Students Living in the Depths of Poverty Ascend to the Stratosphere of the Sublime Via the Power of Shakespeare

On a recent Sunday afternoon, after I had attended services at my church (pastor Jerry McAfee’s New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in North Minneapolis), I drove over to the East Side of St. Paul for a scheduled meeting with Evelyn Patterson (data privacy pseudonym, as with other names in this article), the mother of Damon Preston (Grade 7) and Javon Jakes (Grade 1), and the significant other of Marcel Gifford.  I have chronicled my eight-year relationship with this economically and functionally challenged family in other articles posted on this blog.    


This had been a particularly rough week for the family. Evelyn has struggled for years with many mental issues and demons from her past. A decade ago, her mother died just as a rapprochement had begun to develop between the two after many years of estrangement, a separation that had robbed Evelyn of her birth mother during the critical years of late childhood and adolescence. Evelyn’s maternal grandmother filled the role with reasonable rectitude, in a motif familiar to many African American families in the course of the last three decades. But the absence of her mother had been ever painful. The loss of her mother just as they were getting to know each other again seemed another cruel blow delivered by some hovering oppressive force in a life that had also known two incestuous rapes, one by a maternal uncle, the other by her own father.


The tenth anniversary of her mother’s death had occurred just eight days before my arrival on this Sunday afternoon. The event brought an array of disturbing memories to the fore, and the intervening days had been tumultuous for the family. Evelyn had manifested her deep sorrow and heightened rage by lashing out at Damon, Javon, and Marcel. She skipped her medications numerous times. Her behavior was erratic and largely irrational. The responses her outburst elicited from her sons and Marcel unfortunately matched her own angry verbiage and occasional physical ferocity.


Riding the turbulent waves of a week gone wrong, Evelyn signaled to me that she could not make our 2:00 PM Sunday meeting for the sort of academic session that she and I had been maintaining for several weeks, according to a plan to prepare Evelyn for community college and the pursuit of a degree (first associates, eventually bachelor’s) in business. I had been constantly on the phone with Evelyn, Damon, and Marcel throughout the week, and I had made numerous trips to their apartment to quell some disturbance. I love these people. They trust me. There has been too little love and trust in their lives. My words have moral suasion:


I finally convinced Evelyn to keep our scheduled 2:00 PM academic session.


The power of Shakespeare very well may be the transformative force in a life that badly needs transformation:


I picked Evelyn up at her apartment in East St. Paul at 2:00 PM and drove the fifteen minutes back to New Salem, where I hold my 17 one-on-one and small group academic sessions spread over seven days a week. We settled in for an hour of multi-step algebraic equations and workaday applications. Then we turned to reading.


For three academic years now my students and I have performed one of my compressed versions of classic Shakespearean plays, using the original Elizabethan language of the bard, with each play shortened for presentation in a 30-minute format. Over these three academic years, spanning 2012-2013, 2013-2014, and 2014-2015, we have performed King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth; and we have attended performances of these dramas at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona (Minnesota) and at the Guthrie and Jungle theaters in Minneapolis. At this year’s Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, the students and I will perform my compressed version of Julius Caesar.


Damon, Javon, and Evelyn are all my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. This is Damon’s seventh year in the program; Javon has officially been my student for two years, following my observation of his entrance into the world and experiences as a pre-kindergartener. For Evelyn, this is her first year of participation, just as our reading of my 12-page version of Julius Caesar is her first ever introduction to the foremost master of the English language.


Evelyn loves the majesty of the language and marveled that, with a few key definitions and explanations by me, she could understand the text entirely. The themes of human fickleness, the treachery of erstwhile friends, and the mixed motives that guide human action resonated for one whose life has known all of these.


Evelyn knew that Damon is playing the part of Brutus, and that little Javon is playing the role of Strato, the military assistant to Brutus who holds the sword upon which he runs fatally when the battle at Philippi is lost to Antony, Octavius, and their lesser partner, Lepidus. Shy and even agoraphobic as she is, Evelyn brimmed with pride when I suggested that she take a small role as one of the citizens whose evanescent loyalties go quickly from Brutus to Antony when the crafty oratory of the latter moves the crowd sympathetically to the cause of striking at Caesar’s assassins.


Evelyn had arrived in my car sullen and very close to clinical despondence. Her mood, though, was transformed by her successes in algebra and, especially, the revelation that she could read Shakespeare with alacrity and could feel the emotional power of these transcendent literary works with such resonance to her own life experience.


This is the power of education.


This is the capacity of knowledge to transform lives.


This is the transcendent ability of K-12 education to elevate the lives of people who have known mainly the darkness of prejudice, abuse, and failure, into the radiance that is acceptance, empathy, and success. When properly taught, the language and themes of Shakespeare reach people of all demographic descriptors, especially those who have felt the tragedy in their own lives that they witness in dramas by the master.


Evelyn knows that she and her family can always depend on my love and my teaching. And part of that is knowing the majesty of Shakespeare, with all of the power of great literature to transform lives often lived behind the restrictive borders of the banal into experiences in this one earthly sojourn that ascend to the Sublime.

 

           

           

Very Strong Recommendation for Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> Brenda Cassellius Has the Intellect, Knowledge, and Empathic Sensibility to be a Transformative Leader

Brenda Cassellius, more than any fellow educator I have met in a very long while, has the empathic sensibility to understand the thematic relevance of this poem (“Prejudice,” by Harlem Renaissance literary exemplar Georgia Douglas Johnson) to students and families who have been historically underserved:


These fell miasmic rings of mist, with ghoulish menace bound,
Like noose-horizons tightening my little world around.
They still the soaring will to wing, to dance, to speed away,
And fling the soul insurgent back into its shell of clay.
Beneath incrusted silences, a seething Etna lies,
The fire of whose furnaces may sleep but never dies.


...................................................


At a Community Reception event on Monday, 16 May, I asked Cassellius very tough questions regarding her policies as Minnesota Commissioner of Education to which I have objected: waiver from No Child Left Behind stipulations; initiation of a Multiple Measurement Rating system for assessing school effectiveness across all student demographic descriptors (replacing dominant reliance on results of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments [MCAs]); elimination of high school graduation requirements; and a seeming willingness to do the bidding of teachers unions (Education Minnesota and Minneapolis Federation of Teachers), entities with which she would now have to enter into contentious negotiations in the best interest of students and their families.


When answering those questions, Commissioner Cassellius looked me straight in the eyes and gave responses that were not rejoinders or disputations but reasoned explanations for her policies.


I am very hard to convince.  I have firm principles and have written voluminously as to policies that should flow from those principles.


Remarkably, Brenda Cassellius’s responses to those queries moved me not one whit from my objection to the indicated state-level policies but strongly suggested that she and I share numerous principles that when applied to policy at the central school district level (Minneapolis Public Schools [MPS]) could have a transformative impact on the academic and therefore life prospects for historically underserved populations.


Cassellius and I continued our exchange of ideas in the aftermath of that Community Reception, and in subsequent cell phone conversations. The Commissioner publicly gives out her cell phone number and vows always to get back to anyone who calls. She got back to me within ten minutes of my two calls to her, and we also have shared text messages. She is amazingly responsive and accessible, especially given the fact that she occupies the top administrative position for education in the State of Minnesota and at this particular juncture is heavily involved in policies under discussion as the Minnesota Legislature winds down its Spring 2016 session.


During our first cell phone conversation, I was faced with the amazing situation of having to tell the Commissioner that I just had to interrupt our discussion (at that point 25 minutes in duration) to go run the New Salem Tuesday Tutoring Program as part of my seven-day-a-week New Salem Educational Initiative. She was that enthusiastic about discussing students and their families, and the educational policies and programs for implementation at the Minneapolis Public Schools that would have life-transformative impact. She even discussed the specific situation of a student athlete at Edison High School who could benefit from my academic assistance.


On issue after issue, Cassellius and I agreed on principles, including those flowing from my key emphases:


>>>>>    knowledge-intensive (she tends to say “content”-focused) curriculum;


 >>>>>   teachers trained (she would say “supported”) to deliver such a curriculum;


>>>>>    more aggressive, better articulated and coordinated tutoring program for students who are academically lagging below grade level;  and

>>>>>    much more vigorous outreach to families facing challenges of poverty or dysfunction.

Cassellius and I also agree that we need to do much more to ensure that students of all demographic descriptors are properly prepared to take International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement courses, and to achieve scores in the mid-20s and above on the ACT.


And we agree that the bureaucracy at the Minneapolis Public Schools needs to be greatly trimmed:


Cassellius said in her public interview with members of the school board on Tuesday, 17 May, that she expects principals at all schools to report directly to her. This was in the context of a question about the (six) Associate Superintendents of MPS and suggested that there could be paring of those positions in the offing.


My ongoing investigation of the central bureaucracy at 1250 West Broadway impels me to appreciate this inclination of Cassellius to move the focus of responsibility to building principals at the site level, a move entirely consistent with a stated theme of MPS Strategic Plan 2020 to make the school the unit of change. Redesign of school oversight would have favorable budgetary implications in a district currently bearing a deficit of $17 million, and in which Associate Superintendents command $141,500 apiece. With a referendum looming next November, officials at MPS need to demonstrate that they are going to be better stewards of public funds.


Brenda Cassellius does not pander or merely tell people what they want to hear. She clearly told me that she does not like the way Focused Instruction is designed. In expressing her objections, the Commissioner knew that I have consistently expressed enthusiasm for this program originating in the Bernadeia Johnson administration: I regard Focused Instruction as a potential conduit for a knowledge-intensive education such as articulated by E. D. Hirsch of the Core Knowledge Foundation.


Very important to me, though, is that of the eight candidates who have now been considered in the two phases of the MPS Superintendent search, only she has manifested full understanding of Core Knowledge. Only one of the other candidates (Jinger Gustafson, a first-phase semifinalist) had ever heard of the Hirsch approach. Cassellius is favorable to the content-focused implications of Core Knowledge.


I appreciate both Cassellius’s candor on the Focused Instruction question, even as I am struck by another area of agreement on principle, this entailing the conviction that we must send our students across the stage at graduation to receive a diploma that signifies that they will go forth as people of broad and deep knowledge, prepared according to the purposes of K-12 education for lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.


.......................... 


Every time I converse with Brenda Cassellius, we connect over the most vital concerns of students and their families, particularly those who have been historically underserved or who struggle with issues of poverty or familial dysfunction.


I have taught children of the very poor for over forty years.


This is my life.


I work at least 16 hours most days in an all-out effort to raise the academic and therefore life prospects of children and families whom history has treated unkindly, a circumstance that we must rectify in the Second Stage of the Civil Rights Movement, in which better public education must be central.


Brenda Cassellius feels this mission in her gut more than any other person I have met in a long, long time.  You cannot fool me on this one. I know--- on spoken lines, in between those lines, in vocal cadences, in sincerity of expression, in temporal dedication to the mission:


You cannot fool me on this one.


Brenda Cassellius grew up in the context of a straitened familial economy. She has taken to the streets to sell flowers to meet the exigencies of such an economic condition. She has felt the sting of setback and has met her challenges with courage, perseverance, and triumph. She wants to see others triumph as a matter of social justice and because this is the role that she feels called to assume.


Those who work for economic and social justice cannot do so effectively under ordinary expectations of a mere job. They must feel a sense of mission, as did Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A. Philip Randolph, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinhem, and Cesar Chavez.


Brenda Cassellius feels this sense of mission.


With her keen intellect, knowledge, and empathic sensibility, Brenda Cassellius can be a transformative Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools. If she does transform schools of MPS to deliver excellent academic performance from students of all demographic descriptors, she will make the Minneapolis Public Schools a model for other locally centralized school districts, which in the avowed local-control context of public education in the United States is where transformative change must happen.


Of the candidates who have come before members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education over the course of the last year, Sergio Paez would be a good superintendent. Charles Foust and now Ed Graff have the potential to be very good.


But Brenda Cassellius has those extraordinarily rare qualities that signal greatness. Her selection as the new Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools is a singular opportunity that must not be missed.


For Brenda Cassellius knows that when those seething Etnas emerge from incrusted silences, the fires that burn in all human hearts must be directed away from dangerous urban streets and courses predictive of incarceration:


Those precious young people whose lives are in our hands must be directed instead toward schools where excellent education for human beings of all demographic descriptors honors the “soaring will to wing, to dance, to speed away” toward lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

Major Reconsideration >>>>> Look for My Forthcoming Recommendation for Either Brenda Cassellius or Ed Graff as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools

On Sunday, 15 May, I posted an article on this blog that reviewed my objections to policies of the Mark Dayton gubernatorial administration and the Minnesota Department of Education under the leadership of Brenda Cassellius, current Education Commissioner for the State of Minnesota.


I still look with disfavor on the successful application of a waiver from No Child Left Behind stipulations;  the termination of graduation requirements that had required students to demonstrate grade level performance on a Grade 9 Writing Exam and a Grade 10 Reading MCA (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment);  the creation of a murky new Multiple Measurement Rating system to replace determination of school effectiveness on the clear basis of student performance on reading and mathematics MCAs at grades 3 through 8;  and policies that seemed to forecast eventual jettisoning of the MCAs in favor of assessments aligned to the ACT college readiness exam and college and university expectations (which rang false, given that teachers had been unsuccessful in preparing students for the much easier MCAs).


But under my close questioning at the community gathering at the Davis Center (central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools, 1250 West Broadway) on Monday, 16 May, Brenda Cassellius spoke effectively to issues raised by my still-abiding objections.  I came away with an inclination to reconsider my negative evaluation of Cassellius as a candidate for Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools, given that she seems honestly receptive to major changes for which I advocate:


>>>>>  knowledge-intensive curriculum specified grade by grade throughout the K-12 years


>>>>>  teachers retrained to teach knowledge-intensive curriculum


>>>>>  well-articulated and coherent tutoring program for students who lag behind in reading and mathematics


>>>>>  greatly improved outreach to families of students who are struggling in school


In view of my reconsideration of the Cassellius candidacy, I have removed from this blog an article that I recently posted. 


Please look for an article to be posted on this blog in the coming days that gives my recommendation for either Brenda Cassellius or Ed Graff as new Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Update >>>>> Please Be Aware of Events Related to the Search for Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> Tuesday, 17 May; Monday, 23 May; and Tuesday, 24 May

Please be aware that the opportunity for community members to ask questions of the two finalists (Brenda Cassellius and Ed Graff) for Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) transpired on Monday evening, 16 May, at the Davis Center (central office building), 1250 West Broadway, from 6:00 (actually late-started at 6:40) until 8:00 PM.


The remaining events related to the superintendent search are listed below.  Events on Tuesday, 17 May, are those still given on the website at MPS.  But since the search committee only recommended two candidates (rather than the three originally thought likely) the interview for Candidate C will not occur.  Interview times are likely those given for Candidate A and Candidate B, with a business meeting probably now to occur from 7:45 until 8:15 PM.  I will be attentive to updates and pass these on to my readers as time allows.


>>>>>    Tuesday, 17 May

8:00-12:00 p.m. School Tours
11:00-12:30 p.m. Lunch at Schools
12:30-4:00 p.m. Candidate Personal Time
4:00-4:15 p.m. Board Process Overview by DHR
4:15-5:45 p.m. Candidate A INTERVIEW WITH BOARD (televised and open to the public)


5:45-6:00 p.m. Break
6:00-7:30 p.m. Candidate B INTERVIEW WITH BOARD (televised and open to the public)
7:30-7:45 p.m. Break
7:45-9:15 p.m. Candidate C INTERVIEW WITH BOARD (televised and open to the public)
9:15-9:45 p.m. Board Discussion on site visit




>>>>>      Monday, 23 May


There will be an opportunity to give your view on the two candidates during Public Comment, to take place from 5:30 until 6:30 PM on this day.


>>>>>      Tuesday, 24 May


The Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education will vote on the candidate who shall be the new Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Please Be Aware of Important Events Related to the Two Finalists for Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> Monday, 16 May; Tuesday, 17 May; Monday, 23 May; and Tuesday, 24 May

My readers should be aware of four looming events related to the finalists for the position of Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>>


>>>>>      Monday, 16 May


Various opportunities are available throughout the day for people to meet the two finalists (see note on these finalists below), culminating in a Community Reception at the Davis Service Center at 1250 West Broadway from 6:00 until 8:00 PM.


>>>>>      Tuesday, 17 May


Members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education will be interviewing the candidates during a period running from 4:00 PM until 9:15 PM.  Originally, there was an assumption that there might be three finalists, so that Candidate A was to be interviewed during 4:15-5:45 PM;  Candidate B, 6:00-7:30 PM;  and Candidate C, 7:45-9:15 PM.  These are the times still listed on the Minneapolis Public Schools website as I post this article, but I'll be looking for an update.  Logic would suggest that the two finalists will be interviewed during those first two times and that the school board will thereafter hold a brief business meeting that was originally scheduled during 9:15-9:45 PM, now most likely to run from about 7:45 until 8:00 PM---  but I'll be looking for those updates.


>>>>>      Monday, 23 May


There will be an opportunity to give your view on the two candidates during Public Comment, to take place from 5:30 until 6:30 PM on this day.


>>>>>      Tuesday, 24 May


The Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education will vote on the candidate who shall be the new Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

We Must Go to the Root and Rethink Everything

I recently mentioned to a key official at the Minneapolis Public Schools the fact that my son (Ryan Davison-Reed) and I are true leftists who often hold our nose when voting for Democrats.


My frame of reference was of course most clearly related to education issues, on which Democrats (including members of the DFL) are just as bad as Republicans.


But I feel more revolutionary all the time and have ongoing disregard for most things that appear on my visual screen as I go to and fro in the world:


We have a great need to rethink everything.


I have thought about the necessity of revolutionary analysis and action in revaluating many activities and ideologies.  Contemporary life is very crude, essentially as a function of the brief experience of humanity on the planet.  Our crudeness is observable everywhere we turn.


Ryan and I are always talking about the need to go back to the root on everything.


Thus it is that conservative intellectuals such as Edmund Burke and George Will are wrong at the outset and have no chance ever to be correct on the strength of their main premises. That is to say that to want to conserve institutions that are so crude and upon assumptions about life that are so shallow and illusionary is to want to dwell forever in an artifice built upon human religious beliefs and material aspirations low in aesthetic and intellectual quality. Only occasionally have certain people moved the standard to higher aesthetic realms;  only in given works of creative and scientific inspiration and in the beauty of nature do we see possibilities into a better way of living.


We do indeed want to preserve these works of creative genius as a guide to further discovery in our ascent toward a higher level of knowledge and ethics; but very little do we want to conserve for static observance or conception as Ultimate Truth.


Thus is conservatism in its very nature invalid, and so is reactionary thinking morally repugnant. And liberals have traveled only a very short distance in pursuit of a better way. The pursuit of Truth falls to those moving leftward in the creation of constantly better approximations of Perfection.


Thus spoke not Zarathustra but Gary Marvin Davison.

Citizens Are Ignoramuses, and Officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools Intend to Keep Them That Way

Citizens in the United States are ignoramuses, and officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools intend to keep them that way.


In his book, Just How Ignorant Are We? (New York: Basic Books, 2008), George Mason University Professor Rick Shenkman summarizes scientific survey and polling data in revealing the extraordinary level of American ignorance. Included in his account are the following examples, given for citizens 18 years of age or older, except where noted for particular age groups:


Just 25% of American adults can name more than one of the fundamental First Amendment freedoms (speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition for redress of grievances), although diehard optimists (and equally ignorant folk) might take heart by observing that approximately the same percentage (22%) of adult citizens can name all five of The Simpsons television characters.


Only 30% of adult citizens know that Roe v. Wade (1973) was the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal. Just 25% know that the length of term for Senators is six years, and only 20% know that each state has two senators for a total of 100 members of the upper chamber of the United States Congress. Fewer than half (40%) can name the three branches of the federal government (executive, judicial, and legislative). And, remarkably, a mere 49% of American adults know that the United States was the nation whose pilots dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.


In an assessment of basic knowledge of civics administered to 14,000 college students by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2007, over half of these test-takers scored fewer than 55 correctly out of a total 100 questions. Fewer than half knew that the Battle of Yorktown (1781) ended the fighting between the American colonists and the British in the American Revolution.


Other instruments reveal that just 34% of American adults know that Congress is the federal governmental body with the constitutional right to declare war; 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto. Sixty percent of adult citizens think that the President can appoint federal judges without Senatorial approve--- which must have created confusion in such folk when President Obama appointed Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia amid the controversial refusal of Mitch McConnell and the Republican congressional leadership to bring the nomination before the Senate.


Forty-five percent of American adults think that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution. Only 5% of respondents to one survey could answer 75% of fundamental economics questions correctly; comparable figures for percentage of respondents making 75% correct responses on matters pertinent to domestic issues was 11%; foreign affairs, 14%; and geography, 10%.


A Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad declared in 2003 that American ignorance of the outside world constitutes a threat to national security. The susceptibility of so many uninformed people to the demagoguery of Donald Trump should make that admonition very tangible.


…………………………………………


Most likely against the common perception, young people 18 to 24 years of age are the least informed of all, despite their constant punching of smart phones and other technological devices. Young people as a group rate only above those confined to nursing homes in level of general knowledge.  Only 23% of young people use the Internet to access information pertinent to issues of national or international importance. Young people do very little reading. As revealed in a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts as cited by Shenkman in his book, only 43% of those in the 18 to 24 age group read literature (down from 60% in 1982). Over 50% do not read newspapers (either physical or online), fiction, poetry, or drama.  But few older adults in the United States do much serious reading, either; and in the United States Congress, members regularly cast votes on bills that they have not read.


Rick Shenkman warns his own readers not to mistake access to factual knowledge with consumption thereof:


This, of course, goes to the core of the erroneous approach to K-12 education espoused by education professors and other members of the education establishment. I have detailed in other articles the responses that I have gotten from members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education and officials in the central offices of that school district that reveal their lack of focus on knowledge acquisition as central to K-12 education. They are much under the influence of that falsely labeled “progressive” approach to education that purports to teach students how to think critically and prepare for lifelong learning without having any knowledge base upon which critical analysis must proceed--- and without having learned very much in the first place.


Thus it is that the condition of intellectual laziness and the terrible knowledge base that teachers and other members of the education establishment have as a result of their experience in wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education motivates them to conceal their own ignorance by devaluing knowledge with the claim that facts can always be looked up as necessary. This is all the more true, they claim, now that the Internet and myriad electronic devices provide so much access to ready information.


But the danger is that the typical American shows little interest in knowledge, and never gets around to looking up facts of any relevance to serious national or international issues. Given so little knowledge acquired during the thirteen years spent in the terrible K-12 public schools of the United States, Americans never learn to respect knowledge and never become the lifelong learners and critical thinkers that the education establishment deceitfully claims they are producing.


The entity known as the Minneapolis Public Schools is a salient example of the locally centralized school district of the United States that sends graduates across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only.


Citizens in Minnesota and the United States are ignoramuses.


And, given their knowledge-poor approach to K-12 education, officials in the Minneapolis Public Schools implicitly intend to keep them that way.