>Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> Chapter Sixty-Four (Part Three, Philosophy) >>>>> Properly Defining an Excellent Education and the Excellent Teacher

We must proceed to revolutionize pre-K-12 education by emphasizing knowledge acquired over the process of delivery.  Thus, we should proceed on the basis of the definition gleaned from the work of E. D. Hirsch, but with more attention paid to teacher quality and with extension of Hirsch’s work, which concerns especially pre-K-6 and also grades 7-8 curriculum, to grades 9-12 of high school.

 

Accordingly, we must revamp and upgrade curriculum for specification of knowledge sets for delivery in logical succession throughout the pre-K-12 years.  Currently, we have little curriculum at all at the K-5 level and consider middle school a time primarily for socialization.  We wait until high school to deliver anything approaching a content-rich curriculum, and we try to do this with too many teachers who are not knowledgeable enough to deliver the content.

                                                                                               

Having revamped, upgraded, and sequenced the curriculum, we must train teachers who are academicians able to impart specified skill and knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

In overhauling curriculum and training teachers, we must be clear as to what constitutes excellent education and the excellent teacher:

 

Definition of an Excellent Education

 

An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets in the liberal, technological, ande vocational arts in grade by grade sequence throughout the preK-12 years.

 

Definition of the Excellent Teacher

 

An excellent teacher is a person of broad and deep knowledge, with the pedagogical skill to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

Why Defining Excellent Education and the Excellent Teacher Are so Important

 

Remember that the education professor first made her or his appearance on university campuses in the early years of the twentieth century.  Previously, these trainers of teachers had operated out of institutions known as normal schools.  Few people living as the 19^th century turned into the 20^th century had sought education beyond the sixth grade;  a few went through the eighth grade;  a very small percentage went on to high school.  Teachers at grades one through eight stressed reading, fundamental math, and lessons in geography, history, civics, and literature found in books such as the McGuffey readers.  Teachers at the high school level were field specialists who trained student populations aspiring to college and university attendance.

 

Thus, well into the twentieth century, teachers saw themselves as imparters of knowledge in specific subject areas.  Many teachers, especially at the grades one through eight level, were not well-trained, but even they saw themselves as transmitting important knowledge and skill sets to students.

                                                   

But university-based education professors had other ideas. 

 

Now finding themselves surrounded by professorial field specialists with much more knowledge than they, education professors began to stress pedagogy over subject area knowledge, process over content.  Terms such as “teaching the whole child,” “project method,”  and “child-centered education” conveyed in explanation and application the key idea that knowledge does not matter;  rather, education professors stressed the process of learning, with deference to the personality and capabilities of the individual child. 

 

Resonating with 19^th century literary and philosophical Romanticism touting the divine spark within the individual, the doctrines of education professors conveyed a naïve belief that children if left unfettered by their teachers would find their way to the education that they needed. Education professors faced challenges in convincing local parents and teachers to embrace their “progressive” approach to the education, but from the 1960s on their approach became deeply rooted in the locally centralized school districts of the United States.

 

Over time, subject-specific masters and doctoral degrees gave way to graduate degrees in education for those seeking advancement in the school district hierarchy.  At their core, staff at the Davis Center (central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools, 1250 West Broadway) do not believe in the importance of knowledge.  Students learn very little at grades K-5, and curriculum is weak at grades 6-8 and 9-12.  Only in Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses do students have a chance to get a substantive education, but by that time their academic foundation is weak;  and very few teachers have the knowledge to teach AP and IB courses.

 

Understand how these terms represent the harmful approach of education professors that sends graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools into the world and onto college and university campuses with so little academic preparation, necessitating remedial education for one-third of those graduates.

 

The Abject Ignorance of the American Populace Must Be Rectified Via the Impartation of a Knowledge-Intensive K-12 Education

 

There is a dominant motif in K-12 Education that has violent impact on the lives of our children, as follows:

 

The call for education reform is received by many as a chance to advocate for innovation that challenges the structure and the competency of the traditional school framework.  But most charter schools are worse than the regular public schools, home schooling has as variable success as there is competency of parents to be teachers, and aside from putting in play the notion of increased parental options, the voucher system has gained little traction.  The notion that measurable results can be achieved with a shift to smaller schools or school communities;  and the idea that designing buildings for fluid spaces offering high-technology and fast-paced activities as a means for boosting student achievement;  have as yet yielded no measurable results.  National programs such as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race to the Top are inevitably destroyed by a combination of political forces from the political left (under the sway of teachers unions and others within the education establishment) and the political right (who object to any federal or national level policy as an assault on local control).

 

This dominant motif that calls for better results, gives rein to many disparate groups for the achievement of student progress, and induces federal government action with the intent to improve student performance has resulted in little progress for our students.  The repetition of a whirlwind of mostly ineffective reformist action amidst competing political forces that vitiate any promising initiatives within the whirlwind---  has violent consequences for our youth and for the citizenry of United States.

 

We fail because very few advocating for reform have a clear conception of an excellent education and little understanding of the quality of teachers needed to impart an excellent education.

 

We fail because people of the United States have a fixation on local control that vitiates any national-level effort.

 

We fail because we have a low level of civic participation in our society, with few people involving themselves in those activities that will be necessary to overhaul K-12 education.

 

This failure has violent consequences:

 

Our young people are knowledge-starved.

 

The result for too many of our youth is a life in which there is dysfunction at home and unsatisfactory experiences at school, which is a terrible place to be:  These prevailing circumstances lead many young people to the life of the street, teenage pregnancy, gang affiliation, violent behavior, and a fast track to prison.

 

The American populace as a whole wanders through life on the basis of a very low cultural aesthetic and limited understanding of the ethical precepts that undergird the wisest among history’s philosophers and theologians.   Lives lived in ignorance and illusion are lives given to violent behavior in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, everywhere in these United States.

 

There is a better way.

 

There is a better life.

 

There awaits for us a less violent society.

 

In education there is personal fulfillment.

 

In education there is personal control.

 

In education there is altruistic inclination.

 

We must take a stand for knowledge-intensive education imparted by intellectually astute and pedagogically skilled teachers retrained at the central school district level.

 

To induce central school district staff to define excellent education and train the teachers necessary to impart that education, we must act by exerting pressure on officials at the level of the locally centralized school district

 

Failure to do so will leave us with the ignorant, violent, and dissatisfied society that we now have.

 

Success in doing so will yield people who are culturally enriched, civically engaged, and professionally prepared, and who have little reason to want a violent and desultory life.

Rather, as knowledge replaces the abject ignorance of the American populace, citizens will have every reason to want to live as fulfilled individuals and community participants for whom violence is abhorrent and life is a magnificent gift to be treasured, honored, perfected.

The Poverty of Prevailing Notions as to the Purpose of K-12 Education

 

Professors of education tend to identify the purpose of education as the development of student “critical thinking skills” and a process of discovery that encourages “lifelong learning.”  Undergirding this approach to education is a “constructivist” ideology that maintains that curriculum should be driven by student experiential frame of reference and current interest, with teachers acting as “facilitators” who guide young learners to sources of information used to pursue individual and group projects.

 

Education reformers who work outside the education establishment, in the world of private enterprise, identify the purpose of education as preparation for the marketplace.  These reformers, either explicitly or implicitly dissatisfied with the public schools, emphasize an educational transformation whereby high school graduates will possess the math, reading, writing, technological, and industrial skills necessary to succeed in college, university, and workplace settings.  They want high school, college, and university graduates to be prepared for performing tasks pertinent to well-paying jobs capable of maintaining economically viable nuclear families. 

 

The purpose of education identified by education professors is intellectually impoverished.  The purpose of education identified by reformers from the world of private enterprise is insufficient. 

 

The approach of education professors is a smokescreen for their own intellectual lassitude and for the insufficient knowledge base of the putative educators whom they produce. 

 

I ask my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative all the time to think analytically about the reasons for Hamlet’s dithering once he vowed to revenge his father’s death;  about the relative claims of the Palestinians and the Israelis to territory that each considers theirs as a matter religious and historical right;  about federal budgetary priorities that must be made when considering outlays for defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), physical infrastructure;  about the roots of rock and roll in blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, and country;  about the distinguishing

elements of classical, romantic, and baroque music;  about whether the goals sought by the African American Northern Migration were fulfilled;  about the comparative styles of Arthur Miller and August Wilson---  and on and on with application of analytical processes to the world of knowledge.  They come alive when I ask them to give their viewpoints about such matters.  They typically have not been asked to give well-reasoned views at school.  By no means have our students generally been asked to “think critically.”

 

And the projects that they have pursued, so as supposedly to follow their passions and prepare themselves for “lifelong learning,” are inevitably done without proper academic context.  Their teachers facilitate their quest for information by pointing them toward websites, on which they yank down information for which they have little background in assessing value and pertinence.   A student may conduct an African American History Month project in February on Frederick McGee (a St. Paul attorney of the early 20^th century who was a colleague of W. E. B. Dubois and others in the Niagara Movement) may have no sense of the people and issues that led to the founding of the NAACP, or of the circumstances in Minneapolis-St. Paul that drove McGee’s own activism.  A student may lunge into a project on the Cold War with no background as to what communism actually means in theory and practice, or how a figure such as Joseph Stalin was an ally against fascism and Nazism but an enemy in the struggle for postwar international influence.  Students may grab books for sessions known as DEAR (Drop Everything And Read), making selections from mediocre volumes available in their classrooms but never gaining fascination with majestic children’s literature such as Winnie the Pooh, “The People Could Fly,” or [Native American tale].

 

The notion that our children are gaining critical thinking skills or that they are being prepared for lifelong learning is a charade.  They lack the knowledge base upon which critical analysis must proceed, and the projects that they pursue under flimsy guidance are done in such haphazard fashion and with such little respect for the requisite body of contextualizing information that they gain no practice in conducting authentic research or in the systematic quest for knowledge that lifelong learning would entail.  This disrespect for research extends through high school.  I have students in the New Salem Educational Initiative at all levels K-12;  rarely has a student at any level learned in classes at her or his school how to do proper citations, whether internal citations, footnotes, or endnotes.

 

The purpose of education identified by education reformers from the world of private enterprise is very worthy, but it is incomplete. 

 

The Three Purposes of K-12 Education:  Cultural Enrichment, Civic Preparation, and Professional Satisfaction

                                                           

Job readiness is one of three main purposes of an excellent K-12 education.  Students must be prepared for a life of professional satisfaction, in which they can earn incomes adequate for maintaining a family in what we conventionally regard as middle class circumstances.  This is very important for me, inasmuch as a chief goal of mine in giving my students an educationally challenging and stimulating experience is to advance their economic prospects for an adulthood in which they have ended the cycle of generational poverty that has trapped their families---  ancestral and contemporary---  for many decades extending into the present.  Education is the key to ending cyclical poverty.

 

But just to escape poverty is not to be happy or fulfilled. 

 

The happy and fulfilled person is alive in the world of knowledge.  She or he can go to a production of A Street Car Named Desire or A Raisin in the Sun and have a sense of the place that Tennessee Williams and Lorraine Hansberry occupy in the realm of American drama.  She can tune into Cosmos and be alert rather than lost as Neil Degrassey Tyson, the great popularizing successor to Carl Sagan, traces the evolution of humankind from creatures who emerged from the sea and adapted through natural selection to circumstances of the earthly terrain.  He can continue to be animated by the musical worlds of hip-hop, rhythm and blues, rock, and country, while still appreciating the genius of Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin.  She can understand how Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner each challenged the assumption of free will---  and thus evaluate whether our approach to criminal justice actually operates on sound principles of human behavior.  The happy and fulfilled person has a sense of her or his place in a world history that has known the Tang Dynasty, the Togugawa shoguns, the emperors of Songhai, the mathematicians of the Maya, the architects of Anghor Wat, the empires of the Mediterranean world and of European ambition, the genius of a United States Constitution that nevertheless required the responses of Frederick Douglass and A. Phillip Randolph and Gloria Steinem.

 

Education is not just a matter of professional satisfaction.  Education is also a matter of cultural enrichment.  But that’s not all.

 

The purpose of education is also civic preparation.  People in the United States live in a nation that is the envy of many people across the globe who yearn for democracy.  And yet too many people in the United States do not understand the electoral college system, how primaries differ from caucuses, the constitutional principles that inform the debate between liberals and strict constructionists, the roles of the House of Representatives and Senate when considering a process that leads from impeachment through trial for a president or other federal official accused of “gross crimes and misdemeanors.”  People who have no or little knowledge of the organizational efforts of Sam Adams, Harriet Tubman, Floyd McKissick, Bella Abzug, or Saul Alinsky have no appreciation of the power that lies within themselves if they were to exercise their full rights of citizenship.

 

Instruction in those features of history and government that prepares a person for citizenship is a key component of the purpose of education.  The exercise of citizenship animates a person for the pursuit of causes beyond the self.  Understanding how one may act to advance one’s own rights is important, and that is a part of civic preparation.  But civic preparation also entails an understanding of one’s own demographically defined group, how that group fits into the body politic, and how the rights of the individual, particularistic group, community, state, and nation fit into the complex weave of the polity.  When a person is given the factual information necessary for embracing the responsibility of citizenship, the chances are enhanced that a person’s civic responsibility will be exercised both to enhance personal dignity and to promote human betterment in concentric movement from the person all the way out to the nation as a whole.

 

And a person with a strong sense of self, a grasp of the civic ethic, and dedication to the lives of people in the larger community, is a person whose own purpose in life is multifaceted.  She or he moves forth with a firmness of ego that allows for altruistic commitment to the greater good.

 

Creating New People and a Better World Through the Power of Education

 

When a person is well educated, and therefore culturally enriched, that individual sees the world with eyes ever alert, ears always tuned, thoughts constantly responsive to the wonder of the everyday.

 

He notices that his bank building represents a Neoclassical style that prevailed in the Midwest from the late 19^th century into the early 20^th century.

 

She observes admiringly how the Mississippi river wends its way through the vibrant cities near its upper reaches.  She reflects upon the remarkable spectacle of a noble waterway beginning as a stream out of Lake Itaska, widening as it variously ambles and rushes southward on to the Delta at New Orleans, into the Gulf of Mexico.  And she remembers how this riverine highway awakened the literary gifts of Samuel Clemens, inspired him to embrace river captain allusions in opting for the pseudonym of Mark Twain, and moved him to eloquent abolitionist commentary even as he sends readers into belly-holding fits of laughter.

 

Sounds of Scott Joplin emanating from an unlikely urban doorway capture the appreciative comments of the educated person who knows the connections and has come to appreciate the line running from the work songs of the slaves through the forms of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, all the way to hip-hop.  

 

One of two friends driving down the highway comment that two large formations overhead must be Paris shooting at Hector’s heel.  The other remembers how Hamlet goaded Polonius into sycophantic acknowledgment that a particular cloud was successively---  upon the observation of the Prince of Denmark---  a camel, a weasel, and a whale.

 

A young woman and man feel awkwardness of a first date fade when, after viewing a special exhibit at the special exhibit at the Walker, they engage in a good-natured debate for the remainder of the evening as to whether a Jackson Pollock painting deserves the same consideration for greatness as the work of Leonardo Da Vinci. 

 

At a table in a favored restaurant, a crowd of people in their mid-thirties work their way through a conversation that begins with the discussion of the Balfour Declaration and the White Papers, proceeds to the horrors of the gas chambers, continues to the fate of the Palestinians as second class citizens in a land they claim as their own, moves to the matter of resurging Anti-Semitism among some European populations, and ends with a careful examination of the claims of the two sides in the Arab-Israeli dispute.

 

When one friend complains about the many faults of government, an energetic conversation ensues when another friend asserts, “In a democracy, you are the government.”  There is a basis for this discussion, since all of these friends have been educated in schools in which they have accumulated factual information pertinent to electoral college, primaries, caucuses, and lobbyists.  They know the history of the Republican and Democratic parties, including the nature of the very different incarnations witnessed in the 20^th versus the 19^th century.  They understand the historical context in which John Stuart Mill could be a liberal when he seemed so unconcerned with the fate of the underclass;  and how conservative economists in the United States are very proud of the classically liberal economies prevailing in their nations.  They know about the activist organizational efforts of Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Samuel Gompers, A. Phillip Randolph, and Saul Alinsky, so they know that, whatever their differing view on the power that should be granted in the name of governmental institutions, there is a fundamental truth to the idea that if people exercise their rights of citizenship in a democracy, there will be a mutual identity between people and government.   

 

The world of knowledge is a limitless sky under which one can know so much, yearn for much more, stay forever young, forever interested, always engaged, never bored.

                               

Fulfilling the Purposes of Education and Creating Better People by Revolutionizing K-12 Education

 

If education is imparted in the proper spirit, with attention to cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction, the latter becomes a natural extension of the first two purposes of an excellent education.  These three components together have certain unifying themes:   the joy of being alive in the world of knowledge;  the confidence that a solid body of knowing many things brings;  a connection to other people who share as cultural inheritance the literature, art, music, and scientific discovery that their human fellows have produced across the oceans and continents of the globe.

 

A person who possesses the cultural enrichment and the civic preparation that has come with a liberal arts education by definition has acquired the mathematical skill, reading comprehension, and technological knowhow that flow from an excellent education.  A knowledge-heavy education stimulates analysis and discussion with one’s classmates, teachers, and others on the academic journey of the K-12 years.  Such an education provides both the specific skills necessary to undertake additional training for professional specialization;  and the shared knowledge of the human inheritance that promotes productive and rewarding interactions with one’s colleagues in the workplace.

 

An excellent education provides cultural sustenance.  The world comes alive in appreciation of the musical forms of classical, jazz, rhythm and blues, blues, folk, country, and rock and roll.  The visual cortex lights up with excitement in viewing the work of the Old Masters, Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and Abstractionists.  The cosmos becomes a source of wonder upon contemplation of the great astronomical concatenation that followed a tremendous explosion 13.8 billion years ago.  Language and dramatic insight flow from the literary treasures of William Shakespeare and August Wilson.  Historical context explains the advent of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinhem, the power of their conviction, the impact of their activism. The Pythagorean Theorem is seen for the sheer beauty of its explanatory precision.  Newtonian Laws of Motion explain one’s traverse across earthly expanses, Einstein’s Relativity provides introduction to worlds beyond worlds.

 

An excellent education provides civic preparation.  One understands the great experiment of the Enlightenment that is the United States.  The educated person has a grasp of constitutional principles and can personally evaluate Supreme Court decisions.  One understands the historical forces that have produced roles and statuses pertinent to class and gender.   She who has received an excellent education knows the function and the functioning of the Electoral College, understands caucus and primary, has the knowledge base to file for public office, comprehends the array of issues necessary for effective campaigning.  He who has the educational foundation to join the informed electorate can determine on the basis of historical fact, national relevance, and international circumstances the wisdom of sending the sons of mothers and the daughters of fathers forth into potentially lethal battle.

 

An excellent education provides professional satisfaction.  Fueled with the power of an excellent education, a person can take one’s position in the fields of medicine, law, education, business, or agriculture.  Given the options provided by an excellent education, decisions regarding vocation may be rendered with considerations of responsibility to the family formed of spouse, children, and relatives;  and the family formed of humanity.  Dedication to a satisfying job gives a person a sense of dignity, the spirit of contributing to the familial and the greater good, and the abiding assumption that at the end of this earthly journey a legacy will remain.

 

People of all ethnicities of whatever economic wherewithal deserve the cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that an excellent education brings.  Excellent education for most people must be gained in the schools of locally centralized school districts.  An excellent K-12 education is defined by knowledge and skill sets especially yielding information across the liberal arts of math, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), social science (upon a foundation of history, geography, and economics;  with introduction to political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology);  and the fine arts (visual and musical).  An excellent education can only be imparted by excellent teachers, who by definition are pedagogically gifted professionals possessing deep and broad subject area knowledge across the liberal arts. 

 

The locally centralized school district is the unit in the United States best positioned to impart an excellent education.  It also must be the organization that provides teacher retraining, so that well-meaning and dedicated teachers who truly strive for excellence can overcome the inadequacy of their training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.

 

We must get this mission in our guts. 

 

We must feel in the depths of our individual and collective souls the responsibility to all of our precious children. 

 

We cannot wait until all families are the perfections of our imagination. 

 

If all families are not as we think they should be, be must embrace all children as our own. 

 

Through excellent K-12 education we can shape a different world. 

 

We can pay the debt of history and atone for the misdeeds of our forbearers, even as we seize the instruments of democracy that our ancestors have placed in our hands. 

 

For to be sure, we can at last achieve true democracy by providing equal opportunity for every person via our transformation of K-12 education.

 

We need not go to Guatemala to build schools, though that is a great service if we can do that, too.  We do not have to wait until the next hurricane hits Haiti, although compassion for people in other places is a wonderful thing.  But there are people very near your house, close to your community, living a short flight of the robin from your abode, who await the justice to which you can contribute if you care enough.

 

You need not go to an international outpost, to Washington, D. C., or even to the state Capitol in St. Paul to make a difference.  The opportunity to make an enormous difference lies in organizational and personal effort supportive of the initiatives already in progress at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  You can voice support for these initiatives at school board meetings and public forums.  You can promote and work for school board candidates who understand the importance of knowledge-intensive education.  You can offer your own tutorial services and recruit others to assist teachers schools wityh students facing the most life challenges;  and if you can do this well, you will make a direct contribution to educational excellence for every child.

 

And in doing these things, you will be helping to atone for a brutal history and to advance the vision of a democratic society by revolutionizing K-12 education.

Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> Chapter Sixty-Five (Part Three, Philosophy) >>>>> Atoning for a Brutal History and Apologizing to the African American People Via the Power of PreK-12 Education

As a matter of long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core, we will demonstrate that we truly understand that Black Lives Matter by overhauling K-12 education.

 

The education establishment of the United States has never properly educated the great majority of African American people, and in the broader sense K-12 public education in this nation has never offered academic instruction of excellence to most people.

 

African Americans have been most victimized by the deficiencies of K-12 public education In the United States.

 

Consider the history:

 

Most African American slaves were denied access to literacy.  When slavery ended in 1866 with the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and when the immediately succeeding 14th and 15th Amendments respectively acknowledged fundamental rights of citizenship and voting rights specifically, the pathway opened for African Americans to gain access to education.  But Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877, whereby Democrats granted the contested votes in the very close 1876 presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for withdrawal of federal troops from the South.

 

This left innervated the guarantees of the Reconstruction amendments and created conditions for the rise of hate groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, Midnight Raiders, and Ku Klux Klan; the advent of Jim Crow; and the “separate but equal” abomination in the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).  Segregation, violence, and the sharecropping system sent multitudes of African Americans scrambling on a Great Northern Migration. 

 

But in the urban North black people found restrictive housing covenants that directed them to certain parts of the city where, as in the case of African Americans settling in alongside the Jewish population of North Minneapolis, they joined other ethnic groups who also bore the burden of hateful treatment.  The Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, decision of the Supreme Court formally ended segregation in 1954, and the Civil Rights victories manifested in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965;  in combination with fair housing and employment laws in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s;  opened a pathway for African Americans positioned to grab for the middle class American Dream.

 

Ironically, though, many successful African American people joined whites fleeing the urban core.  In North Minneapolis, after rioting on Plymouth Avenue in summer 1967, Jewish people left in droves for St. Louis Park and other suburbs;  when many middle class African Americans did the same, this left behind--- as a general rule--- the poorest of the poor.

 

The Minneapolis Public Schools, like all American systems of K-12 public education, never had offered a superb quality of education.  Now mostly white educators were at a loss to provide high-quality education to a Northside population that increasingly included very challenged populations moving in from such places as Gary, Indiana;  Southside Chicago;  and Kankakee, Illinois.

 

And that’s where we remain today.

 

Our locally centralized system of the Minneapolis Public Schools has never provided anything close to a decent K-12 education to African Americans living at the urban core.

 

The time is now for us to provide knowledge-intensive K-12 education to our African American youth, and to our general populace of students of whom African American students constitute a particularly long-denied subset.

 

If we really believe that Black Lives Matter, then we must formulate a long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core by overhauling K-12 education in the Minneapolis Public Schools and across these not yet very United States.

 

The Opportunity to Confront the Forces of History and Overcome the Impact of Errant Legislative Policy in Minnesota

 

During the 1970s, North Minneapolis (the MPS schools of which are most challenged in terms of student achievement) underwent a great transition.  Civil rights and fair housing legislation had opened up suburban residential possibilities for those African Americans positioned to attain middle class status. Among those stuck in poverty, though, anger seethed.  Riots broke out along Plymouth Avenue in the summer of 1967;   overwhelmingly, destruction fell hardest on shops owned by members of the long-established North Minneapolis Jewish community, accelerating a residential shift into St. Louis Park.

 

From the 1920s through the 1960s, programming of the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, particularly under the leadership of W. Gertrude Brown from 1924 through 1937, typified a culturally vibrant North Side African American community harboring deep yearnings for middle class status.  Highly motivated Jewish and African American students responded with alacrity to teachers at North High School, at that time the best public secondary institution in Minnesota.

But as middle class African American and Jewish folk moved away from the North Side in the course of the 1970s, relatively low housing costs attracted those moving in from more challenged communities such as Gary, Indiana;  South Side Chicago;  Detroit, Michigan;  and other Midwestern urban outposts.  By this time, the old Wheatley had fallen to urban renewal, memories of the rich cultural heritage of North Minneapolis were fading, and North Minneapolis was giving evidence of problems faced by inner city communities throughout the United States.

Crack cocaine hit the streets about 1980 and gang activity rose precipitously.  Minneapolis Public Schools educators were overwhelmed by students facing very challenging circumstances.  Teachers, very few of whom were African American, had little training pertinent to instructing students from severely challenged families of economic poverty and frequent dysfunction.

This situation coincided with a lamentable trend in departments, schools, and colleges of education to promote a degraded “constructivist” pedagogical creed, according to which students and teachers define subjects to be studied, at whatever pace and in whatever manner that they choose. 

                                                                               

Education professors appropriated for this innervated approach to education the term “progressive,” but academic content declined in quality for those who most needed carefully defined and sequenced skill and knowledge sets.                                    

 

In 1983, a federally commissioned study entitled A Nation at Risk detailed the poor quality of K-12 education in the United States.  Fads for addressing the dilemma came and went until a movement

for higher academic standards and measurable results finally produced a worthy bipartisan program, No Child Left Behind.  In 2004, consistent with the requirements of this legislation, committees formed by the Minnesota Department of Education generated academic standards for reading, math, science, and social studies.  Officials of the Minnesota Department of Education also constructed the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) to assess student knowledge in reading and math for Grades 3 through 8.  Grade level performance on assessments for writing (administered in Grade 9), reading (Grade 10), and math (Grade 11) was deemed necessary for graduation.

Steadily, as student performance proved embarrassing, Education Minnesota (the well-funded teachers union in Minnesota) went to work on members of the DFL, undermining support for the MCAs and for academic standards.  The DFL-dominated, farcically dubbed “education session” of the 2013 Minnesota Legislature terminated the high school tests as graduation requirements.   Governor Mark  Dayton’s Education Commissioner, Brenda Cassellius, inaugurated an imprecise new Multiple Measure Ratings system and signaled that the MCAs would eventually be replaced by assessments more aligned to the ACT, upon the fanciful notion that students who could not pass high school level tests now are going to be better prepared to take the much more difficult, college readiness instrument.  Republicans, meanwhile, typically say that standards and assessments that they once supported now offend their local control sensibilities.  Perceiving an opening and adding further to the disarray, certain teachers, never keen on implementing measurable standards, are refusing to administer the doomed MCAs.

In this morally corrupt condition of state-level ineffectiveness, in which academic targets shift, no one can be held accountable, and “local control” becomes the mantra, meaningful overhaul of our K-12 systems must indeed ensue at the level of the central school district.         

The Vital Mission to Make of the United States a True Democracy by Providing Excellent Education to All of Our Precious Children

In the course of the middle to late 19^th century, power-holders in the United States pursued courses of action that would in the 20^th century come to be identified with the apartheid regime of South Africa.  At the same time that the United States government was systematically appropriating land that had been occupied for millennia by Native Americans, policies implemented by that same government reneged on a promise that had been made to African Americans in the waging of the Civil War and, especially, in the enactment of the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the United States Constitution. 

 

The greatest miscreant acts taken by the United States government with regard to Native Americans were not in the expropriation of land as such, because something akin to the exercise of eminent domain was inevitable in the context of agrarian expansion by settlers of European ancestry;  the reprehensibility of government policy relevant to Native Americans was, rather, in the failure to compensate them fairly for lands seized and to evolve a policy in consultation with Native American

leaders and populace capable of integrating these ancestral first inhabitants of the Americas into the life of the United States on culturally respectful terms.  Policies pertinent to the forcible redistribution of Native American land as individualized land parcels, and the violent removal of children for reeducation on terms decreeing European styles of physical presentation and forbidding communication in native languages, were both ethically abhorrent and pragmatically ineffective.  Federal policy toward Native Americans anticipated in some respects the apartheid system of South Africa.  Policy toward African Americans had even clearer parallels.            

                                                                                               

Slavery in the plantation system of the Antebellum South has received due reprobation.  Less pervasively understood and disseminated is information relevant to the failure of Reconstruction and the one hundred years of American history that resulted from a major Constitutional breach.  Slavery was embedded in the United States Constitution of 1789, but denial of citizenship in the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 contravened the 14^th Amendment asserting citizenship for people regardless of race or previous condition of servitude and the 15^th amendment guaranteeing the right of males 21 years of age and older to vote;  and although the 13^th amendment forbidding slavery was generally followed as a technical matter, aspects of the sharecropping system revived many features of the plantation system.            

According to the Compromise of 1877, a dispute over a contested presidential election in Florida was resolved when Democrats agreed to concede victory in that state to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel Tilden, with the understanding that federal troops would be removed from the South.  With this agreement, the white establishment in the South was able to reassert  dominance and over the course of the ensuing years to institute the system of segregation defined by Jim Crow institutions and the Black Codes;  the decision of Supreme Court Justices in Plessy v. Ferguson gave federal  judicial blessing to state legislative initiatives and ad hoc societal practices asserting the right of states (according to the concepts of interposition and nullification) to pursue courses of action in defiance of federal law. 

                                                                               

In this context of betrayal, a Great Northern Migration ensued whereby a huge contingent of the African American population relocated in cities of the North and Midwest such as New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Minneapolis.  African Americans did find more remunerative jobs in the North, but they also experienced a great deal of social anomie and less formal but pervasive racism in the form of restricted housing covenants and denial of access to restaurants and hotels commonly accepted as reserved for exclusively white patronage.

                                                                               

The Northern Migration accelerated in the aftermath of World War I and continued with great force throughout the 20^th century.   People of African American ethnicity in the Twin Cities settled especially heavily in the Rondo Community of St. Paul, in North Minneapolis from Glenwood Avenue northward, and in certain sections of South Minneapolis, focused initially along 4^th and 5^th Avenues between East 35^th and 41^st Streets.  In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, continuing to the present time, there was also a pronounced trend toward a kind of Westward Migration, especially from Chicago and nearby urban, suburban, and exurban communities:  Southside Chicago;  Gary, Indiana;  and places of African American settlement such as Kankakee, Illinois.

 

African American populations have in the main been ill-served by urban school districts in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and indeed in Minneapolis and St. Paul.   In Minneapolis, the education of African Americans facing severe economic challenges has languished;  Minneapolis Public Schools decision-makers have not heretofore generated a viable program for addressing the needs of students of various ethnicities mired in generational poverty, whether these students identify as African American, Hispanic/Latino, Native American/ American Indian, Hmong, or Caucasian.  Over thirty years now since the publication of A Nation at Risk, the risk falls most heavily on impoverished families living at the urban core. 

 

The time is now to reduce that risk by addressing the academic needs of the urban poor, thus moving forward with the key agenda of the Second Phase of the Civil Rights Movement.

 

When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, he was in the midst of organizing a Poor People’s March on Washington in frank recognition that his Civil Rights Movement had achieved only a partial victory with the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), along with subsequent federal initiatives in health care, housing, and employment.  These congressional acts of statutory law had opened a way toward political and economic progress for those who had the wherewithal to strive for middle class status, residentially moving if they so desired into the tranquility of suburban enclaves.  Left behind at the urban core, though, were people mired in cyclical generational poverty who saw little hope for themselves as to they looked toward futures reminiscent of the familial and community examples they saw around them in the detritus of inner city life.

 

So Dr. King knew as of 1968 that his job was only half done.  He had opened the way toward equality of citizenship in a technical sense, but he had fallen far short in making a path through which those in the most challenged urban areas could move toward equity of educational and economic opportunity.  In the program he was generating, Dr. King’s emphasis was on diverting federal dollars from military involvements (he had become an outspoken opponent of the War in Vietnam), toward programs that would indirectly and in some cases very directly transfer into the familial coffers of impoverished people of the inner city.

 

I will never know if Dr. King would eventually have put more emphasis on improving the quality of education dispensed by the public schools.  What I do know is that as the 1970s ensued, urban school districts that had been minimally acceptable by international standards became outright disasters.  And this is the case today, over 30 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk. 

 

By the 1980s, observers with any degree of discernment knew that the most important policy implication to result from Brown v. Board of Education offered no definite path to excellence in education for African American young people living at the urban core.  There had been people in many quarters who assumed that desegregation would result in vastly improved outcomes for inner city youth, that attending schools by tradition receiving far better educational resources housed in superior facilities would provide a significantly better education.  This was wrong for chiefly four reasons.

 

First, K-12 education in the United States is weak by the standards of nations at similar levels of economic development.  Public education in the United States does not come close in quality to that offered by the systems of East Asia and the European social democracies.  Results of the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) exam perennially demonstrate this.

 

Second, curriculum is weak in the K-12 public institutions of the United States.  In the East Asian nations of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore;  and in the social democracies of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and France;  a strong liberal arts curriculum is set at the national level, and implemented through each nation in a way that demonstrates that literature, fine arts, economics, history, political science, natural science, and math are valued.  These subjects are introduced sequentially year by year at each grade level from kindergarten forward.  By comparison, curriculum in the United States is decided at the state and local levels in a way that demonstrates contempt for knowledge of the liberal arts.

 

Third, teachers in the United States are ill-trained.  Decision-makers and professors in university departments, schools, and colleges of education operate programs that prepare prospective teachers poorly in terms of pedagogy, subject area knowledge, and practical experience.

 

Fourth, those administrators and teachers at the central school district level (which according to the penchant in the United States for local control is the most important unit for examination) who design and implement programs for urban youth do so in the absence of any sincere conviction that all students are capable and deserve an excellent education.  These educational professionals generally have little understanding of the problems of the urban poor, lack the skills to communicate effectively with people from economically challenged circumstances, and have few institutionalized approaches for reaching out to people with caring assistance right where they live.

 

We must exert every effort and apply every pressure necessary for success.  And we must begin by getting a firmer idea of what constitutes an excellent education and what describes an excellent teacher.          

 

Realizing the Vision of a Democratic Society by Revolutionizing K-12 Education

 

The United States has never functioned as a democracy, given an understanding of that sociopolitical form as a polity providing equal opportunity for all citizens.  As of 1789, most people of African heritage counted constitutionally as “all other persons” who were not free, indentured, or Native American.  The free and the indentured were counted in determining apportionment by states in the House of Representatives;  African Americans were counted at the fractional three-fifths, while untaxed Native Americans were counted not at all.  Women were counted for the purpose of determining representation in the House, but they had to wait until 1920 to vote, and they awaited the late 1960s and early 1970s for legal guarantees that moved them nearer to equality with men.

 

African American men should have achieved full citizenship according to the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments, but the Compromise of 1877, Jim Crow, Black Codes, interposition, nullification, vigilante judges, and lynching jurists favored de facto practices over de jure formulations.  Formal citizenship for African Americans came with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but a post-Reconstruction history of migration and Northern-style segregation yielded urban ghettos wherein the equality of opportunity inherent in democracy could not abide.

     

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted on 2 July, fifty years ago at the publication of this new journal.  But fifty years hence, we still do not have democracy.  We will only have democracy when we provide excellent education to all of our young people, providing those living at the urban core a genuine route out of the entrapment of multigenerational poverty, pressures conducive to familial dysfunction, recourse to pharmaceutical pleasure, easy money discovered en route to incarceration, and a life that will never know the cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that excellent education bestows.

 

 

Training Teachers Capable of Imparting a Rich Liberal Arts Curriculum   

Teachers are abominably trained. 

 

Education professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education throughout the United States are philosophically united around a harmful creed known as “constructivism,” which takes student experiential frames of reference and avid personal interests as the driving forces of curriculum.  In a system undergirded by this approach for identifying what is to be studied, teachers are conceptualized as “facilitators,” classroom presences adept at understanding the life experiences of students, listening to young people talk about their passions, and directing learners to resources appropriate to their life experiences and interests.

 

There is much that is initially appealing about this conceptualization of the educational experience, especially in the United States.  People in the United States frequently see themselves as rugged individualists, free to do, live, worship, work, and congregate as they choose.  To rugged individualists, there is a great deal of appeal in the notion of a freewheeling classroom of happy, smiling students enthralled with an educational experience that focuses on them, pitched to their interests, with a classroom facilitator interfering as little as possible with the students’ exciting educational journey.    

 

But such an approach shortchanges students.

 

 By not transmitting to them what is their cultural inheritance, we rob students of the great body of knowledge and wisdom accumulated over the centuries from the greatest mathematicians, most brilliant scientists, finest literary masters, most adroit historians, and most supremely talented practitioners of the fine arts. 

 

Giving Students Their Rightful Cultural Inheritance

 

Low are the odds that a young student is going to gain an early understanding of the specific Native American groups who populated the two continents of the Western Hemisphere, the importance of Columbus’s voyages to the Americas, the injustices of the Middle Passage, the essential principles of the United States Constitution, or the presidencies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson---  unless a knowledgeable teacher presents information and directs discussions about these major historical events and personages. 

 

Unlikely in the extreme will students in the early grades come to know the difference between

deciduous trees and evergreens, exactly what causes and constitutes different forms of precipitation, what plants thrive in the tropics versus those that persist under desert conditions, how cells promote the growth of bodily tissue and anatomical organs, why Copernicus was so insightful in describing the

universe as heliocentric, how Gregor Mendel revolutionized our understanding of heredity and genetics with his seminal work---   unless a teacher who knows and cares about such things conveys the wonder of scientific discovery to students.

 

Not at all predictable will be the student’s path to understanding the cultural contexts that have given us classical, blues, jazz, rock, and hip-hop music;  the musical forms that determine the classification of those musical genres;  the defining elements of tap, folk, ballet, ballroom, and hip-hop dancing;   the musical concepts of melody, pitch, and harmony;  or the distinguishing features of West African, Renaissance European, Song Dynasty, American Realist, or International Cubist visual art forms

---  unless a culturally and artistically astute teacher animates a classroom with the sheer glory of these extraordinary human accomplishments in the fine arts.

               

Nor will young students be privy to the elegant simplicity of Arabic numerals;  the interplay of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in solving and explaining so many practical problems;  the thematic unity of fractions, decimals, and percentages;  the art of selecting which of these expressions of part to whole is most efficiently applied to a given circumstance;  the magnificent equilibrium of the algebraic equation;  the combination of art and science to be observed in geometric two-dimensional and three dimensional shapes---   unless a teacher alive in the world of mathematics conveys its power and beauty to students.

 

And there is not much chance that students will gain introduction to literary masterpieces such as the A. E. Milne Winnie the Pooh books;  the stories from One Thousand One Arabian Nights;  the strange worlds that Louis Carrol created in Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass;  the power of the African American folktale, The People Could Fly; or the Native American tale, Inktomi Has Two Eyes -----  unless a teacher who truly appreciates and reads high-quality literature models such love in transmission to students. 

 

And yet these are all realms of knowledge in the worlds of natural science, history, fine arts, mathematics and literature over which children as young as those in the Grade K-2 years can roam with acute understanding when taught by a teacher of intellectual substance, rather than a mere functional facilitator. 

 

When we give students room to make their own decisions for research efforts, we must make sure that they have a solid informational base on which to identify topics for investigation.  When we ask young people critically to analyze an issue, we must ensure that they have the factual knowledge

necessary to inform their analysis.  We take from our students something very precious when we deny to them their cultural inheritance in mathematics, literature, history, natural science, and the fine arts.

 

And if we deny them thusly, we send our students across the stage at graduation, after thirteen years of schooling, almost as ignorant as they were when they entered Grade K---  however thoroughly their egos have been massaged on the flimsy notion that the curriculum should be guided upon their own whims.

                                                                                               

The level of knowledge that abides in the heads of most high school graduates is unconscionable.

To correct this violation of a public trust, to rectify our failure to provide common skill and knowledge sets to all of our precious young people, whatever their demographic descriptors, we need better teachers.  We need teachers who respect knowledge and have it rumbling along their neural pathways, ready to be imparted with conviction, energy, joy.

 

To do this we must overleap the impediments posed by the vapid creed of education professors in our departments, colleges, and schools of education.