A Precocious Child and Her Mother Look Beyond a Tower of Poverty

A Note to My Readers: 

The names used for the students and their family members in this article are, in the manner of my typical practice, data privacy pseudonyms.

Just beyond the southern edge of Nicollet Mall off downtown Minneapolis there is a subsidized high-rise apartment complex run by the social service agency, Volunteers of America (VOA).  This facility is just a few years old and like so many similar facilities from a certain vantage point has a look of decency and even an occasional nod to the nice.  There is an open courtyard with picnic tables and playground equipment that in other circumstances would present themselves as beacons of that quality of energetic life to which human beings aspire on this one earthly sojourn.  

 

But grinding poverty tends over time to wear down such facilities, as we know from familiar motifs played out in Southside Chicago, East Los Angeles, West Dallas, North Minneapolis, and many other urban centers where originally hospitable public housing took on a different look as drug dealers and pimp-pushers plied their trades and took their toll.

 

God bless Volunteers of America for building this tower of cheap housing for people who have few other options.

 

But the Tower of Hope lies beyond any such tower of housing, in the pursuits and policies of the locally centralized school district, in this case the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

………………………………………………………..

I got the call for help in an apartment on the eleventh floor of this high-rise via the intermediation of Shameah Franklin, mother of Kamal and Alicia, focal personages in the next article as you scroll on down this blog.  The daughter of Joanna Blake, Shameah’s  best friend, was flailing academically and behaviorally at Jefferson K-5 in the Minneapolis Public Schools.  I got the message one week in March 2016 and by the next week was ascending the elevator to assess the needs of Aniya Emerson, daughter of Joanna.

 

I always brace for the worst. 

 

Shameah’s description of Aniya’s situation suggested to me the possibility that the latter might be a child with significant behavioral challenges and learning disabilities.  Shameah told me that she was on an Individualized Learning Plan (IEP) of the type given by special education staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools to children who struggle with behavioral or learning difficulties or both.  The prevailing circumstances seemed to present a child who lashed out at fellow students and was falling academically behind her grade 2 level of school enrolment.

 

When I arrived, I went into the upbeat banter and verbal introduction that always accompany my first arrivals, quickly putting both Joana and Aniya at ease.  I talked with Aniya awhile to get a sense of how she felt about school, which bespoke a situation better than I expected, given what I knew of her circumstances via second- and third- hand accounts.

 

I then on my yellow pad sketched out addition and subtraction problems of a rudimentary, single-digit sort.  Aniya had no problem with these.  I went on to double-digit versions of these problems, with no regrouping (borrowing or carrying).  Still no difficulty.  I went on to double-digit problems requiring regrouping, for the first time getting a stymied response from Aniya.

 

I explained the regrouping process.  Aniya caught on immediately.  We went through several double-digit exercises of this sort, then I move on to three-digit and four-digit versions, which require a great deal of focus for the first-time performer of these operations.  Aniya made a few mistakes but righted her course upon my gentle correction and without too much ticking of the clock was performing these problems with alacrity.

 

I had Aniya count by “2’s,” “5’s,” and “10’s,” which she did with skill in the upper range of my expectation when first meeting a grade 2 student.  I then showed her how multiplication with such numbers is just an extension of the counting process.   She had heard of multiplication and thought herself very cool for doing some.  Things were progressing so quickly at this now 45-minute juncture that I showed her the nine trick;  Aniya caught on so quickly that soon she was calculating  6 x 9, 4 x 9,

8 x 9, on through all such combinations involving single digits---  with nary a mistake or hesitation.

 

Okay, let’ see, I thought, maybe she has a verbal challenge.  I sketched out a bevy of single-syllable words, two-syllable words, and then upon her success went on to teach Aniya vocabulary such as probable, fortunate, comprehensive, thorough, beneficial, comparative, impulsive, self-control, opportunity, and even amicable.  From the beginning, she sight-read these word with great skill and learned my definitions at rapid speed.  Aniya knew and could spell all of these words 90 minutes into this quite revealing academic session.

 

…………………………………………………………

 

 

With the elapse of these notable minutes, I determined that Aniya has no learning disabilities.

 

I turned to behavior.

 

Aniya did lash out sometimes in class.  A lone antagonist, a girl in her class, particularly provoked thee responses.  I told Aniya that someone who had the kind of ability that she had demonstrated to me should be making the most of her natural gifts.  We talked about strategies for dealing with Markesha, the antagonist.  We talked about not letting the silly, rude, or distracting comments from others throw a person off one’s game plan.  Aniya listened.   I had the strong sense that I was getting through.

 

But often bringing a child’s behavior into line is a matter of much more extended conversation, of the kind that I had week after week with Kamal (he of the SPAN program cited in the next article as you scroll down).   But this was a younger child, and the behavior was not so entrenched at grade 2 as can be the case at grade 8.  Joanna advocated for her child at two looming meetings to assess her IEP status. 

 

Week by week I would ask if there were any incidents at school;  over the course of five weeks, there was only one minor incident.  Furthermore, as Aniya and I zoomed through ascendingly greater mathematics challenges and her fluently and accurately read book of grade level readings that I gave her, her teachers were amazed that this child who so recently was languishing below grade level was now giving evidence of ability in math and reading at grade 3 and by some indicators at grade 4.

 

At the end of academic year 2015-2016, staff at Jefferson released Aniya from her IEP.

 

She has continued to thrive in this academic year 2016-2017.

 

………………………………………………………….

For Joanna personally, this year has not been so good.  The organs of her merely 32 year-old body have been as dysfunctional as were her own familial circumstances growing up in Chicago, then in foster care in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

 

Joanna’s blood pressure runs way too high.  At 30 years of age she had received notice that she was a diabetic.  Her dedication to a better, more vegetable-laden diet had been sporadic.  In November 2016, her kidneys began to function abnormally.   When I said goodbye to Aniya and Joanna for a while as I took off for Taiwan and then Texas in December, the mother of this tandem did not look at all well.  She had just spent several hours at Hennepin County Medical Center with medical staff furiously trying to get her bodily systems in sync.  Joanna’s face looked withered and exhausted.  Quite frankly, I hoped that she would still be on the planet when I returned in a few weeks.  I gave thought to how I might help situate Aniya if her mother did not make it.

 

Joanna looked better on my return.  The verdict on the immediate future of her health is still uncertain, but she appears to have a chance of surviving and proceeding deeper into a life that in its early decades had known too much of the bad habits and self-medication that are the wont of people for whom life has seemed to offer too much abuse and too little hope.

 

……………………………………………………………..

I have detailed in many articles on this blog how history is responsible for creating too many circumstances of the sort described for Joanna and Aniya.

 

I have been at least as persistent in pressing the message that the overhaul of K-12 education is the foundational solution for our prevailing domestic problems arising from basic human needs.

 

With the impartation of excellent K-12 education, we give hope to people, a vision beyond the present, a future of lives unfolding with cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.  We provide to Aniya and children of her demographic descriptors that share of the human inheritance in knowledge and skill that is their birthright, and we end generations of cyclical poverty, create lives of personal power and self-confident citizenship, and thereby send forth those “tiny ripples of hope” so as to “build a current that can tear down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance” that Bobby Kennedy says arises from displays of moral courage.

 

We therefore must have the moral courage to overhaul K-12 education and make of the Minneapolis Public Schools a model of the locally centralized school district.

 

Precious and precocious child Aniya and mother Joanna are now looking beyond a tower of poverty toward a Tower of Hope.

 

We must assure that children of all demographic descriptors and the parents who adore them can do the same.

 

Creating Promising Futures within Many Families, Family by Family: The Case of a Brother-Sister Duo Ascending from the Challenges of Poverty and Dysfunction

A Note to My Readers: 

The names used for the students and their family members in this article are, in the manner of my typical practice, data privacy pseudonyms.

My longtime readers will remember that a bit over four years ago I wrote a series of articles, based on a most remarkable Saturday in my life in the New Salem Educational Initiative.  I worked with six different small groups (3-5 people) in the course of that day, beginning at 9:00 AM and finally turning my beat-up Honda Civic homeward at 10:00 PM that evening.

 

I put these articles together in a compact book and entitled the series, Just Another Day at the Office:  A Day in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative:  The Remarkably Unremarkable Events of September 29, 2012.

One of the articles featured a student by the name of Kamal Richardson, whose mom (Shameah Hutchinson) had gotten my name from one of my fellow church members at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, where I direct both the New Salem Tuesday Tutoring Program and my seven-day-a-week program of small-group academic instruction.

Shameah was frantic because Kamal, then in grade 8 at Sanford Middle School and having spent three years in the Minneapolis Public Schools SPAN program for students with severe emotional difficulties, was not acquiring the academic skills that she felt her son should be mastering.  Shameah explained to me that Kamal was not being challenged enough at school and needed additional help and sufficient challenge to get up to his grade 8 level, especially in reading and math.  The SPAN program had helped him some behaviorally, but she feared that he was falling farther and farther behind academically.

There was no surprise in any of this for me.  Virtually all special education programs in the Minneapolis Public Schools undervalue the capabilities of the students, effectively placing them on a track that is even less worthy to be called educational than is the mainstream course of study that sends the general student population shuffling toward a diploma.  I told Shameah that I understood her concern and that we would work out a schedule.

…………………………………………………………..

A worked Kamal into an already packed schedule on Saturdays, meeting with him weekly at 5:00 PM.  Occasionally I would find no one at home---  usually because of some disruptive circumstance but occasionally due to forgetfulness on the part of people whose lives are disordered in the extreme.  Shameah and Kamal moved three times during the eight months that I have known them. For awhile they had no home of their own and had to shuffle among friends and family members.  Nevertheless, Shameah tried to keep contact with me by using the cell phones of friends or the new ones that she would get from time to time.  And, because I knew so many people in the family, I was able to utilize those contacts to keep in touch.

I worked with Kamal on math skills that he should have mastered by this juncture in grade 8.  Demonstrating no learning disability, he quickly mastered fundamental math through concepts such as fractions, decimals, percentages, ratio, proportions, and simple probability.  We then began to work on algebraic equations and got as far as those of the simultaneous type whereby two variables must have the same values in two different equations.

Kamal’s vocabulary was underdeveloped and he had had little experience writing essays or research papers in school.  At that time, students in Minnesota were still required to pass a writing skills exam at grade 9.  Kamal and I read a variety of fictional and nonfictional materials together, and with the grade 9 writing exam looming put a lot of energy into the organization of essays.

I modeled an introduction to an essay in response to the prompt, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”  This was similar to the kind of question asked on the grade 9 writing test.  Kamal chose Jamaica and identified understanding family life, trying a variety of food, and learning more about holidays and customs as three topics around which to order internal paragraphs.  I modeled the introduction, he wrote the second paragraph, I straightened this out for him and explained the importance of keeping on topic within a paragraph, then left him with the task of doing the remainder of the body (paragraphs three and four) on his own.  I then modeled a conclusion for him.  We refined the essay, did this for three additional essay assignments, and soon Kamal was writing an essay that would earn him at least the necessary “3” and maybe even a “4”out of the “5” rating necessary to pass the exam.    

Kamal was polite, soft-spoken, and eager to learn in my academic sessions with him.  I observed him for one school day, and his behavior was fine.  But I fully understood that when presented with unchallenging material he got bored, and that there are components of his psyche at this point that lead him to act out in given situations on certain school days.  So I counseled Kamal to make the most of his weekly academic sessions with me.  I promised to keep him challenged, give him a well-rounded education, prepare him to pass the exams necessary to graduate, and to give him most of his substantive education with me during our weekly academic session. 

I asked Kamal to behave himself at school.

 

He said that he would.

 

And he did.

 

………………………………………………………..

 

Kamal passed that writing exam as a grade 9 student at Washburn High School.   

Kamal and I continued to work together throughout his grade 9 year.  He worked his way out of the SPAN program with a display of much-improved behavior.  He and I read a bevy of sophisticated articles as we look toward his next testing challenge, the reading exam at grade 10. 

But a series of unnerving episodes shook the family.  Shameah sent Kamal to live with relatives who had settled in Salem, Oregon.  In Salem, he finished high school in the standard three years and graduated on time, in spring 2016.

                                    ……………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

Two months into academic year 2015-2016, I got another call from Shameah, similar to that which I had gotten in her quest for academic help for Kamal.  Her daughter, Alicia, was now living with her, a transfer from residential quarters of relatives on her dad’s side.  Alicia was struggling as a grade 6 student at Ramsey K-8 of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Her grades in mathematics were particularly bad, but her performance in general threatened to yield failure and a repeat of grade 6.

I went to work immediately with my logically sequenced exercises in math. 

Alicia knew few of her multiplication tables at the time of our first academic session, but I ran her through my efficient method of multiplication table mastery, building confidence with the easy ones that are essentially self-evident (“0’s” and “1’s”), can be easily counted (“2’s,” “5’s,”and “10’s”), have a trick (the “9” trick), or have a sound indicator (“six times four is twenty-four,”  “six times six is thirty-six,” “six times eight is forty-eight”)---   then working our way from the “3’s” and ”4’s,” to those in the ”7’s” and “8’s”that tend to give students the most difficulty (6 x 7, 7 x 7, 7x 8 and 8 x 8).

 

With similar logical rigor and efficiency, Alicia moved conceptually through multiplication up through three digits top and bottom, division with five-digit dividends and two digit-divisors, graphing, tabulation,  fractions and mixed numbers with all operations, decimals, and percentages.

 

Alicia turned a failing grade in math into a “B” and also began to complete and turn in all homework in her other subjects, for which we also reserved time.  When the homework load was light, Alicia and I read selections in history, literature, fine arts, and natural science from the What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know volume in E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge series and kept meticulous vocabulary lists.

 

Now, in grade 7 and still at Ramsey, Alicia is making all “A’s” and “B’s.” 

 

She and I are now reading extensively about African American history and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, of which her knowledge was very slight.  Alicia now knows the essence of the Compromise of 1877, Plessy v. Ferguson, Northern Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Sleeping Car Porters Strike, Brown v. Board of Education, Memphis Bus Boycott, Little Rock Nine, the murder of Emmett Till, the lunch counter sit-ins, formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the series of events that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Aside from the Emmett Till murder, Alicia had learned very little of these events, so that she had little contextual information for Fanny Lou Hamer’s courageous stance in the 1964 Democratic National Convention, for which she was doing a project for Black History month.

 

………………………………………………….

 

Shameah smiles when she sees Alicia and me working together.

 

I looked up one day to see her beaming and said, “Shameah, you have a very smart daughter here.  She is doing so very well in all subjects.”

 

“It’s all because of you, just like how you got Kamal on the right track.”

 

“I pointed the way, and your kids learned where to go.”

 

“Well, then, we sure need more teachers who can point the way,” she said.

 

“I’m working on that one,” I returned.

 

“Well work hard, ‘cause those schools need a lot of work.”   

Three Sisters of Ecuadorean Parentage Triumph Through Hard Work and Reconnection to the New Salem Educational Initiative

A Note to My Readers: 

The names used for the students and their family members in this article are, in the manner of my typical practice, data privacy pseudonyms.

Manuela, Lucinda, and Anita Sandoval are three students of Ecuadorean parents and grandparents whom I have known for many years and who are very active current participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative.

 

Manuela was in grade 5 at Sheridan Elementary in the Minneapolis Public Schools when she enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative;  Lucinda was in grade 4;  Anita was in grade 1.  There is an unusual nuance, though, to their tale of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative:

 

The trend for many years now has been for my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative to enroll very early in their K-12 years and then study with me until graduation from high school and beyond.  In the case of these sisters, though, residential shifts and familial struggles resulted in a two-year interruption as students under my guidance.  Anita studied with me from grade 1 through grade 3, then after the two-year interruption we reconnected when she was in grade 6;  Manuela and Lucinda reconnected after the same time lapse, resuming study with me at grade 9 and grade 10 respectively. 

 

For all three of these students, this was precious time lost;  their skills had atrophied in many areas by the time we began our weekly academic sessions anew.  For Manuela and Lucinda the struggle became very arduous to recover foundering basic math and reading skills and to attain the academic goals that they and their parents, Carlos and Marcia, had for them as high school students aspiring to attend a four-year college or university..

 

………………………………………………………………………

When I can start with a student very early and sustain them under my academic instruction throughout the K-12 years, I typically move them into high school with excellent chances to attain an ACT score in the mid-20s or above.  When they do not begin until the middle school years, even at grade 6, the struggle becomes more difficult, and thereafter students must be highly focused to approach the level toward which I always want to guide them.

 

The reason for this is that students get such inadequate instruction in their K-12 experiences in school that I must provide most of the key knowledge and skill sets that will truly prepare them for collegiate and university experiences.  Students learn very little in the way of subject area knowledge prior to high school.  Even in math, the strongest instructional component in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools, students have frequently not mastered fundamental concepts to the point of automaticity in such a way as to provide satisfying experiences in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, or calculus.  Students learn to read reasonably well in kindergarten through grade 2, but their poor vocabulary development and lack of encounters with challenging reading material thereafter do not give them the skills or habits necessary to comprehend the increasingly complex material descriptive of the legitimate high school or college student. 

 

I can improve a student’s chance for college or university success at any time, even for those who do not connect with me until the high school years.  But at the latter point, my efforts with a student typically become a salvage operation.  The K-12 education provided in the Minneapolis Public Schools do not as a rule prepare students from economically challenged circumstances, frequently in the context of familial dysfunction, in such a way as to give them the academic foundation necessary for collegiate or university viability. 

 

Stride up to any student from such circumstances, who otherwise is just as bright and full of intellectual potential as young people with residences in Linden Hills or Lowery Hill, and ask them what they got on a practice or actual ACT, and they in the overwhelmingly typical case will cite scores somewhere between 12 and 15.

 

This is the reality. 

 

And also the reality is the fact that an ACT score of 21 or above is predictive of collegiate or university viability.  A score of 25 is necessary for acceptance to most selective colleges and universities.  National Merit Scholars who have recorded near-perfect PSATs generally go on to attain scores in the 31 to 36 (perfect) range on the ACT, and even such scores do not guarantee entrance into the most elite schools of the United States. 

Young people from challenged circumstances, then, having matriculated in K-12 systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools that have never been organized to get anywhere close to meeting their needs, face daunting challenges as they aspire to college or university attendance.      

 

………………………………………………

The foregoing observations indicate strongly why once a student comes under my academic instruction and guidance, I never let go.  I typically have multiple familial cell phone numbers memorized and am prepared to shift my pick-up-for-transport-to-New Salem point as circumstances require.  Many of my students have multiple residences at which they might lay their heads for any given overnight sleep (or lack of much thereof for gunshots in the night or numerous personages coming and going). 

 

And all of my students have moved at least twice in search of cheaper Section 8 housing.

 

All of them.

 

So I am always prepared to follow students wherever they go, and a change of residence or continuing familial challenges do not deter us.

 

The Saldovar sisters fit the profile of my typical student in many ways but in others they differ.  In their case, the familial challenges that threw them off their schedule and their rescheduling with me were mostly in their extended family, not those of their nuclear residence.  But a series of circumstances involving severe discord, desertion, divorce, immigration problems, and too many angry voices in the family broadly construed provided so many distractions that it was all that they and their family could do to get the sisters to school during the week and into church on Sunday for the solace that for a biennial was otherwise lacking.

 

The girls’ parents (Carlos and Marcia) did not get very far in school back in Ecuador.  But they are smart, industrious, strict, loving, and caring.  Carlos has mastered English at a high conversational level and Marcia has done passably well in this regard.  Carlos makes a decent living driving a truck, but the sisters have always qualified for free and reduced price lunch.  Manuela, Lucinda, Anita, and their parents eventually moved from the Northeast Minneapolis home that they shared with members of the extended family who were facing such dysfunctionality, to a duplex in Columbia Heights. 

 

They chose the latter location in search of better schools, but in this aspect their move was not favorable:  The Columbia Heights schools are no better than those in Minneapolis.  This is true of most near-suburb and charter school options that inevitably disappoint the seekers of better education among my students and parents:   Most locally centralized school systems and most educational delivery systems in the United States suffer from the same flaws that I have detailed in many places on this blog.

Faced with economic conditions just a little better than most of my students and similar challenges pertinent to dysfunction in the extended family, Manuela, Lucinda, and Anita nevertheless had to their advantage two presiding and co-residing (even married) parents with strong personal ethical systems who imparted superlative life values to their daughters.  Since I ordinarily have to expend herculean effort to get my students focused beyond their life problems, the situation in the nuclear family of these sisters helped enormously to maximize the use of our time together to address mainly academic problems.  By the time that we reconnected, they had seen all too much of the circumstances that were so wearing on the extended family.

 

Manuela, Lucinda, Anita, Carlos, and Marcia embraced our reconnection as if the prayers that they lofted each week toward the Divine object of their Sunday worship had been answered.

 

We went to work, and we succeeded mightily.

 

………………………………………………………………………..

Manuela’s grades rose in her algebra II, FST (combining functions, statistics, and trigonometry), and pre-calculus classes as I led her through exercises designed for efficient recovery of fundamental mathematical skills and then proceeded to master each concept from her pre-homework assignments. Her vocabulary and general reading skills improved as she poured through the advanced reading challenges that I gave her.  We practiced the ACT exam in a very strategic way;  we had no time to go through the practice exam as exhaustively as I prefer, but we gave her enough confidence and skill mastery to give her a good chance for a score acceptable to the colleges to which she was applying.

 

I had a little more time with Lucinda, but when I first reconnected with her in her grade 9 year she was not as relentlessly diligent as Manuela, so recovery and progress went more slowly.  But by her grade 11 year, Lucinda’s study habits had improved greatly, her confidence was rising, and she was following the pattern of skill and knowledge mastery that had described Manuel’s ascent.

 

Anita was a precocious young child when I worked with her during grades 1 through 3, and when I reconnected with her at grade 6 she was just as apt if considerably less well-established at grade level.  She quickly recovered, stabilized academically, then began to appear on the “B” and then ”A” honor roll at school.  She is now still just in grade 9, so that I have had and will have the time ahead to develop in her the academic weight and ballast that is my mission, my goal, my abiding effort to give to my students---   the sort that leads to the very best experiences at the college and university level.

 

……………………………………………………………………..

 

Now, in this academic year of 2016-2017, Manuela is in her first year as a student at Augsburg College, with aspirations to become a registered nurse.

 

Lucinda, now a senior, is struggling a bit in pre-calculus, but we are addressing the remaining issues, and otherwise her grades are all at “B” or better.  She is contemplating a range of colleges that fall at a tier similar to Augsburg, including in addition to that institution St. Cloud State University and the University of Minnesota at Mankato.   She, too is considering nursing but is keeping her options open.

 

Anita is making all “A’s” and “B’s” as a grade 9 student at Columbia Heights.  She is confident and ambitious, very seriously and with very keen prospects in my tough judgment, setting her sights on becoming a neurosurgeon.

 

Among many other accomplishments, these three sisters, who speak only Spanish at home, have enacted the parts in the Shakespearean productions that we perform each year of the witches in Macbeth and in Julius Caesar the parts of Portia (Anita), Calpurnia (Lucinda), and Mark Antony (Manuela).

 

Manuela is still meeting with me as a college student, which has become the norm for my students and me.  The three sisters and I meet each week to read chapters in my nearly complete new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education;  thus far they have covered, in the thorough manner upon which I insist, the chapters of Economics and Psychology. 

 

Anita has excellent prospects for completing all fourteen chapters in the book, practicing in the meticulous way that I prefer for the ACT, scoring at a high level on the latter, putting together an excellent financial package at an upper tier university, and becoming the neurosurgeon that she aspires to be.

 

Manuela will earn good grades at Augsburg, and Lucinda will do the same at a comparable institution.  In continuing to study with me, they will continue to add to their academic weight and ballast, advance their skill and knowledge sets, and via their reading of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education go forth as culturally enriched, civically prepared, as well as professionally satisfied adults.

 

I will continue to prepare my students for such lives, of the kind that all human beings deserve.

 

And in that conviction, I will continue to work incessantly to induce the transformation of the Minneapolis Public Schools into a model for other locally centralized school districts, so that students of all demographic descriptors have the opportunity to experience this one earthly sojourn at the level occupied by Manuela, Lucinda, Anita, and the other students of the New Salem Educational Initiative.

 

 

Salient Cases of Three Lives Transformed Through the Power of Knowledge in the New Salem Educational Initiative

A Note to My Readers:  

The names used for the students and their family members in this article are, in the manner of my typical practice, data privacy pseudonyms.

Damon Preston, little (half-) brother Javon Jakes, and mom Evelyn Patterson are thriving.

 

Thriving.

 

I am amazed and honored to convey the abiding situation with such unqualified phrasing.

 

When I last wrote about this trio in October 2016, I was able to convey that the lives of Damon, Javon, and Evelyn had taken a decided upswing.  Evelyn had largely extricated herself from her relationship with Marcel Gifford and was taking necessary legal action to keep him from coming around the new duplex in Coon Rapids to which I moved the family in my 2008 Toyota Matrix late last July 2016.

 

Evelyn’s restraining order on Marcel has been effective in keeping him away.  He tried to check in a couple of times on Facebook but Evelyn held to her principles and plan of action, reminding him that even that means of contact was a violation.  Marcel, who lived the gang life in Chicago and was involved in enough nefarious activity as to want to keep clear of the court system in Minnesota, ultimately got the message and has now kept both his physical and electronic distance from Evelyn and her boys.

 

I have had the supreme joy of seeing the tension leave the faces of all three members of this family of  people endeavoring against great odds to make a way for themselves in the world.  Easy smiles have replaced fear and vexation in the countenances of all three.  And Evelyn, who this time last year was several pounds overweight, sleeping fitfully, and struggling with an array of mental demons that have haunted her all of her life---  now has shed much of the extra weight, has the look of a rested human being, and is making great progress in processing the disturbing experiences from a life that both early on in Chicago and since coming to Minnesota has known far too much abuse in way too many forms.

 

When I arrive these days to pick up Damon for transport to our weekly academic sessions at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, the scene is so much different from what it ever was at any of the other residences to which I had followed his family:  two in North Minneapolis, one in far South Minneapolis, and that last one on the East Side in St. Paul: 

 

The duplex is tidy. 

 

There is less smell of cigarette smoke and none of reefer. 

 

Evelyn and the boys are relaxed, in the midst of enjoyable activities undistracted by any troubling episodes of the type that had mounted in St. Paul.

 

I have always been able to keep Damon and Javon on an ascendant course at school, but my efforts throughout the eight years that I have known this family of necessity required a tremendous expenditure of time and energy.  I still give the family huge amounts of my time, but in the greatly improved environmental and attitudinal context of the present my efforts are now overwhelmingly expended for purposes directly moving these three striving souls onto those ascendant courses rather than for the removal of obstacles.

 

                              …………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Damon is poised to earn the Student of the Year Award again (I gave him that honor at last year’s Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet) among the 125 students and family members in my network.

 

He is a quite extraordinary young man and he responds with alacrity to every challenge that I place before him.  At just Grade 8, Damon has transcended the achievements of even some of my very fine high school and college students.  Damon has now read the first three chapters (Economics, Psychology, and Political Science) of my nearly completed fourteen-chapter book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, written to give my students a full array of knowledge sets in the subject areas of economics, psychology, political science, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English usage, the fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics. 

 

The text is written at a level appropriate for high-achieving upper high school and university students, and intellectually ambitious adults.  At only Grade 8, Damon has reviewed each of these chapters for full mastery, and incorporated the knowledge attained into our discussions of journal and newspaper articles.

 

That is to convey, I communicate to my students that knowledge attained should be knowledge retained---  that knowledge is to be treasured and applied to an understanding and betterment of this world.

 

And Damon gets all of this. 

 

He has imbibed my message thoroughly and with gusto. 

 

This is a young man who has seen the deep and foreboding dark caverns of life and has emerged with an immense yearning for the light at the heights.  When Damon expressed an interest in pursuing a career in law, I went through various fields for him to consider beyond those courtroom displays from the sphere of criminal law that get such exposure on television dramas.  I told him about such fields as environmental law, entertainment law, marriage and family law, corporate merger law, and contract law.  He decided that the latter sounded interesting. 

 

Damon, most of whose family members never finished high school let alone matriculated beyond, is from what I can discern the only Grade 8 student at Coon Rapids Middle School aspiring at this juncture to be a contract lawyer, even in a community well-populated with university-educated professionals.

 

Damon is at the top of his accelerated math class and has a report card full mostly of A’s, with a few B’s.

His vocabulary at this point is sophisticated and his writing is expressive and frequently eloquent.   Eight years into his participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, and four years away from his projected university experience, Damon is developing increasing levels of knowledge on a well-established base that will maximize his opportunities for success in the years ahead.

                                                                         

                                 …………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

 

When I deliver Damon back home after our weekly academic sessions, for the sake of time I work with Javon and Evelyn (who has now also become my student) right at the table in their dinette.  The latter reference implies the existence of furniture, which was absent in the St. Paul apartment;  on those days when for the sake of time I worked with Javon and Damon at that abode, we’d work sitting in the hallway for lack of light and anywhere to sit inside.  The new residence has a living room with adequate amount of furniture, as well as the table in the dinette.

 

Javon and Evelyn and I work academic magic at that table. 

 

Javon is only in Grade 2, but he has full knowledge of his multiplication tables and zooms through reading material at Grade 5 level.  I do a lot of explicit vocabulary building with Javon, so that words such as amicable, bountiful, concordant, prescient, and empathetic present no challenge for him.  At Grade 2, he finds these vocabulary items well within the range of comprehension and extension into his own verbal expression, thereby achieving and exceeding verbal skill levels more typically associated with children of the upper middle and upper economic strata. 

 

Evelyn, who back in Chicago was one of the few from her family who did graduate from high school and even took a few classes at a community college, has in her study with me regained control of all pre-algebra concepts and has moved into a study of algebra and geometry.  She now has vocabulary lists that I have generated for her that total 150 highly sophisticated words.  She will soon be reading Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education with me and on her own and is even as I write this applying to the closest community college in Coon Rapids.

 

                                    …………………………………………………………………………………………………..

So this is quite a story of the lives of three members of a family, long stuck at the lowest economic level observed in the United States, now full of hope for ending generations of cyclical poverty through the power of education.

 

I endeavor with each day to serve my students and their families, with full application of what my West Texas pappy called, “elbow grease.” 

 

But providing direct academic instruction to my students and multiple services to their families constitute only part of my 16 to 18 hour days working full speed to impel the changes in K-12 education via the various venues and platforms I have created.

 

This is the commitment of a revolutionary whose life is guided by the conviction that the overhaul of K-12 education is the most important mission imaginable.

 

The provision of a knowledge-intensive K-12 education is the foundation for a future in which factual information and universally embraced ethics creates a world in which peace and empathic understanding replace violence and cultural antagonism.

 

The impartment of excellent K-12 education will also be our moral recompense due to people such as Evelyn, Javon, and Damon---  who have waited a very long time for this nation to become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.

 

Be Aware of and Take Action Regarding the Low Competence of Those Making Decisions at the Minneapolis Public Schools

In the days, weeks, and months to come, I will be advocating even more persistently that all members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education and members of the public become intensely familiar with the vital matters of curriculum and teacher quality.

 

As I will soon be fully revealing in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, the nature of the training that prospective superintendents, academic officers, and teachers receive in departments, schools, and colleges of education is so abysmal and follows such a misguided philosophy of education that others from outside this strange universe are going to have to become more engaged.   Members of the school board and members of the public are going to have to pressure educators to study such approaches as the Core Knowledge curriculum of E. D. Hirsch for the design and implementation of an incrementally sequenced, grade-by-grade knowledge-intensive K-12 education.  

 

Hirsch’s curriculum is most fully developed for students in grade pre-kindergarten through grade 6;  the Core Knowledge Foundation also provides curriculum for grade 7 and grade 8.  In my other nearly complete book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, I provide such a knowledge-intensive curriculum to upper level high school students, university students, and intellectually ambitious adults.

 

My regular readers have seen many articles posted on this blog concerning the ineptitude of those at the Minneapolis Public Schools making academic decisions, those pertinent to the very most important matters of curriculum and teacher quality.  Readers of my academic journal (Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, launched in July 2014) have read even longer analytical articles on the subject.  I recently addressed relevant issues in an opinion piece for the Star Tribune (Saturday, 28 January 2017, “Some Educators Promote a Badly Flawed Ideology").

And I have addressed this issue many times in my Public Comments at the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools. 

 

We are accustomed to observing at least minimal competence in most professionals from the spheres of medicine and law.   We would like to think that professionals in the sphere of education have something approaching that level of competence.  But they do not.  Thus it is that members of the Board of Education and the general public put a faith in staff at the Minneapolis Public Schools who are not now positioned by the nature of their misguided training to fulfill.

 

Very notably at the Minneapolis Public Schools, staff members who are responsible for nonacademic matters, people such as Jennifer Lindquist and Jesse Winkler who provide professional support to the school board;   Department of Communications Executive Director Gail Plewacki;  the superlatively talented Eric Moore (Chief of Research, Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability); and the brilliant Chief Financial Officer Ibrahima Diop;  who are trained in fields other than those in that strange world of education professors;  are immensely more competent than are staff such as Superintendent Ed Graff, Deputy Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin, and Department of Teaching and Learning Executive Director Macarre Traynham, all of whom have been trained by education professors.

 

Spotlighting this problem of staff quality at the Minneapolis Public Schools with regard to those making decisions on the central matters of curriculum and teacher development will be a tough task and require reams of courage. 

 

Citizens must educate themselves on these issues and then take action.

 

The same is true in confronting the fact that too many mediocre teachers inhabit the classrooms of this and most other school districts.

 

But being specific as to the problems faced and acting in ways to impel change toward upgrading curriculum and teacher quality in our public schools represent the paramount task in transforming K-12 education at this stage of the Civil Rights Movement .

 

And only by promoting truly excellent K-12 education for all of our precious young people can we become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.

A Letter Pertinent to the K-12 Revolution, Sent Via Email to Martin Peyer

February 1, 2017

Martin--- 

You should know that I am a revolutionary of the practical sort, in the mode of Gandhi, Malcolm X, Steinhem, Alinsky, and Mao.  My style is especially reminiscent of the latter, who wrote and planned into the depths of the night and went forth onto the field of action by day.

I work 16 to 18 hours a day in the cause of the K-12 Revolution and have generated an academic journal, a blog, a television show (The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gary Marvin Davison, shown this evening as all Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on MTN cable channel 17 in the Minneapolis area), and two nearly complete books intended to extend the principles that I have perfected in the New Salem Educational Initiative to the transformation of the locally centralized school district, in the iteration of the Minneapolis Public Schools that most affects the young people and families whom I serve on a daily basis.

In the wee recent hours, after my return from my daily thrust into the toughest urban situations in Minnesota, I took time to look at the websites you referenced and found them very familiar versions of an old, tired approach to education, technologically dressed up as new, that for many decades has insidiously emanated from departments, schools, and colleges of education, those cash cows of colleges and universities headed by education professors.  Thus are our precious children deprived of a knowledge-intensive education every day the sun rises over the eastern skies.

Your invitation to the morning breakfast, which I hope was well-meaning, would only be accepted as one more venue for me to deliver my revolutionary message.  I'll evaluate the likelihood of your meeting being an appropriate venue as necessary as time goes on.

In the meantime, I am going to post this communication on my blog.  I am good about responding to most emails but must in the revolutionary spirit discipline myself to make any lengthy responses pertinent to my main mission.

I wish you well in your personal life, but do know that on a professional level you have wandered into my revolutionary's buzz saw.

I'll most likely respond to any further communications from you specifically in the manner of a publicly posted article---  and more broadly in my revolutionary activities throughout each day. 

My very best to you for personal health and happiness, and the same for all of those whom you hold dear---

Gary

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.

Director, New Salem Educational Initiative