiana; in time, she amassed a fortune.
But black slave owners were a tiny portion of the free African American population. Most free African Americans worked as laborers or skilled crafts people; some entered the professions or started businesses.
Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) operated a thriving shipbuilding business in Connecticut, gained great wealth, and trained other African Americans to start businesses of their own. James Forten (1766-1842) also made a fortune in the maritime industry, inventing a device to handle sails more efficiently and launching a company that employed a total of 40 employees, including on his payroll both African American and white workers. At mid-19th century, William Whipper of Pennsylvania began his entrepreneurial career as a clothes cleaner, became an expert in steam scouring, and prospered so greatly as to pour investments into multiple successful business ventures. Tax records from the mid-19th century indicate that there were 21 African American entrepreneurs in New York City making over $100,000 per year, thus earning what for that era was a huge amount of money.
African Americans of the pre-Civil War era made huge contributions with their scientific inventions. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) compiled The Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris, published annually from 1791 to 1802; he also served on the commission that planned the construction of a new capital at Washington, D. C., in 1789, then from 1790 was among those commissioned to survey the site for the future capital. Henry Blair received a patent for a unique seed planter in 1834. Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) received a patent in 1846 for a vacuum evaporator that produced white sugar crystals from sugarcane juice and proved also to have utility in the production of soap, gelatin, and glue. Lewis Temple (1800-1854) invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry, given the enhanced effectiveness of his invention for hunting the huge oceangoing mammals whose bodies were used for the production of many commercially lucrative goods; Temple, though, never gained much from the commerce induced by his invention: he never was able to gain a patent and died penniless in the very city of Bedford, Massachusetts, whose economy had boomed on the strength of his invention.
The entrepreneurial success and inventiveness of African Americans in the early 19th century was not rewarded with citizenship, which was obviously denied to slaves but also withheld from free blacks. Free blacks in Maryland and North Carolina had to have special licenses to sell corn, wheat, or tobacco. In most states of both the North and the South, free blacks could not vote, hold public office, or testify in courts against whites. African Americans could not carry weapons in this era of commonplace white gun-wielding. Failure to pay off debts or remit tax payments resulted in fine or imprisonment for free blacks of the North; in the South, such a debtor or tax offender could be sold into slavery as means to collect the sums owed.
African American artisans, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists, and professionals formed a small but energetic black middle class that grew restive with the conditions of American life, at the same time that their success provided powerful arguments against the racist pronouncements and assumptions that pervaded white-dominated society. African Americans were in large measure responsible for establishing the economy and physical infrastructure of the United States. They designed and constructed churches, mansions, public buildings, and private plantations.
John Hemings is famous for his role in producing articles and fixtures for the Monticello, the plantation of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. Hemings was a slave at Monticello, but he was no field hand. He was a joiner by trade and a genius who created numerous exquisite pieces of furniture in the woodworking shop that he ran on Jefferson’s plantation. Following Jefferson’s sketches, Hemings turned out chairs, tables, benches, fine railings, arches, and window shutters.
African Americans in the growing urban centers of the North generally faced prospects of inadequate public education facilities, inferior housing, and lack of legal protections that white citizens held as a matter of birth. And they faced numerous challenges beyond the strictly legal: A white mob attacked a community of predominately African American residents in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829; similar incidents occurred in a number of northern cities where newly arrived black immigrants competed with workers for jobs. During the decade after the riot in Cincinnati, most southern and some northern states limited or banned the immigration of free blacks.
In this context of the sheer cruelty perpetuated against slaves and the vexing legal injustices inflicted against free blacks, an inexorable momentum built for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of full citizenship rights for all African Americans.
The section given comes after a section describing the slave trade and slavery and before another on the Civil War and Reconstruction. I particularly like this section for the astounding accomplishments that are described for both slaves and free blacks, who typically studied under self-education scenarios and succeeded at the highest levels prevailing in their fields, often recording achievements far beyond those of white members of their communities who started life with far more advantages.
After you read this snippet, scroll on down to the next article (actually posted earlier) for the fullest explanation that I have given to date with regard to my motivation for writing Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
And then, as you scroll on down through my blog, you'll find the six other snippets posted thus far, posted amidst other articles that I trust will be of keen interest, as well.
Here is the snippet from Chapter Seven:
Although the life of the slave was laborious and the working hours long, there was some time left over for recreation, amusement, and personal accomplishment. Many slaves became superb hunters and fishers, planted masterful gardens, and played tunes on homemade instruments that would prove to be the progenitors of the blues and jazz genres that are at the soul of American music. Some resourceful slaves cultivated reputations for good behavior that won them off-plantation passes from lenient masters; given access to a wider circle of associations, some slaves learned how to read and write. This knowledge might also come from a comparatively compassionate member of the master’s family, either with or without the master’s permission.
Free blacks also often reached out to their fellow African Americans by providing instruction in reading, writing, and subjects for which those skills served as gateway. African Americans of free status occasionally founded schools, as did those among the white population who opposed slavery and sought to elevate the educational and cultural level of slaves and former slaves. A free black by the name of Elias Neua, who had been born in France, operated a school for African Americans by 1704. Records indicate that a couple of slaves whose given names were Harry and Andrew (surnames unknown) ran a school for basic reading and writing instruction in South Carolina during the early 18th century. For a period beginning in 1751, missionary and teacher Joseph Ottolenghi taught slaves in Georgia at the behest of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Quaker Anthony Benezet ran an evening school for African Americans out of his home during 1750-1760; a group of Quakers also came together in 1774 to run a school for African Americans in Philadelphia. And in 1787, the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves established the New York African Free School, generally credited as the first full-curriculum school for African Americans. Most African Americans eventually became Christians, although some, especially at first, incorporated animistic beliefs into their new faith. They also very notably drew upon African music to enliven standard Christian hymns and to create spirituals unique to African American people. From the African American Christian tradition came much of the impetus for blues and jazz motifs that in turn shaped all music that is American in origin.
For a mostly enslaved people, contributions in many fields were mighty:
In 1721, a Massachusetts slave named Oneissimus taught the famous religious leader Cotton Mather how to inject a patient with a small amount of the small pox virus to create a vaccine effect. A South Carolina slave named Caesar developed antidotes to rattlesnake venom. Also in South Carolina, the slave Wilcie Elfe gained medical knowledge from an owner-doctor, opened a successful pharmaceutical practice in Charleston, patented effective medicines, and sold his curatives throughout the state. Similarly, the slave James Derham studied under owner Dr. Robert Dove, from whom he purchased his freedom and then set up his own medical practice. During the 18th century, former slave David K. McDonough gained fame for his skill as a vision and hearing specialist, displayed at his own Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York.
According to the census of 1860, there were 488,070 free blacks in a total African American population of 4,441,770 (with the slave population, therefore, at 3,953,700 [having grown from 697,897 since 1790]). Hence, free blacks constituted about 11% of the total African American population in the United States just prior to the Civil War. Over half of these free African Americans lived in the South.
Freedom had come in a variety of ways. Some white masters freed offspring that resulted from intercourse with black slaves, thus hoping to avoid social censure. Once in a great while, a slave was so enterprising as to secure off-plantation wage labor, in addition to her or his toil as human chattel, and make enough money to purchase freedom from masters implicitly more lenient and empathetic than most. As the abolitionist movement gained momentum, some southerners felt the tweak of conscience that could give a slave her or his freedom, as reward for faithful service, or just because it seemed the right thing to do. Other slaves were freed by the terms of wills. Some survived the mad dash for freedom, moving across fields and through woods just ahead of sniffing dogs and scurrying agents of the master, against the intent of the fugitive property provisions of the United States Constitution and statutory law.
Some free African Americans themselves owned slaves. Some of these were carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors who bought slaves and made them apprentices. The 1830 census recorded 753 slaveholding African Americans. The 1850 census recorded that 19% of black tailors in Charleston, South Carolina, owned slaves. Slaves worked for free blacks as maids or day laborers and, in a few cases, they worked the fields picking cotton or harvesting, much as they did for white slave owners. William Johnson, a freed slave living in Natchez, Mississippi, became a multi-business entrepreneur, running barbershops, purchasing and renting out property, and superintending a money-lending business; hiring managers to run businesses selling toys, wallpaper, coal, and sand; renting carts and other vehicles; offering a service watering down the streets of the hot southern city of Natchez; and accumulating 350 acres of land on which he put fifteen slaves to work chopping down timber and farming the fields. New Orleans merchant Cecee McCarty trained slaves as salespeople who peddled imported dry goods across the state of Louisiana; in time, she amassed a fortune.
But black slave owners were a tiny portion of the free African American population. Most free African Americans worked as laborers or skilled crafts people; some entered the professions or started businesses.
Paul Cuffe (1759-1817) operated a thriving shipbuilding business in Connecticut, gained great wealth, and trained other African Americans to start businesses of their own. James Forten (1766-1842) also made a fortune in the maritime industry, inventing a device to handle sails more efficiently and launching a company that employed a total of 40 employees, including on his payroll both African American and white workers. At mid-19th century, William Whipper of Pennsylvania began his entrepreneurial career as a clothes cleaner, became an expert in steam scouring, and prospered so greatly as to pour investments into multiple successful business ventures. Tax records from the mid-19th century indicate that there were 21 African American entrepreneurs in New York City making over $100,000 per year, thus earning what for that era was a huge amount of money.
African Americans of the pre-Civil War era made huge contributions with their scientific inventions. Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) compiled The Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris, published annually from 1791 to 1802; he also served on the commission that planned the construction of a new capital at Washington, D. C., in 1789, then from 1790 was among those commissioned to survey the site for the future capital. Henry Blair received a patent for a unique seed planter in 1834. Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894) received a patent in 1846 for a vacuum evaporator that produced white sugar crystals from sugarcane juice and proved also to have utility in the production of soap, gelatin, and glue. Lewis Temple (1800-1854) invented a harpoon that revolutionized the whaling industry, given the enhanced effectiveness of his invention for hunting the huge oceangoing mammals whose bodies were used for the production of many commercially lucrative goods; Temple, though, never gained much from the commerce induced by his invention: he never was able to gain a patent and died penniless in the very city of Bedford, Massachusetts, whose economy had boomed on the strength of his invention.
The entrepreneurial success and inventiveness of African Americans in the early 19th century was not rewarded with citizenship, which was obviously denied to slaves but also withheld from free blacks. Free blacks in Maryland and North Carolina had to have special licenses to sell corn, wheat, or tobacco. In most states of both the North and the South, free blacks could not vote, hold public office, or testify in courts against whites. African Americans could not carry weapons in this era of commonplace white gun-wielding. Failure to pay off debts or remit tax payments resulted in fine or imprisonment for free blacks of the North; in the South, such a debtor or tax offender could be sold into slavery as means to collect the sums owed.
African American artisans, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists, and professionals formed a small but energetic black middle class that grew restive with the conditions of American life, at the same time that their success provided powerful arguments against the racist pronouncements and assumptions that pervaded white-dominated society. African Americans were in large measure responsible for establishing the economy and physical infrastructure of the United States. They designed and constructed churches, mansions, public buildings, and private plantations.
John Hemings is famous for his role in producing articles and fixtures for the Monticello, the plantation of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. Hemings was a slave at Monticello, but he was no field hand. He was a joiner by trade and a genius who created numerous exquisite pieces of furniture in the woodworking shop that he ran on Jefferson’s plantation. Following Jefferson’s sketches, Hemings turned out chairs, tables, benches, fine railings, arches, and window shutters.
African Americans in the growing urban centers of the North generally faced prospects of inadequate public education facilities, inferior housing, and lack of legal protections that white citizens held as a matter of birth. And they faced numerous challenges beyond the strictly legal: A white mob attacked a community of predominately African American residents in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829; similar incidents occurred in a number of northern cities where newly arrived black immigrants competed with workers for jobs. During the decade after the riot in Cincinnati, most southern and some northern states limited or banned the immigration of free blacks.
In this context of the sheer cruelty perpetuated against slaves and the vexing legal injustices inflicted against free blacks, an inexorable momentum built for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of full citizenship rights for all African Americans.
Sep 27, 2015
Writing >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education< to Atone for the Miserable Education that Students Get in the Minneapolis Public Schools
Whenever I am reading a newspaper or journal article with a student, or training that person to take the SAT or ACT, I always end up giving mini-courses in economics, political science, psychology, history, literature, English usage, the fine arts, or natural science. This is in addition to teaching them most of what they know about math and the skill of reading at advanced levels of comprehension.
I give these mini-courses and teach these skills because the education that students receive in the Minneapolis Public Schools is so insubstantial. And my identification of the Minneapolis Public Schools with the rendering an insubstantial education may be taken to apply to all urban school districts. We are getting some signals of improvement from Charlotte-Mecklenburg and from Cincinnati, but we’ll have to wait for many years to see if the school districts in those urban centers realize their seeming promise. We have been disappointed so many times.
Even in the areas of math and reading, for which student assessments got so embarrassing that even the education establishment started giving belated attention, the results are not encouraging. The United States fares poorly by comparison with other nations on the highly regarded PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), a program that tests academic skills in math, reading, and science in all major industrialized nations and many developing, emerging, and newly developed nations as an activity of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [note that spelling is in the British style for an organization actually based in Paris, France]).
And for young people from economically challenged and historically abused families, the results are disastrous: Almost all young people in these familial categories score poorly on objective tests of skill and knowledge. And they either do not graduate from high school or they have to take remedial courses once in a college or university setting; moreover, graduation rates for students of economically and historically challenged circumstances from colleges and universities are very low.
When reading a substantive article from the newspaper or an ACT practice reading, all kinds of topics are likely to arise. Such topics may lead me to ask questions such as the following:
>>>>> You do know what was important about the Mayflower, right?
>>>>> You know the basic difference between a republic and a monarchy, don’t you?
>>>>> You’ve heard of Sigmund Freud, haven’t you?
>>>>> You know that Buddhism began in India but ended up gaining more followers in Southeast and East Asia, right? And do you know, then, what religion is most prevalent in India?
>>>>> You do know that Newton’s laws of motion and gravity revolutionized how we thought about the physics of planet Earth--- but that Einstein taught us that those laws are not absolute and not at all adequate when contemplating motion and gravity of the greater cosmos--- right?
I always get blank stares when I pose these questions, which arise implicitly from articles that we read, because such topics gain mention in serious reading material. So I end up taking a long time just helping students to understand subjects that they should be learning in school.
Two favorites of mine are the single words “liberal” and “communist.” Just ponder the layers and layers of difficulty in understanding the various meanings of these terms if the student is not given a full exposition that includes usages across historical and societal circumstances.
So all of this got very old.
Wanting to give my students the equivalent of a private school education and then, knowing that even the education rendered at well-regarded private institutions in the United States is overrated, wanting for them much better than that--- I decided just to haul off and write a book, to be entitled, Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
This book is now becoming the chief reading text for my students, who are successively moving through the chapters already written, those focused on economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, and African American history. I will soon have completed the chapters on literature, English usage, and fine arts (visual and musical); and then by early November will have concluded the chapters for mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics.
That will be fourteen chapters covering the subjects most important to an excellent liberal arts education, of the sort that will send students forth into the world culturally enriched, civically informed, and prepared to pursue specialized training for lives of professional satisfaction.
Readers of the whole book will gain that education that most high school and even most university graduates wish that they had received. And now my students will know the answers to the questions posed above--- and many more.
Subscribers to my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota are currently receiving three chapters at a time, per edition. Most recently they have received the first three chapters, those for Economics, Political Science, and Psychology.
Readers of the blog have received snippets that represent about 10% of the full chapters. My goal is to provide an avenue for the journey through the exciting world of knowledge, alerting readers to information that they have never before received--- or refreshing them on subjects studied long ago, awakening them anew to the excitement of knowing, understanding, and thinking deeply about matters of great importance to the fully lived life and the citizen of the world.
Our young people need such an education. They are cheated every day they set foot in the terrible institutions of the Minneapolis Public Schools--- and all other urban schools of the United States.
And well-regarded suburban and private schools are overrated, recording test scores that do not rate high on the PISA exam, not even close to providing the much higher quality education rendered to students in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, and the Scandinavian nations.
If all people, even in the comparatively superb educational systems of the European social democracies and East Asia, mastered all of the knowledge that I am providing in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, this would be a better world:
People would understand the fundamental principles by which national and international economies function; the differences in the vast array of political systems of the world; why people behave as the do; how people of all major world religions view the divine and the purpose of humanity; how world, American, and African American history have given us the world of today; the finest works of the European Old Masters, the Song Dynasty landscape artists, and the exquisite sculpture of the Ibo; the roots of hip-hop and rap in the work songs of the slaves; the meaning of a gerund and how a participle can hang; the principles of geometry and trigonometry utilized in constructing bridges that usually don’t fall--- but why they do when they do; how asexual reproduction occurs; the chemical combinations that yield favorable versus unfavorable outcomes for humanity; and why energy is equal to mass, if one takes velocity into consideration.
Knowing such things enriches life, makes this potentially wonderful world understandable, and reduces the chances that people live out this one earthly sojourn forever ignorant, always wondering but never knowing who they are and how they relate to other creations of the natural world. This is the education that our young people and all people should have but do not receive. Tired of having to provide my students this sort of education in ad hoc lectures, I have tapped out the foundations of an excellent education on my keyboard. Now my students will have the education that they should have in Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, and so will you my readers.
Then we’ll share what we know with a world in need of the healing that knowledge and understanding will provide.
I give these mini-courses and teach these skills because the education that students receive in the Minneapolis Public Schools is so insubstantial. And my identification of the Minneapolis Public Schools with the rendering an insubstantial education may be taken to apply to all urban school districts. We are getting some signals of improvement from Charlotte-Mecklenburg and from Cincinnati, but we’ll have to wait for many years to see if the school districts in those urban centers realize their seeming promise. We have been disappointed so many times.
Even in the areas of math and reading, for which student assessments got so embarrassing that even the education establishment started giving belated attention, the results are not encouraging. The United States fares poorly by comparison with other nations on the highly regarded PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), a program that tests academic skills in math, reading, and science in all major industrialized nations and many developing, emerging, and newly developed nations as an activity of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [note that spelling is in the British style for an organization actually based in Paris, France]).
And for young people from economically challenged and historically abused families, the results are disastrous: Almost all young people in these familial categories score poorly on objective tests of skill and knowledge. And they either do not graduate from high school or they have to take remedial courses once in a college or university setting; moreover, graduation rates for students of economically and historically challenged circumstances from colleges and universities are very low.
When reading a substantive article from the newspaper or an ACT practice reading, all kinds of topics are likely to arise. Such topics may lead me to ask questions such as the following:
>>>>> You do know what was important about the Mayflower, right?
>>>>> You know the basic difference between a republic and a monarchy, don’t you?
>>>>> You’ve heard of Sigmund Freud, haven’t you?
>>>>> You know that Buddhism began in India but ended up gaining more followers in Southeast and East Asia, right? And do you know, then, what religion is most prevalent in India?
>>>>> You do know that Newton’s laws of motion and gravity revolutionized how we thought about the physics of planet Earth--- but that Einstein taught us that those laws are not absolute and not at all adequate when contemplating motion and gravity of the greater cosmos--- right?
I always get blank stares when I pose these questions, which arise implicitly from articles that we read, because such topics gain mention in serious reading material. So I end up taking a long time just helping students to understand subjects that they should be learning in school.
Two favorites of mine are the single words “liberal” and “communist.” Just ponder the layers and layers of difficulty in understanding the various meanings of these terms if the student is not given a full exposition that includes usages across historical and societal circumstances.
So all of this got very old.
Wanting to give my students the equivalent of a private school education and then, knowing that even the education rendered at well-regarded private institutions in the United States is overrated, wanting for them much better than that--- I decided just to haul off and write a book, to be entitled, Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
This book is now becoming the chief reading text for my students, who are successively moving through the chapters already written, those focused on economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, and African American history. I will soon have completed the chapters on literature, English usage, and fine arts (visual and musical); and then by early November will have concluded the chapters for mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics.
That will be fourteen chapters covering the subjects most important to an excellent liberal arts education, of the sort that will send students forth into the world culturally enriched, civically informed, and prepared to pursue specialized training for lives of professional satisfaction.
Readers of the whole book will gain that education that most high school and even most university graduates wish that they had received. And now my students will know the answers to the questions posed above--- and many more.
Subscribers to my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota are currently receiving three chapters at a time, per edition. Most recently they have received the first three chapters, those for Economics, Political Science, and Psychology.
Readers of the blog have received snippets that represent about 10% of the full chapters. My goal is to provide an avenue for the journey through the exciting world of knowledge, alerting readers to information that they have never before received--- or refreshing them on subjects studied long ago, awakening them anew to the excitement of knowing, understanding, and thinking deeply about matters of great importance to the fully lived life and the citizen of the world.
Our young people need such an education. They are cheated every day they set foot in the terrible institutions of the Minneapolis Public Schools--- and all other urban schools of the United States.
And well-regarded suburban and private schools are overrated, recording test scores that do not rate high on the PISA exam, not even close to providing the much higher quality education rendered to students in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, and the Scandinavian nations.
If all people, even in the comparatively superb educational systems of the European social democracies and East Asia, mastered all of the knowledge that I am providing in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, this would be a better world:
People would understand the fundamental principles by which national and international economies function; the differences in the vast array of political systems of the world; why people behave as the do; how people of all major world religions view the divine and the purpose of humanity; how world, American, and African American history have given us the world of today; the finest works of the European Old Masters, the Song Dynasty landscape artists, and the exquisite sculpture of the Ibo; the roots of hip-hop and rap in the work songs of the slaves; the meaning of a gerund and how a participle can hang; the principles of geometry and trigonometry utilized in constructing bridges that usually don’t fall--- but why they do when they do; how asexual reproduction occurs; the chemical combinations that yield favorable versus unfavorable outcomes for humanity; and why energy is equal to mass, if one takes velocity into consideration.
Knowing such things enriches life, makes this potentially wonderful world understandable, and reduces the chances that people live out this one earthly sojourn forever ignorant, always wondering but never knowing who they are and how they relate to other creations of the natural world. This is the education that our young people and all people should have but do not receive. Tired of having to provide my students this sort of education in ad hoc lectures, I have tapped out the foundations of an excellent education on my keyboard. Now my students will have the education that they should have in Foundations of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, and so will you my readers.
Then we’ll share what we know with a world in need of the healing that knowledge and understanding will provide.
Sep 16, 2015
The Insincerity of American Society with Regard to Attaining Educational Equity, as Considered in the Demise of No Child Left Behind
When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he wanted to concentrate on a domestic agenda for which he vowed to apply conservative solutions in compassionate service to impoverished and other challenged populations often considered more politically responsive to programs of Democratic provenance:
In 2002--- as one of the few programs on the Bush domestic agenda that was not permanently deferred due to the exigencies of the 9-11 attacks--- the president oversaw bipartisan (Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Representative John Boehner helped secure support) passage of legislation on which personnel at the United States Department of Education had worked; officially a renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first issued during the presidency of President Lyndon Johnson, this legislation went by the more specific appellation of No Child Left Behind.
Consistent with President Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, the explanatory comments in the legislative document cautioned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and put forward an aggressive program to achieve educational equity by 2014. To attain such a lofty goal, the legislation mandated the construction of tests (assessments) for evaluation of grade level performance at Grades 3-8 and the concomitant generation of instruments for measuring the achievement of high school students in math, reading, and writing.
Very importantly, the data were to be disaggregated to assess achievement of students according to gender, economic level, and ethnicity, and schools were to be held responsible for grade level achievement in all demographic categories. Those schools that were found to be underserving any of the student populations were put on a five-year sequence of warning, hiring of outside tutors, and restructuring for persistent failure. Over the longer term, city, state, or private contractor control of perpetually failing schools and school districts was to be an option.
At first, Republicans were solidly behind the legislation, which conveyed a get-tough approach that made them feel that an old-school return to basics was moving forward. But within a half-decade came the conservative push-back against a federally mandated program: Republicans began repeating a refrain in favor of local control and the effective disassembling of the working framework of No Child Left Behind.
As to Democrats, they were subject to immediate pressure from the education establishment--- especially the National Education Association (NEA)and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and their local school district teacher union affiliates--- that typically contributed heavy cash to the campaigns of Democrats. By the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, most Democrats both in Congress and local legislative chambers were working to gut No Child Left Behind.
By the time George Bush left office, No Child Left Behind had been so seriously undermined as to have lost any potential for raising the performance level of all students. When President Obama took office his staff at the United States Department of Education began a new program called, “Race to the Top,’’ which mandated that states show anew how they were going to address the persistent gap in performance levels between the white and the economically well-off, on the higher performance side, and young people of color and low income, on the lower performance side.
Buying into the rhetoric and prevarication by both Democrats and Republicans, the Obama administration approved waivers from the mandates of No Child Left Behind in states that could construct and articulate the case for an alternative program for achieving educational equity.
Thus it was that one of the few promising items from the George W. Bush domestic agenda was gutted by political forces at left and right--- and how we still wring our hands over persistent demographically indicated performance levels--- having, over the course of about ten years, destroyed the most promising program in American history for addressing the issue of educational equity.
In 2002--- as one of the few programs on the Bush domestic agenda that was not permanently deferred due to the exigencies of the 9-11 attacks--- the president oversaw bipartisan (Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Representative John Boehner helped secure support) passage of legislation on which personnel at the United States Department of Education had worked; officially a renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first issued during the presidency of President Lyndon Johnson, this legislation went by the more specific appellation of No Child Left Behind.
Consistent with President Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, the explanatory comments in the legislative document cautioned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and put forward an aggressive program to achieve educational equity by 2014. To attain such a lofty goal, the legislation mandated the construction of tests (assessments) for evaluation of grade level performance at Grades 3-8 and the concomitant generation of instruments for measuring the achievement of high school students in math, reading, and writing.
Very importantly, the data were to be disaggregated to assess achievement of students according to gender, economic level, and ethnicity, and schools were to be held responsible for grade level achievement in all demographic categories. Those schools that were found to be underserving any of the student populations were put on a five-year sequence of warning, hiring of outside tutors, and restructuring for persistent failure. Over the longer term, city, state, or private contractor control of perpetually failing schools and school districts was to be an option.
At first, Republicans were solidly behind the legislation, which conveyed a get-tough approach that made them feel that an old-school return to basics was moving forward. But within a half-decade came the conservative push-back against a federally mandated program: Republicans began repeating a refrain in favor of local control and the effective disassembling of the working framework of No Child Left Behind.
As to Democrats, they were subject to immediate pressure from the education establishment--- especially the National Education Association (NEA)and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and their local school district teacher union affiliates--- that typically contributed heavy cash to the campaigns of Democrats. By the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, most Democrats both in Congress and local legislative chambers were working to gut No Child Left Behind.
By the time George Bush left office, No Child Left Behind had been so seriously undermined as to have lost any potential for raising the performance level of all students. When President Obama took office his staff at the United States Department of Education began a new program called, “Race to the Top,’’ which mandated that states show anew how they were going to address the persistent gap in performance levels between the white and the economically well-off, on the higher performance side, and young people of color and low income, on the lower performance side.
Buying into the rhetoric and prevarication by both Democrats and Republicans, the Obama administration approved waivers from the mandates of No Child Left Behind in states that could construct and articulate the case for an alternative program for achieving educational equity.
Thus it was that one of the few promising items from the George W. Bush domestic agenda was gutted by political forces at left and right--- and how we still wring our hands over persistent demographically indicated performance levels--- having, over the course of about ten years, destroyed the most promising program in American history for addressing the issue of educational equity.
Sep 4, 2015
A Portion of a Communication to One of My Students, Currently Matriculating at the University Level
As director and teacher in the New Salem Educational Initiative, the relationships that I establish with my students are forever. I follow them through their university years (after having been their teacher as early as Grade K) and beyond.
Here is a portion of a communication that I sent to one of my students currently matriculating at the university level.
The matter that I am addressing is the range of qualities evident in certain professor types--- what mix of heavyweight research, ongoing reading in the field of specialty, and pure pedagogical ability the professor manifests in the classroom particularly and in the university setting more broadly:
>>>>>
Some professors possess more knowledge than others.
In that regard, they tend to fall into three categories:
1) There are some professors who are powerhouse researchers who have done a lot of original research and written many books based on that research.
2) There are others who studied through to the Ph.D., by definition, then, having absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge; but then they tend to coast on that knowledge base without keeping up in their fields.
3) Then there are others who do not do much if any original research (like those in #2), but they do read a lot and keep up with the latest developments in their fields. Their knowledge base can be just as good as the heavyweight researchers; they just do not make as many original contributions to their fields of specialization.
The question then becomes what kinds of teachers these professors are.
Sometimes a university professor is heavy into her or his research and does not care all that much about teaching; but I have known many who both made major contributions to their fields and still were dynamite teachers.
A professor in category #2 or #3 had better be a dynamite teacher, or that professor's value to the institution is slight. If one does not emphasize research that brings the university recognition, then she or he has the very major obligation to do a super job teaching.
I know a bit about the research and publication histories of your professors, but I've never taken their classes, so you'd have to tell me how effectively they communicate what they've designated for you to learn.
So--- how are your teachers? Which one of them is the best communicator? Are they all fairly good? Is there one who is clearly not as good a pure teacher as the others?
I know that when the professor is clear that you will understand. So please ask good questions, make them be as good as they can be, and ask for additional clarification in office hours as necessary:
Sometimes one clarification can open up the breakthrough into understanding necessary to grasp an important concept, which then builds on other concepts toward a unified grasp of the topic of current emphasis.
Aug 31, 2015
A Sixth Snippet from My New Book, >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education<: Evolution of Native American Cultures (From the American History Chapter)
This article continues a series of postings from my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education. Readers may learn of my motivation for writing this book and read the five other snippets by scrolling down a few articles on the blog. The snippet posted in this article is from a section on the evolution of the Native American peoples from my American History chapter.
About 17,000 years ago, with the world at the height of its last Ice Age, an icy bridge across today’s Bering Strait served as the conduit for people following their game herds from Siberia into Alaska. From there, they trekked southward to the Rocky Mountains by about 10,000 years ago and from the Rockies moved eastward to the Atlantic coast. These peoples fashioned bows and arrows, war clubs, and spears from wood and stone; with the wooly mammoth extinct as they were in the midst of their migrations across the plains and prairies of the upper West and Midwest, they hunted small game, deer, moose, and the American bison (buffalo).
By about 1500 B. C. (BCE), some of these hunter-gatherers learned to cultivate crops on land along rivers, settling into small villages and developing distinct cultures.
The Aleut of southwestern Alaska lived in sod houses, going forth to fish and hunt wildlife, including sea mammals; women used an original two-strand twining technique to weave clothes and blankets. The Inuit people spread out from southeastern Alaska to Greenland, hunting whale, seal, and caribou; in response to their Arctic climate, they built ice igloos, constructed the versatile kayak, and wore footwear highly adapted to ice and snow.
The Ottawa people originally lived north of the Great Lakes before moving to an inlet (Georgia Bay) of Lake Huron in southeastern Ontario. The Huron people also lived in Ontario, as did a portion of the Iroquois confederacy (comprised of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca); the Iroquois also settled in today’s Quebec Province and New York State. The Narragansett people constructed their wigwams (domed houses with sapling frames covered with bark and deerskin) in Rhode Island.
Arapaho, Blackfoot, Comanche, Cree, Crow, and Flathead tribes lived and hunted in various areas of the Great Plains; the Cree also lived in the woodlands along and north of today’s Canadian border. To the northwest (today’s Idaho, Oregon, and Washington) lived the Nez Perce, while across the expanses of today’s Midwest lived Cheyenne, Dakota, Kickapoo, Ojibwe, Osage, and Shawnee.
The Cherokee were skillful farmers who lived in the southern Allegheny Mountains of Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. The Delaware built their rectangular, bark-covered houses in the woodlands areas extending from the Atlantic. The Miami also were an Eastern Woodlands people who burned forest land to clear fields and control brush to abet their agricultural economy; they also, though, hunted buffalo (unusual for those living so far east). The Shawnee lived in Kentucky and West Virginia after being pushed southeastward from Ohio.
The eight clans of the Seminole lived in Florida. The Chickasaw hunted panther, deer, bear, beaver, and otter in northern Mississippi; males distinctively shaved both sides of the head, leaving a central crest. In other areas stretching across the American South were Natchez, Choctaw, and Creek, the latter composed of 50 distinct bands.
The Kiowa were a highly mobile people, based in Oklahoma but roaming and raiding far enough to bring back parrots and monkeys from South America. In the American Southwest lived Apache, Hopi, Navaho, and Utes. The Yaqui were ardent warriors dominating northern and northwestern Mexico.
Native American societies responded to their natural environments and local circumstances of life in ways that produced a variety of cultural traits, economic activities, and artistic expressions:
The Iroquois used wampum, belts or strings with knots and beaded designs serving as mnemonic aids for chroniclers of stories and legends; wampum also served as currency and as a unit of measure.
Pueblo tribes crafted items associated with kachina dancers, including masks that the dancers wore and dolls representing the dancers themselves; they also produced turquois and shell jewelry and exquisite pots.
In a fascinating practice comparable to those of Tibetan Buddhists, the Navajo created colorful sand paintings from sand, charcoal, cornmeal, and pollen to depict religious symbols and to create a sense of spiritual reverence--- then, as comment on the evanescence of physical existence and material objects, they scattered the coloring agents back into nature.
Native American groups made logically adaptive decisions in matters of diet, physical security, and economy:
The Inuit (Eskimo) cured and stored meat and fish for the winter. Tribes of the Pacific Northwest fished from 50-foot long dugout canoes that were perfect for seafaring. The Eastern Woodlands people used hoes and digging sticks to work fields productive of maize and tobacco. The Dakota and other Plains people adroitly whipped up a stampede among buffalo and drove these over cliffs.
Many peoples of the American Southwest ground acorns into flour that they made into dough, which they flattened and placed on heated stones for producing wafer-thin bread.
Certain concepts and practices undergirded most Native American belief systems, while others were highly distinctive to particular groups:
Most Native American groups gave high status to a shaman who was perceived to mediate between human beings and the gods, spirits, and souls of the dead. The special powers of the shamans were often associated with a striking physical appearance, including features that we today think of as being those of the handicapped or disfigured. The shaman would typically acquire dramatic insight while suffering a physical ordeal and drifting into a trance. Realization of her or his powers would come with the sensation of leaving the body to soar through the realms of the gods and the dead.
The shaman was many things to her or his people: spirit medium, mystic seer, wise sage, eloquent poet. The shaman was also a physician who could both apply curative herbs and oust an offending spirit. Curing disease by expelling a malevolent spirit would involve an emotional array of activities: swaying, drumming, chanting, sighing, groaning, and laughing hysterically--- with the emotional state deepening and the sound rising as the healing rite moved through successive stages.
Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest told tales of land and sea, bear and salmon, military victories and dramatic historical events. Clan-based totemic societies formed to express the mystic relationship between one’s group and an emblematic figure. The clan’s legends and history would be told by masked dancers or master storytellers among the elders. Totemic societies performed rites venerating the Sun, Moon, Sky Being, and Creator (in the form of a Trickster Raven).
The Cree people venerated spirits associated with the hunt, and they revered an Earth Goddess who gave life and maternal attention to all animals. Generations past, present, and future existed in close association: The souls of the ancestors lingered in close proximity to their living descendants. Legends featuring talking animals and the Four Directions gave testimony to Cree belief in the unity of Nature.
The Inuit (Eskimo) conveyed myths of the whale, the walrus, mysterious ghosts, and fantastic creatures. During long winter months, the Inuit would often sit waiting for caribou, or they would situate themselves by blowholes for hunting fish or seal; such scenarios could animate imaginations productive of wondrous spirits and startling occurrences. Sitting and peering into the winter sky, the Inuit would see family and friends in the aurora borealis (Northern Lights) dancing in a realm beyond Earth, the life to come.
Native Americans on the Great Plains revered the Spirit of the Buffalo and the Earth Mother. Men organized themselves into ritual societies that prepared them and sustained them in the activities of governance, war, and hunting. Frequently under the counsel of a spirit guide, young people would come of age with a Vision Quest in which they would dwell under conditions of fasting and physical seclusion, productive of dream-states giving insights into their future life missions and roles in family and society.
The Iroquois believed in an impressive but remote “All Father” who dwelled in every aspect of Nature. Spirits in the natural world were thought to be more active in daily life and in annual events, controlling the seasons and animating major festivals associated with the agricultural calendar.
Pueblo people sat atop mesas, the rocky tableland of the American Southwest, peering into a world in which visionary beings brought the blessings of life and received love and veneration in return.
Native Americans living in Pueblo communities told tales from a vast assortment of myths conveying the relationship between humankind and the plants and animals of the Natural World.
Among other peoples of the American Southwest, shamans communicated intensely with gods, ancestors, and the spirits of Maize, Rainbow, Sun, and Thunder. Around communal fires, storytellers told of dramatic events associated with the hunt and the experiences of the ancestors. Boys at eleven or twelve years of age typically went on the Vision Quest.
Among those Native Americans dwelling and farming in the American South, the Natchez were notable for belief in a Sacred King. Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws told tales of a Trickster Spirit, a personified Rabbit, and the origins of tobacco and maize.
The Native American peoples were the first inhabitants of what we now call the United States. Their logical rhythms of life, intimate connections to nature and ancestors, and rational economic responses to environmental circumstances were severely disrupted by the arrival of Spaniards, British, and French in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Aug 28, 2015
Evaluating the Personnel at the Minneapolis Public Schools: Are Board and Staff Up to the Responsibility of Delivering an Excellent K-12 Education?
You folks reading about the needed overhaul in K-12 education must remember that the Minneapolis Public Schools are just that: public schools.
Inasmuch as they are public institutions, their staff members are paid from public funds and serve because the public allows them to do so. People tend to be intimidated by people who have their offices in large buildings of bureaucratic institutions, forgetting that those very employees should be intimidated by the public. They should be constantly on edge, ever thinking that if they are not doing their jobs they could be dismissed at a moment’s notice.
This means that current staff members of the Minneapolis Public Schools should be very much on edge, indeed: They have they not done their job for at least 35 years.
The Minneapolis Public Schools as a central school district responsible for properly educating everyone has educated no one very well, and has been absolutely neglectful in educating young people from families of dysfunction and poverty. The time is now, so we must be fast about evaluating those currently responsible for the education of the children and adolescents of Minneapolis.
Perpend:
Interim Superintendent Michael Goar served under recent Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and should have come in with full momentum to implement the programs pertinent to the Shift, High Priority Schools, and Focused Instruction initiatives. He is 66.6…% successful, which is not enough, especially since he has neglected the most important program.
>>>>> He has done a marvelous job in cutting staff, reducing the former 651-count burden in the central office on West Broadway to 531 (an elimination of 120 positions); this is consistent with the Shift initiative.
>>>>> Limited but reasonably persuasive evidence suggests that progress is being made in lifting the academic performance of the High Priority Schools. A presentation made last spring by Laura Cavender, the district official responsible for superintending the program at those schools, strongly indicates progress--- but with a long way still to go to ensure that the academic performance of students from impoverished circumstances at least matches that of their economically better situated peers.
So Goar can be given credit for overseeing advances in the Shift and High Priority Schools programs.
>>>>> But the best evidence available to me suggests strongly that Interim Superintendent Goar has failed to implement Focused Instruction in a way that fulfills the potential of the program.
Focused Instruction is the initiative begun during the Bernadeia Johnson administration to bring curricular consistency to each grade level and to make the curriculum more knowledge intensive.
Although many teachers have indicated that they have enjoyed the training to deliver such a knowledge-based curriculum, there have been protestations from Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) president Lynn Nordgren and other hard-core teacher union types. These latter strongly manifest the tendency to object to any initiative that takes them out of their comfort zone, into which they have long brought faulty concepts from their abysmal training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.
Goar may very well be accommodating Nordgren, et al, in failing to move the Focused Instruction initiative forward. Or he may be listening to the shallow thinkers in much of the education change community, for whom the search for new, innovative approaches avowedly points the way to better education.
This constitutes what I term the “hail Mary pass” approach, whereby in the absence of any sense of the nature of an excellent K-12 education (achieved via knowledge intensive curriculum, logically implemented in grade by grade sequence; by knowledgeable teachers able to impart this education to all students), these gadflies advocate for charter schools and vouchers. Lacking the conceptual acumen and the energy necessary to induce change at the central school district level, they put their trust in the ability of putative innovators to experiment their way to better education.
This sort of approach is what Goar prevailed upon school board members to take in a unanimous vote last spring for four new pseudo charter schools called Community Partnership Schools. The school board thus abdicated adult responsibility to specify the cultural inheritance of knowledge that we want our students to have as they walk across the stage to claim a diploma after 13 years in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
This is the sort of responsibility that I assume on this blog; in my monthly editions of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; and in my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
Goar and his staff are your employees. The public pays them.
And the public elects the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
If any of these people cannot specify the constituent elements of an excellent education, and the qualifications of teachers able to impart an excellent education, they need to go.
We should first prevail upon Goar to do his job. The sad reality is that he may be as good as we can get, given the paltry pool from which we can draw in deciding upon a longer-term superintendent. But if Goar does not seize the opportunity provided by Focused Instruction to provide a knowledge-rich education to our precious young people, the public should send a message that he is not the person to lead the Minneapolis Public Schools.
And the same message should be sent to all central office personnel; and to Tracine Asberry, Carla Bates, Kim Ellison, and Josh Reimnitz. The latter four are Minneapolis school board members who will be up for reelection in 2017. If they have no ability to articulate a definition of an excellent education; or to specify the retraining program that will be necessary to produce teachers capable of imparting a truly excellent education; then they should not be returned to their positions in 2017.
If we are serious about overhauling K-12 education and thus making of our nation the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be, we will take responsibility as adults and apply all necessary pressure on educators to do their jobs.
And if anyone at the central office or school buildings of the Minneapolis Public Schools; or on the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education; is not doing her or his job by ensuring educational excellence for young people of all demographic descriptors, that person must go.
The overhaul of K-12 education is the paramount domestic issue of our time. Without doing this, we get nothing else right.
Our efforts are long overdue.
The time is now.
Look in that mirror again.
Inasmuch as they are public institutions, their staff members are paid from public funds and serve because the public allows them to do so. People tend to be intimidated by people who have their offices in large buildings of bureaucratic institutions, forgetting that those very employees should be intimidated by the public. They should be constantly on edge, ever thinking that if they are not doing their jobs they could be dismissed at a moment’s notice.
This means that current staff members of the Minneapolis Public Schools should be very much on edge, indeed: They have they not done their job for at least 35 years.
The Minneapolis Public Schools as a central school district responsible for properly educating everyone has educated no one very well, and has been absolutely neglectful in educating young people from families of dysfunction and poverty. The time is now, so we must be fast about evaluating those currently responsible for the education of the children and adolescents of Minneapolis.
Perpend:
Interim Superintendent Michael Goar served under recent Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and should have come in with full momentum to implement the programs pertinent to the Shift, High Priority Schools, and Focused Instruction initiatives. He is 66.6…% successful, which is not enough, especially since he has neglected the most important program.
>>>>> He has done a marvelous job in cutting staff, reducing the former 651-count burden in the central office on West Broadway to 531 (an elimination of 120 positions); this is consistent with the Shift initiative.
>>>>> Limited but reasonably persuasive evidence suggests that progress is being made in lifting the academic performance of the High Priority Schools. A presentation made last spring by Laura Cavender, the district official responsible for superintending the program at those schools, strongly indicates progress--- but with a long way still to go to ensure that the academic performance of students from impoverished circumstances at least matches that of their economically better situated peers.
So Goar can be given credit for overseeing advances in the Shift and High Priority Schools programs.
>>>>> But the best evidence available to me suggests strongly that Interim Superintendent Goar has failed to implement Focused Instruction in a way that fulfills the potential of the program.
Focused Instruction is the initiative begun during the Bernadeia Johnson administration to bring curricular consistency to each grade level and to make the curriculum more knowledge intensive.
Although many teachers have indicated that they have enjoyed the training to deliver such a knowledge-based curriculum, there have been protestations from Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) president Lynn Nordgren and other hard-core teacher union types. These latter strongly manifest the tendency to object to any initiative that takes them out of their comfort zone, into which they have long brought faulty concepts from their abysmal training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.
Goar may very well be accommodating Nordgren, et al, in failing to move the Focused Instruction initiative forward. Or he may be listening to the shallow thinkers in much of the education change community, for whom the search for new, innovative approaches avowedly points the way to better education.
This constitutes what I term the “hail Mary pass” approach, whereby in the absence of any sense of the nature of an excellent K-12 education (achieved via knowledge intensive curriculum, logically implemented in grade by grade sequence; by knowledgeable teachers able to impart this education to all students), these gadflies advocate for charter schools and vouchers. Lacking the conceptual acumen and the energy necessary to induce change at the central school district level, they put their trust in the ability of putative innovators to experiment their way to better education.
This sort of approach is what Goar prevailed upon school board members to take in a unanimous vote last spring for four new pseudo charter schools called Community Partnership Schools. The school board thus abdicated adult responsibility to specify the cultural inheritance of knowledge that we want our students to have as they walk across the stage to claim a diploma after 13 years in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
This is the sort of responsibility that I assume on this blog; in my monthly editions of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; and in my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
Goar and his staff are your employees. The public pays them.
And the public elects the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
If any of these people cannot specify the constituent elements of an excellent education, and the qualifications of teachers able to impart an excellent education, they need to go.
We should first prevail upon Goar to do his job. The sad reality is that he may be as good as we can get, given the paltry pool from which we can draw in deciding upon a longer-term superintendent. But if Goar does not seize the opportunity provided by Focused Instruction to provide a knowledge-rich education to our precious young people, the public should send a message that he is not the person to lead the Minneapolis Public Schools.
And the same message should be sent to all central office personnel; and to Tracine Asberry, Carla Bates, Kim Ellison, and Josh Reimnitz. The latter four are Minneapolis school board members who will be up for reelection in 2017. If they have no ability to articulate a definition of an excellent education; or to specify the retraining program that will be necessary to produce teachers capable of imparting a truly excellent education; then they should not be returned to their positions in 2017.
If we are serious about overhauling K-12 education and thus making of our nation the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be, we will take responsibility as adults and apply all necessary pressure on educators to do their jobs.
And if anyone at the central office or school buildings of the Minneapolis Public Schools; or on the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education; is not doing her or his job by ensuring educational excellence for young people of all demographic descriptors, that person must go.
The overhaul of K-12 education is the paramount domestic issue of our time. Without doing this, we get nothing else right.
Our efforts are long overdue.
The time is now.
Look in that mirror again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)