Alternate Universe Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Gary Marvin Davison Delivers Major Address to Staff, MFT, and Public

In a major address to Davis Center and site staff, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers leadership and rank and file, and members of the public, Alternate Universe Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Gary Marvin Davison on Sunday (6 October 2019) gave major details of a program for overhauling curriculum, teacher training, and other important features for transforming MPS into a model for other locally centralized school districts.

The text of his speech is as follows:

 

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Good evening, friends.

 

My comments this evening will not be astonishing to those many of you who are already engaged in the development of the program important details of which I convey to you today.  We have been earnestly at work for many months now implementing the program that looms for entry into the conventional universe wherein Superintendent Ed Graff and Davis Center staff have been so dilatory.  I thank you all for your diligent efforts and for the joy that I see on your faces and in the eyes of the students of the Minneapolis Public Schools as those precious beings come alive in the world of knowledge.

 

Thus, this address is at least as vital for the auditory processes of those now laboring in the corruption that characterizes MPS actors in the conventional universe.  As if this were a new program, I speak to you today as I did at the incipience of our exciting journey, knowing that there are staff members in the conventional universe already excited about our efforts who long to hear a coherent message of pre-K-12 transformation.

 

Know, remember, and be ever thoughtful, then, about the following:

 

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We at the Minneapolis Public Schools are dedicated to the impartation of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum that will enable our students easily to master the Minnesota State Academic Standards in the context of courses that stretch beyond those standards in ambition.

 

Our pre-K-5 students will emerge from their experiences in those years with abundant knowledge and skills pertinent to mathematics, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), English literature and usage, history, government, economics, psychology, and the fine arts (visual and musical).  Students will have mastered curriculum associated with Algebra I and many concepts in geometry;  curriculum relevant to the other subject areas will be similarly advanced.

 

Upon matriculation in middle school (grades 6-8), students will continue this advanced course of study in the designated subject areas.  Students will master concepts pertinent to Algebra II, Geometry, and Trigonometry.  They will emerge from middle school with abundant knowledge sets in United States and World History.  They will continue to accumulate broad and deep knowledge in biology, chemistry, and physics, with well-designed laboratory experiences;  keen attention will be directed toward the associated sciences of health and reproduction.  From their experiences at grades pre-K-5 and grades 6-8, students will have gained a good initial understanding of Shakespearean literature, Greek drama, and the wealth of literature generated by and for African American, Somali, Latino/Latina, Hmong, and American Indian communities.  Students will also emerge from the preK-8 years with knowledge of Western classical music and music from the traditions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  They will learn of the roots of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop in work songs, blues, and jazz---  with the goal of affirming student contemporary interests while providing context for the development of current popular styles.  During the middle school experience, students will be given opportunities to advance in a world language and to explore vocational interests.

 

During high school (grades 9-12), all students except those facing severe learning challenges will take Advanced Placement courses in Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, United States History, World History, and a world language.  By the junior (grade 11) and senior (grade 12) years, students will have ample options pertinent to their driving professional and vocational interests;  and they will all take courses requiring mastery of academic research techniques and citations in the context of generating college-level research papers focused on subjects of driving student interest.

 

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Such ambitious curriculum will require thorough retraining of teachers, especially those at grades preK-5.  Teachers at that grade level will engage in a full year of study for a Masters of Liberal Arts Degree focused on mathematics through calculus and accordingly advanced material in English literature and usage, history, biology,  chemistry, physics, and the fine arts (visual and musical).  Aspiring preK-12 teachers will write a master’s thesis on a topic of driving interest within the subject areas given above.  Upon receipt of their Masters of Liberal Arts Degree, aspiring preK-5 teachers will serve a full year of internship to determine suitability for employment as teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

For teachers at grades 6-8 and 9-12, both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in a major subject area within mathematics, the natural sciences, history, government, English literature, music, painting, sculpture, world language, or the technological or vocational arts will be mandatory.  No degrees from departments, colleges, or schools of education will be accepted.  Upon verification of receipt of the master’s degree, aspiring teachers at grades 6-8 and 9-12 will then serve a full year of internship to determine suitability for employment as teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

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Curriculum and teachers are at the core or our successful knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education for the students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Three other programmatic features characterize our district:

 

1)  At least one hour each day in preK-5 will be devoted to enrichment activities, with assertive skill-acquisition or advanced academic exploration as appropriate for the given student;  hence, each student will advance from the preK-5 experience able to demonstrate grade level performance in mathematics and reading;  possessed of an abundant store of commonly shared skill and knowledge sets;  and with additional experiences pertinent to the driving personal interests of the given student.  Classroom teachers will according to their rigorous training be highly adept at imparting the knowledge and skill sets and serving the individual needs of students;  we will also make generous use of highly trained Education Support Professionals and volunteers.   

 

2)  As we continue to streamline the Davis Center bureaucracy, we will eliminate many departments while adding one, a Department of Resource Provision and Referral, staffed with well-paid Education Support Professionals and others comfortable with on the ground, in the home interactions with families facing the gravest life challenges.   

 

3)  In streamlining the bureaucracy, we will eliminate the Department of Teaching and Learning and the position of Associate Superintendent.  Academic decision-makers will henceforth come from the teaching ranks, possess academic master’s degrees, have proven experiences of success as classroom teachers, and acquire any additional administrative expertise via intense training sessions prior to moving into the administrative assignment.  Such academic decision-making positions will be greatly reduced, since the curriculum will be firmly set and teachers will have proven ability from the training that we provide or require:  Curriculum will be embedded in our specified knowledge and skill sets and in the brains of our professionalized teaching core, featuring teachers receiving a median of $85,000 and Educational Support Professionals receiving a median of $65,000 in annual salary.

 

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Thus, curriculum overhaul, teacher training, and the points given immediately above constitute our program for the delivery of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to our precious students., of all demographic descriptors.

 

We also declare the following as guiding principles:

 

>>>>>   We will ensure that students of all demographic descriptors are eager for and prepared for the acquisition of commonly shared knowledge and skill sets, and that they also have ample opportunities to explore their driving personal interests;  the latter will be important in the course of the preK-12 years and gain particular emphasis at grades 11 and 12 as students envision their postsecondary lives.  We will make no rigid distinction between students on academic versus vocational tracks but rather offer similar curriculum with opportunity to explore driving personal interests.    

 

>>>>>   We will abide by all pertinent laws, but we will not as a district emphasize racial integration.  Rather, we will make each school an institution of academic excellence, respect both the common and ethnic-specific humanity of each student, and create an environment wherein the goals of artificially structured integration are reached by our culture of human understanding, knowledge, and conviction.

 

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Finally, we will proceed each day making sure that students know why what they are learning is vital to their lives, with this message conveyed by teachers and all staff imbued with the strongest possible conviction as to the importance of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.

 

We will send students forth upon graduation to lives of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction by virtue of the preK-12 education of excellence that we have provided to them.

 

In doing this we will provide a model for locally centralized school districts across the United States, in the conviction that the time is now for making this nation the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.

 

I love you for the efforts that you have made and will continue to make as we prepare to take our program from the alternate into the conventional universe.

 

My greatest gratitude and profound respect goes out to each one of you---

>Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> Chapter Sixty-One (Part Three, Philosophy) >>>>> The Intellectual Damage Inflicted by Education Professors and the Incompetence of the Teachers and Administrators Whom They Train

All problems of the locally centralized school district in the United States are traceable to wretched teacher and administrator training programs. 

 

We have known for at least 30 years that we must transform our systems of K-12 educational delivery in order to give citizens of all demographic descriptors an excellent education.  In 1983 a federally commissioned study, A Nation at Risk, signaled the crisis in schools of the United States, with implications for many facets of life in the polity, given the critical importance of education to the quality of life in a nation of advanced economic status and world leadership. 

 

By definition, we have not cared enough to make the needed changes.  People do those things about which they care deeply or to which they are addicted.  In the United States, people get married, and secure the most remunerative employment possible.  They have children and angle for the best possible lives for their own particular progeny.  People buy houses, automobiles, electronic goods, and consumer items of many sorts at the upper ranges of what they can afford.  They twitter and tweet and stare at computer screens.  They ensconce themselves in front of television sets to dance with the stars, identify their favorite new singing voice, and immerse themselves in the reality of other people’s vapid lives.

 

All of this is more important to people as of the year 2017 than the education of our precious children. 

 

Rarely does any child in the United States get an excellent education.  As a nation we do not believe enough in the importance of knowledge-based lives to even imagine an excellent education for our children.  We go to war because in our episodic propensities going to war at the time seems the right thing to do, or we are told by people of our political affinity that it is the right thing to do, not because citizens as a whole have the knowledge base in history and international relations to make considered judgments of their own.  Whether or not, and for how long, the Federal Reserve should pour money into the economy is a policy decision evaluated by people on the same episodic and self-focused basis, not because the typical citizen has a whit of knowledge concerning macroeconomics.  The reality of climate change is evaluated by the typical person not on the basis of any depth of scientific knowledge but on what scientists themselves say, at best, and in view of religious and personal biases, at worst.

 

The unit of delivery of excellent K-12 education in the United States must be our locally centralized school districts.  In public education systems of East Asia and the European social democracies, curriculum and policies are centralized at the national level, but in the United States

people claim an attachment to local control.  So in this nation, any progress that will be made in

transforming K-12 education must be made at the level of the locally centralized school district.  We cannot and should not pin our hopes on charter schools or vouchers.  Most charter schools are worse than conventional public schools.  There are not enough excellent private schools to accommodate the masses of K-12 students, even if a thoroughgoing voucher system could be instituted.  And in any case, should we ever aspire to the quality of education found in East Asia and the European social democracies, we need to find a way to approximate the coherence of curriculum found in those educational systems. 

 

Mediocrity of K-12 education in the United States originates in departments, colleges, and schools of education wherein professors do not believe that systematically acquired and mentally stored knowledge of the liberal arts is important.  They believe, instead, in so-called “constructivist” approaches that begin with the knowledge base and life experiences of the student as a foundation for seeking information that is relevant to the particular young person. 

This so-called “progressive” approach to education is implemented upon the assumption that the systematic, sequential accumulation of knowledge in math, natural science, social science, history, literature, and the fine arts is not important.  Only those topics that passionately drive a given student, for which a teacher serves as “facilitator” in accumulating this particularistic information, are important.  As to accumulated knowledge from the human inheritance, one can always “look it up.”

But this view of education and the teacher is deeply flawed.  Imagine going to a cardiologist with complaints about chest pains and being told that the doctor would have to take a moment to look up what is known about arterial blockage, because this was not covered in medical school.  Consider describing to an attorney an experience whereby police officers broke into one’s home without a search warrant and being told by this lawyer that this sounds like an interesting predicament that would have to be researched, because such instances were not part of the law school curriculum.

Taught by such professors promulgating the “constructivist,“ “progressive” approach to knowledge and pedagogy, our K-5 teachers, especially, enter our classrooms woefully underprepared.  Those who teach at the grades 6-12 level are a bit better trained, because most get bachelor’s degrees in legitimate disciplines (e. g., physics, math, history, economics, English literature, fine arts).  But low licensure requirements mean that those who enter our middle schools and high schools are not always truly masters of their fields.  Graduate programs for teachers, in the meantime, provide programs for easily attained master’s degrees that are financial spigots for universities.

Teachers unions act in ways to protect such unprepared teachers.  Most central school district and school building administrators are too busy protecting their sinecures of substantial remuneration to contest teacher union power, and thus the status quo prevails.  Our children walk across stages to receive diplomas in name only.  Most could not tell you the difference between debt and deficit;  the Roman and Byzantine Empires;  Newtonian and Einstein’s physics;  Ego and Superego;  or the literary styles of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.  And they could not tell you the essential differences, as we recall our nominal focus on Black History in February, in the approaches to the African American dilemma in the early 20^th century as espoused by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey.

Constructivist ideology and systemic flaws operate in highly similar ways from state to state, so that teacher preparation programs and institutions of K-12 education maintain the status quo of mediocrity in Minnesota and throughout the nation.   But we cannot afford to wait for the needed overhaul of teacher preparation programs on college campuses, nor can we depend on action taken mainly at the state level to produce the needed institutional change.

The needed overhaul of K-12 education will ride the waves of energy emitted by local school district activists who take seriously the great accumulated wealth of knowledge that defines the human experience, working to retrain teachers and revamp curriculum to ensure that children of all ethnic and economic descriptors receive this knowledge as their rightful inheritance.

Although central office administrators, building principals, and teachers within the locally centralized school district have their particularistic differences connected to roles occupied within the education establishment, their fundamental views on curriculum and pedagogy are essentially the same.  Teachers unions and administrators with their own group affiliations may struggle together over contracts, evaluations, and job assignments, but teachers and administrators at all levels espouse the views that they imbibed from those campus low-lifers known as education professors. 

Ever since the transformation of the normal school into teacher’s colleges created within universities during the 1920s, education professors have sought to make a place for themselves in their new institutional setting.  Lacking the knowledge base of field specialists such as psychologists, philosophers, mathematicians, chemists, literary scholars, historians, and economists who were best positioned to provide prospective teachers with a strong knowledge base, education professors began to emphasize pedagogy over subject area training for teachers.  They came to view schools as dispensers of many attitudes and vocational tools purportedly for the good of students:  training for a life of work integrally connected to the employment and social position of parents, socialization for citizenship, and for a period of the early 1930s the internalization of a collectivist outlook for constructing a socialist society at a time when the Great Depression had undermined faith in liberal democracy.

 

Education professors came to profess a belief in a “constructivist," "child-centered” approach to education that minimized the value of imparting logically sequenced, commonly shared knowledge sets, in favor of giving great scope to the child’s own life experiences and interests, with the presiding classroom presence transformed from teacher into “guide” or “facilitator.”  Student mastery of well-defined knowledge sets, education professors maintained, was not important.  In addition to preparing for one’s vocational and civic responsibilities, the student should learn to think critically about topics of immediate personal and societal importance and to access information as a lifelong learner.

 

Emphasis on the individual interest of the student as the driver of what was to be learned fit well with the zeitgeist of the 1960s.  Over the decades since the 1920s, parents, teachers, and local communities had often objected to the views of education professors, but during the years from the 1960s to the present year of 2018, the ideology of the education professor has been dominant in our schools.  When a student gets to high school, she or he may scramble quickly to make-up for lack of knowledge by taking substantive Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses; but even the most ambitious college-bound student graduates with large gaps in the knowledge and skills necessary to make the most of the college or university experience.

 

During the first two decades of the 20^th century, the normal schools that had been established in the latter part of the previous century metamorphosed into teachers colleges that soon became attached to universities.  Education professors were then faced with the need to justify themselves amidst true academicians whose specialties in psychology, philosophy, and the key subject areas of mathematics, natural science, history, political science, economics, literature, and the fine arts made them better purveyors of knowledge for academic training of teachers.  Thus did education professors become advocates of process over content, pedagogy over subject matter;  more insidiously, they became opponents of the systematic impartation of specified knowledge and skill sets.

 

Although this key anti-knowledge message took different forms as pedagogical fads came and went, the essential core of the message never changed.  That message is entirely consistent with the contemporary education professor’s insistence on the ability to think critically and to become an enthusiast of lifelong learning as the key components for students in K-12 schools.  The education professor maintains that the acquisition of specific knowledge and skill sets is not important, for those can always be looked up or learned as necessary.

 

So never think that such pap is new or “progressive,” although education professors appropriate the latter appellation.  Such harmful jargon has been the consistent usage of education professors for a century.

 

Professors of cognitive psychology demonstrate through research published in professionally refereed journals that knowledge builds on knowledge, freeing up limited short-term memory for quick retrieval in the pursuit of knowledge sought in the moment.  Adept and informed critical thinking depends on knowledge.  Love of learning most often happens when students pursue knowledge systematically as a matter of acquired habit, a labor of love.  Critical thinking and lifelong learning are functions of knowledge purposely pursued;  they are not efficiently or effectively demonstrated in the absence of systematically acquired knowledge.

 

Education professors have done much harm in seeking to make a place for themselves at colleges and universities, where they occupy the lowest rung with regard to professorial status.  They send forth ill-trained teachers, particularly at the K-5 level, who know very little about mathematics, natural science, history, economics, psychology, literature, English usage, or the fine arts.  Middle school teachers are little better, and most high school teachers are not capable of serving as instructors in advanced courses such as those for Advanced Placement.

 

Thus do we get abominable performance by students in the United States on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment);  and by students in Minnesota on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments.

 

Education professors are objectionable generally.  Mathematics education professors are objectionable particularly.  A mathematics education professor is someone without the intellectual mettle to pursue a degree in mathematics, thus retreating to a similar-sounding credential.  Many mathematics education professors lack the intellectual discipline to master the intricacies even of algebra and geometry, much less calculus, differential equations, linear and advanced algebra, topography, and the ever-ascending challenges in a legitimate mathematics masters or doctoral program.  

 

So mathematics education professors conger up various iterations of the purportedly deep-think, multiple answer, learn via manipulative approach as reported by Faiza Muhammad in “Several Districts Are in the Midst of Overhauling Their Curriculum” (Star Tribune, Section B, Page 1, February 8, 2018).  This approach is akin to the “New Math” that produced such deleterious results in the 1960s and early 1970s and has made unfortunate comebacks at various intervals ever since.  As with previous students upon whom such an approach was inflicted, the students of the Brooklyn Park, Anoka-Hennepin, Osseo, and Columbia Heights school districts will be academically poorer for the infliction.

 

Because mathematics professors are themselves mathematically challenged, they are forever contriving ways to make what is simple seem difficult, so as to avoid what is truly difficult.  Notice that their gimmicks are never applied to mathematics at the higher levels;  their ruses would never be applicable to Advanced Placement courses at the high school level.  The schemes of mathematics professors always come with a pretension of philosophical depth, always focused on relatively simple mathematics at the K-5 level.

 

But simple does not mean trivial.  The operations and concepts pertinent to addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, fundamental probability, ratios, proportions, graphs and tables are vitally important.  But student inevitably come to me for academic assistance because they have not been taught these skills in their classroom.  This is especially true for K-5 students, but the point is that until I teach them these skills, most high school students have never acquired the requisite ability in the fundamental operations and basic skills to succeed at higher mathematics.  I teach them skills, then we ascend to college preparatory mathematics.

 

Students of the Minneapolis Public Schools and other school districts perform so wretchedly in mathematics because mathematics education professors have been playing with their lives, in order to survive pseudo-professionally.

 

They must stop.

 

Teacher training programs as currently inflicted on our prospective teachers and administrators should be terminated.

 

The pseudo–profession of education professor should be no more.

 

>Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> Chapter Sixty-Two (Part Three, Philosophy) >>>>> How We Got in This Pre-K-12 Education Mess

In the report of September 2018 from the Minnesota Department of Education on the results of Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) in math and reading for the 2017-2018 academic year we found out that just 60 percent of Minnesota students were proficient in mathematics, the same figure as that for 2016-2017;  for reading the comparable figures were 59 percent in academic year 2016-2017 and 57 percent in 2017-2018,a two percentage point decline.

 

In the Minneapolis Public Schools, reading proficiency rose a bit over those two academic years, from 43 percent to 45 percent, with math proficiency flat at 42 percent.  In that school district, one-third of graduates who matriculate at colleges and universities need remedial instruction.  And most graduates walk across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only, so deficient are they in key knowledge and skill sets in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, quality literature, English composition, and the fine, vocational, and technological arts.

 

Year after year we get similar results.

 

How did we get in this mess?  

 

Thomas Jefferson, for his many human failings, was a visionary of citizenship in the democratic society who said that "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves;  and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

 

The 19^th century educator Horace Mann developed this Jeffersonian notion of an educated citizenry by asserting the need for common schools that would provide citizens with shared knowledge as the basis for participation in democracy.  Across the nation, teachers in one-room rural and larger town and city schools imparted knowledge and skill sets in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, and literature.  Often, teachers used the popular McGuffey Readers that were by no means ethnically representative but did provide substantive information and gave students experience with high-quality literature.

 

Two views of education for African Americans came from Booker T. Washington, who stressed vocational education and the development of economic independence before insistence on full citizenship rights;  and W. E. B. DuBois, who took a view consonant with that of Jefferson and Mann and asserted that a “talented tenth” of the African America population should lead the way to informed political participation.  And indeed, such African American luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and DuBois gave testimony to the power of knowledge as they held the ideals of the United States constitution before a nation that was not living up to the ideals expressed in that document;  the speeches of those three are replete with references to history, government, and literature.

 

Schools in the United States at the 19^th-20^th century divide were of widely varying quality.  Most students did not attend school past grade six.  But by the first two decades of the 20^th century an increasing number of students were seeking attendance in high schools that generally featured classical curricula in mathematics, natural science, history, government, English literature and usage, and Latin.  An intermediary institution, junior high, also appeared in some urban districts, for students in grades seven through nine, featuring academic preparation for the high school curriculum.

 

At that turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century, normal schools offered formal preparation for some teachers;  these varied widely in quality but in general assumed that teachers would be instructing students in a rigorous academic curriculum.  But by the second decade of the 20^th century, teachers colleges located on university campuses overtook the normal schools as institutions of teacher preparation.  Education professors, now ensconced in university settings among academic field specialists, began to emphasize pedagogy over curriculum, with the assertion that the systematic acquisition of knowledge was not important.

 

The writings of John Dewey, while full of internal contradictions and often lacking clarity, typically asserted that education should resonate with the experience of the child and offer practical preparation for life.  More clearly, William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg advocated for a putatively progressive approach to education that deemphasized the sequential acquisition of knowledge and skill sets.  Heard in 1918 penned an article, “The Project Method,” and soon published a book of the same name;  in 1928, Rugg, with coauthor Ann Shumaker, published the book,  The Child-Centered School.  In these two volumes we have the foundations for the “progressive” education movement that, against the vigorous counter arguments of such subject area proponents as William C. Bagley, became entrenched at the teachers colleges, most influentially at the Teachers College of Columbia University.

 

This view of education took many decades to prevail in the schools of locally centralized districts across the nation.  Many teachers had trained as field specialists.  Many parents of immigrant populations and African Americans relocating as participants in the Great Northern Migration wanted a substantive education as a basis for scaling the educational ladder to success.  But paradoxically in sync with a creed known as “progressive,” proponents of those ideas absorbed and espoused racist precepts of the first decades of the 20^th century that expressed doubts as to whether the children of southern and eastern European immigrants and African American migrants could master an academic curriculum .  Such populations were typically tracked into vocational curriculum while decision-,makers won to the “progressive” creed begrudgingly provided an academic track to satisfy expectations of university admissions offices.

 

During the late 1960s, the “progressive’ creed thrived in a zeitgeist with individual personal expression at the center;  “progressive” ideology now dominated among teachers and administrators, all trained by education professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education.  This was terrible timing.  In terrible and ferocious irony, advances in civil rights made possible the pursuit of the middle class lifestyle for African Americans positioned to climb the economic ladder;  and fair housing laws made residential housing covenants less likely:  African American middle class flight joined white flight as phenomena that at the urban core left behind the poorest of the poor.

 

Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980.  Gang activity proliferated.  Urban school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools were overwhelmed, with almost all-white middle class teaching staffs faced with the duty to teach populations with which they had no cultural affinity.  And with the triumph of “progressive” education, these teachers had little of substance to offer their students that could assist them in ending the cyclical poverty that created the conditions of inner city life.  Mainly white educational theorists touted critical thinking, lifelong learning, projects and portfolios as measures of student learning, curriculum driven by individual teachers and their students---  all in the absence of logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets measurable by objective assessments, thus robbing students of the information base upon which genuine critical analysis and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge could proceed.  The mantras of education professors became excuses for teaching very little at all.

 

By the late 1990s, a movement for academic standards and testing ultimately produced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, but telling disaggregated data results proved embarrassing to the education establishment, which went to work on those Democrats (in Minnesota, the DFL) to which the teachers unions give so bountifully;  and those on the right, supporters of Republicans, came to object to strict federal mandates.  No Child Left Behind gave way to waivers under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top moniker, which in Minnesota produced the murky Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS);  and then the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2016) produced the even murkier North Star Accountability System (NSAS). 

 

The latter system, now being rolled out by Brenda Cassellius and staff at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), like MMRS relieves the pressure on school officials by relegating objective measures such as the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to status as just one factor among many---  including graduation rates, student attendance, incremental academic progress over time, incremental progress of English learners---  for rating school and district programs.  Cassellius and the other North Star explicators at MDE ask the public to believe that six Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs), each staffed with seven or eight members, are going to provide the needed assistance for addressing the abysmal academic performance of Minnesota’s students.

 

Charter schools and school choice programs have been part of the educational landscape of Minnesota since the early 1990s.  But charter schools are typically even worse than the mainline public schools, and choice programs have been a diversion from the fact that few schools in Minnesota provide true excellence of education by comparison with the nations of East Asia and those such as Germany, Finland, Canada, Poland, and Australia that far outperform students in the United States on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).

 

We got in this K-12 mess in Minnesota, with unfortunate resonance throughout the nation, with the unfortunate coincidence of an anti-knowledge approach to education, residential patterns traceable to a racist history, unprepared urban school districts that have never dedicated themselves to the education of students of all demographic descriptors, and the growth of charter schools and choice programs that exacerbated the problems.

 

We got in this mess for highly identifiable reasons.

 

Now, according the precepts of Part Three:  Philosophy, we must get out.

>Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< >>>>> Chapter Sixty-Three (Part Three, Philosophy) >>>>> Prevailing Conceptions of What Constitutes an Excellent Education

In response to an email that I sent to her, Michelle Rhee (the founder and chief executive officer of the education reform organization, StudentsFirst) defined an “excellent education” as follows:

 

An excellent education equips a person with the skills and inspiration necessary to follow their passions, achieve their dreams and become a productive member of society.

First and foremost, this requires a firm command of the foundational skills upon which our society and economy are built: reading, writing, mathematics, science and problem solving. Our schools must be rigorous—through testing and other means—in demanding that every child is proficient in these core subjects.

An excellent education, however, must move beyond the basics. Just as a command of the fundamentals of basketball—shooting, dribbling, passing—are necessary to become an effective player, an excellent player also has the ability to work well with others, analyze and strategize, and think quickly and creatively.

Our schools must foster creativity and exploration, and allow children to develop social and analytic skills. Every student should have the opportunity to learn a second language and participate in arts, music, sports and after-school programs.

Finally, in addition to arming kids with a broad and robust array of skills, an excellent education motivates kids—no matter their socioeconomic background—to use those skills to reach for the stars. This is why an excellent education cannot exist without excellent teachers, who have the special ability to identify and cultivate the potential within every child. Recruiting, rewarding and retaining great teachers must be the centerpiece of any education reform agenda.

An investment in our schools is an investment in our nation’s future; we cannot stop fighting until every student receives the excellent education they deserve.

The response from Ms. Rhee is wholly in accord with the main themes that she elucidated in her book, Radical:  Fighting to Put Students First (New York:  HarperCollins, 2013).  One of the things that struck me in reading that book, though, was the absence of the kind of explicit definition that she offered in her emailed response to me. 

 

I find this to be the case time after time.  Steve Perry, for example,  never gets around to defining an excellent education in his own book, Push Has Come to Shove:  Getting our Kids the Education They Deserve---  Even If It Means Picking a Fight (New York:  Broadway Paperbacks (Crown/ Random House, 2011)

               

Michelle Rhee is a passionate advocate for a quality of change in K-12 education that puts the interests of students ahead of adults in education-related jobs.  With grit, courage, and the backing of an equally steel-spined mayor (Adam Fenty, who lost an election and his job as a reward for his own efforts in behalf of students), Michelle Rhee took on the education establishment as chancellor of schools in Washington, D. C., during 2007-2010.  As an advocate for policies and the quality of teachers capable of improving student achievement in some of the theretofore worst schools in the United States, one can extrapolate from Rhee’s book (and the documentary, “Waiting for Superman”) principles that consider math and reading skills essential to an excellent education, which also includes a strong liberal arts curriculum.  But a focused and specific definition is lacking in her book and speeches.

 

Focus, for that matter, is lacking in the definition offered by Ms. Rhee in her emailed response.  A definition as lengthy as the one she offered fails to provide a central focus around which other, desired components may be ordered.  Her definition fails to provide any conclusive comment on the relative importance of subject area knowledge versus the processes by which one acquires knowledge, a matter of great debate and dissension among those who concern themselves with change in K-12 education.

 

At a “Soup with the Supe” event in February 2013, Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson responded to a question from me on this matter of the definition of an excellent education with the laundry list approach taken by Rhee.  In the course of a 30-second ramble, the superintendent ticked off a definition that included the importance of educational technology, engaged students, lively teaching, critical thinking, and an amorphous reference to general knowledge and skills.  As with the Rhee definition, there is nothing in Johnson’s definition that comes as a surprise, and little to which one might object---   but also not much around which to build an approach to educational excellence for a K-12 public schools system.

 

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Thus far, I have tendered the same question as to the definition of an excellent education to many people working for educational change in Minnesota.  Three of these are at the head of their respective organizations.  Two have yet to convey to me a cogent response.  The other replied as follows:

 

“Ah, that is such a profound question.”  She then verbally raced forward with comments that she apparently thought to be of greater importance, especially the negotiations that at the time were ensuing between officials of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Whatever the level of profundity of the question posed, we need to give a clearer and more concise definition of an excellent education before we race madly to achieve it.  And the definition is not at all a matter of consensus among thoughtful observers and commentators.

 

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Omission of a working definition for an excellent education may also be noted in the work of prominent authors, commentators, and founders of large organizations articulating ideas for change in K-12 education.  Although I find their omissions part of the noted and regretted phenomenon, one can extrapolate from the publications of some of the best-known commentators working definitions that these notables would recognize as synchronous with their key emphases.

 

Three educators who would be properly placed in the “progressive” camp of articulators of K-12 change are Alfie Kohn, Howard Gardner, and the late Maria Montessori.  Definitions culled from their works would viably gain expression as follows:

 

An excellent education is a matter of students and teachers collaboratively investigating topics of intense mutual interest through engaging cooperative projects, demonstrating their knowledge in portfolios, presentations, and demonstrations.                              [Alfie Kohn]

 

An excellent education is a matter of students disciplining their minds in pursuit of deep understanding of the true, the beautiful, and the good while utilizing linguistic, musical, mathematic, spatial, kinesthetic, and personal intelligence as appropriate.       [Howard Gardner]

 

An excellent education is a matter of preparing a learning environment wherein children will acquire common skill and knowledge sets at their own pace, according to the means most appropriate at each developmental stage.                       [Maria Montessori]

 

What unites these progressive commentators is an emphasis on process.  For progressive educators, the process by which one acquires subject area knowledge supersedes what is learned.  Most extreme in this regard is Alfie Kohn.  His vision of “the education our children deserve” embraces the “learning how to learn,” “lifelong learning,” and “constructivist” approaches that overwhelmingly dominate professorial pronouncements in our schools, colleges, and departments of education.  This approach devalues knowledge for definite, sequenced acquisition and promotes the notion that facts can always be looked up when one needs them.  What is important to progressive educators is a classroom driven by the particular and passionate interests of students and a teacher who acts more as facilitator than disseminator of factual knowledge.

 

At the other end of the spectrum, one finds the politically conservative William Bennett and the politically liberal E. D. Hirsch.  The latter deserves a lot of credit for disentangling the term “progressive,” which holds sway in so much of the education establishment, from “liberal,” which often metamorphosed into “progressive” as the other term became the pejorative “L” word from the Reagan era forward.  One who emphasizes a content-focused education may be politically liberal while considering as anathema the principles that undergird the approach to education commonly known as “progressive.”  

 

As distinguished from the progressive educators Kohn, Gardner, and Montessori, the content-focused Bennett and Hirsch present ideas in their publications and public talks that can be distilled into the following definitions of an excellent education:

 

An excellent education is a matter of parents modeling a love of learning and an enthusiasm for knowledge that is then tapped by teachers who engage students with a rich and rigorous core curriculum in grade by grade sequence.                  [William Bennett]

 

 

An excellent education is a matter of transmitting specified skill and knowledge sets mastered to the point of automaticity, broadening and deepening core knowledge in careful grade by grade sequence throughout the K-12 years.                                [E. D. Hirsch]

                                                                                               

 

Thus, for Bennett and Hirsch, strong liberal arts content knowledge is the heart of an excellent education.  I have heard Hirsch comment that he considers lively teaching and student engagement important;  for him, though, the process is that which delivers the subject area content.  It is content, not process, around which he centers the Core Knowledge books under his editorship, the foundation of the same name, and his conception of the schools that he says we need but rarely get.

 

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The definition of an excellent education is important.  The widespread tendency for upholders of the status quo and advocates for educational change alike to avoid clarity and specificity in defining an excellent education is notable and lamentable.

 

If we agree that process is paramount, then those whom we want to hire to preside over our children’s classrooms should be good facilitators, asking good questions for students to ponder critically, eliciting articulations from students as to their most passionate interests, and guiding them toward sources of information on those personally chosen topics for study.  Educational facilitators (teachers) in the progressive conception need not be experts in subject areas;  rather, they should be reliable human portals to a world of knowledge open for exploration rather than mastery.

 

If we agree, on the other hand, that content is paramount, what we want is a specified, sequenced, grade-by-grade curriculum across key areas of the liberal arts.  Adapting Hirsch’s presentation of subjects to be studied for Core Knowledge acquisition, we could define these prioritized subject areas as math, science (chemistry, biology, physics), history, economics, literature, and the fine arts.  Teachers in this conception of an excellent education should be broadly and deeply knowledgeable at the K-5 level and experts in their fields at the secondary level.

 

So it matters. 

 

Our failure properly to educate so many of our children lies to a large extent in our own failure to decide what being an educated person means.