Seemingly Disparate Candidacies of Don Samuels and Rebecca Gagnon are the Strongest For the Open At-Large Seat in the Looming School Board Election of 4 November 2014

Understand first of all that I regard Bernadeia Johnson as a potentially transformative superintendent and that supporting her Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift initiatives is my paramount concern.


Then, set aside simplistic thinking and unseemly invective, and you’ll find that Don Samuels and Rebecca Gagnon are the strongest candidates for the two open at-large seats in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education election, looming on 4 November 2014.


Samuels is well known in Minneapolis for his city council service, erstwhile mayoral candidacy, and Hope Collaborative focused on education change. He has the support of those contributing to the Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund, which has received a boatload of money (over $200,000 worth) from former New York mayor and Republican iconoclast Michael Bloomberg and other fat cats. The funds have been garnered by and from those who advocate for abolishing existing teacher tenure rules, charter school options, effective teacher evaluation, merit pay, and the administration of standardized tests as the key measure of accountability. These are the sorts of reform measures for which Samuels himself advocates.


Rebecca Gagnon is a very different type of education advocate. She is the incumbent for an at-large seat and has acquired deep knowledge of fiscal issues, the administrative personnel and offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools, and the numerous details undergirding the key initiatives of Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift that make the administration of Bernadeia Johnson so promising. Gagnon has the strong backing of Education Minnesota, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, and the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party. Because of the backing of these latter entities she is suspected of being under the sway of education establishment types aligned with the DFL, and therefore standing as an impediment to following through on the measures pushed by the education reform crowd.


Also running for the at-large seats are Iris Altamirano and Ira Jourdain. Altamirano has the same sort of backing from those pouring money into the Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund as does Samuels. Curiously, though, Altamirano also is endorsed by DFL and education establishment types of the kind backing Gagnon. Altamirano stresses early childhood education, multilingual competency, accountability for principals and teachers, and communication among education professionals, families, students, and all stakeholders in the delivery of K-12 education.


Jourdain is a very involved parent of MPS students and a human services worker in the Division of Indian Work. He shows some knowledge of MPS programs such as the Lucy Laney “Co-Teaching” model and the International Baccalaureate program at Edison High School.


The District 5 school board race is the only other contested race in Minneapolis; the candidates are Nelson Inz and Jay Larson. Larson is a highly engaged parent of MPS students at Nokomis Community Schools. Inz is a teacher at Great River Montessori High School in St. Paul but has coached at Folwell Middle School in Minneapolis and has children attending MPS schools. Of these two candidates, Inz has the greater range of experiences in education, but his strong link to DFL politicians backed by Education Minnesota make him suspect as an advocate for education change. His candidacy is not touted by those contributing to the Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund


Here I should remind readers that I advocate many of the same changes stressed by those contributing to the Progressive Education Fund: abolishing existing teacher tenure rules, effective teacher evaluation, merit pay, and measurable student performance via standardized testing. But I differ with most of the education change crowd as to the efficacy of charter schools, emphasizing instead the importance of revolutionizing (rather than reforming) the locally centralized school district. This is where I become passionate in support of Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson, who with full and adroit implementation of Focused Instruction, effective programming at High Priority Schools, and the “Shift” to funding of programs directly affecting students could transform the Minneapolis Public Schools into a national and even international model for K-12 education.


I am also an activist of the Saul Alinsky type. I show up and speak forcefully at forums offered by teacher contract negotiations and meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, the latter at which I have in recent meetings asserted my views during the designated time for Public Comment. I have never seen Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund chair (and reformist MinnCAN chief) Daniel Sellers at these meetings, certainly not making any comments on the proceedings or policies under consideration. This lack of on-the-ground engagement is true, too, of other would-be reformers in Minnesota.


The views of Don Samuels are highly synchronous with the policies of Superintendent Johnson. He is not liked, though, by many longtime leaders in the African American community of North Minneapolis, and he does sometimes seem out of touch. I once heard him rail against hip-hop music at a meeting wherein we both gave talks. But in terms of his potential to work well with Superintendent Johnson, he is a strong candidate for the at-large seat in the looming school board election.


During one of those Public Comment moments at a recent Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education meeting, I praised especially board member Tracine Asberry for her keen questions and focus on student progress. But I also had favorable comments for board member Carla Bates and for Rebecca Gagnon. With regard to the latter, I praised her for always doing her homework and for her own sharp focus on monitoring any initiatives for their actual improvement of student performance. I then noted that she would be even more effective if she did not so often utter tired old phrases obviously whispered in her ear by Minneapolis Federation of Teachers President Lynn Nordgren, a fierce defender of the status quo.


So Samuels and Gagnon offer very different perspectives and are backed by opposing actors in the arenas of politics and education reform. Samuels’s views will most often fall in seamlessly along the lines of Superintendent Johnson. But Gagnon backs the key initiatives of Focused Instruction and High Priority Schools, and she gives abundant evidence to me of a fierce dedication to the education of students of all economic and social descriptors, an intense dedication to equity.


So set aside simplistic thinking and unseemly invective. Show some nuance and the ability to cut through false oppositions. Cast those at-large votes on Tuesday, 4 November 2014, for Don Samuels and Rebecca Gagnon.


Then go to those school board meetings, up the level of your own activism, and convey to those freshly elected members in no uncertain terms that you expect them to back the potentially transformative policies of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson for a model of education that could end many cycles of familial poverty and move us closer to the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.

The Entreaty of Melissa McCoy

The Entreaty of Melissa McCoy


by


Gary Marvin Davison


Note: 


Melissa McCoy is a composite, fictional character whose lament and entreaty is drawn from the experiences of the many young people with whom I have worked and whom I have loved in the course of a more than 40-year journey.


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








I’m just wantin’ y’all to know
that I’m hurtin’ so bad
hurtin’ so bad
hurtin’ so bad  
hurtin’ so bad
'cause I’m beginnin’ to understand
how long it’s been
long it’s been
long it’s been.


Four hunn’ed years ago
years ago
years ago
you ripped my
great-great-great-great granny
mine
mine
mine
my
my
my
great-great-great-great-granny
from the depths of the
Bight of Benin
you took her
and
you locked her
in a cage
until the ship came
and
took her away ‘cross that
long, lonely ocean lonely ocean
lonely ocean
lonely ocean
and then took joy that she survived the
sweat
stench
urine
feces
chains
fever
blood.
You took joy
‘cause you could set her on the block
and
open her mouth
to show that her teeth
had somehow not rotted.
You pointed to her skin
and
put her naked young body
on display
in evidence
that she likely could
produce more free labor
to get your
cotton
tobacco
rice
whatever
you needed
you needed
you needed.


And ' course
you had no regard at all for
her needs
her needs
her needs.
And you kept her there
and
millions with her
millions with her
millions with her
unda the hot sun
hot sun
hot sun
but took care to place her
in the evenin’
where she could have mo’ babies,
mo’ babies
mo’ babies
and
give you pleasure
you pleasure
you pleasure
not
her pleasure
not
her pleasure
your pleasure
‘cause that’s all that ev’a matt’ed
was your pleasure
what you needed
you needed
you needed.
That’s all that ev’a matt’ed to you.


And you kept her there,
us there
her there
us there
until war broke out
for yo’ own purposes
own purposes
own purposes
but promisin’ us
freedom
that was supposed to be
as simple as
13, 14, 15.
But then you
Compromised in 1877.
And you separated us
in unequal equality
in 1896,
Till we scrambled
Northward on a Migration
to freedom
but
found none.
‘Cause y’all said,


“No, not here,
you can’t live here
here
here.
But you can live
there
there
there
'cause you got lots in common
with da
Jews
Polacks
Wops
and all."




So we waited
waited
waited
and worked
hard
hard
hard
‘til just as things seemed to be
getting’ betta
betta
betta the many
still-frustrated
still-frustrated
still-frustrated
didn’t wanna
wait no more
wait no more
wait no mo’
no mo’
no mo’
no mo’.


So there went the
stones
bricks
bats
clubs
anything handy
and the
glass cracked
store owners departed
and
mostly just us
poorest
poorest
poorest
stayed behind.


So you put us here,
And we have stayed here
stayed here
stayed here
stayed here
and
even though
you never understood us
and
never believed in us
you promised us an
education
that never came.


But
now
now
now
the time has come. 
Bernadeia
Richard, Kim, Jenny, Rebecca, Alberto, Tracine, Carla, Josh, Mohamud,
the time has come,
come,
come.
The time came a long time ago,
but the education didn’t,
so now is the time that it’s
got to come
gotta come
got to come
gotta come.


‘Cause you know that they still don’t care,
those folks who came up from the
plantation to live on
Lowry Hill
and in
Linden Hills
 ‘cause they got Blake and Breck and all those,
for what good they are,
or aren’t,
but that’s where their kids go now
while we wait for ya’ll to
do the right thing.


Bernadeia, I hear good things about you.
They say that we’re gonna learn new things
about our
great-great-great-great-grannies
and about the
Great Wall
Iroquois
Laws of Motion
Relativity
Operant conditioning
Cognitive dissonance
Id
Ego
Superego
Oedipus
Electra
Troy Maxson
Hamlet
Ma Rainey
King Lear
Joe Turner
Macbeth
Achilles
Hector
Beowolf
Caged Birds
Dreams Deferred.


So, please, Bernadeia,
you gotta
keep your word,
‘cause we want our
dreams deferred
no more
deferred no more
deferred no more
no more
no more
no more,
deferred
no more,
no mo’,
no mo’
no mo’.


We want to know about
Hindus
Muslims
Black Muslims
Nation of Islam
Jains
Buddhists
Confucians
Shintoists
Daoists
Animists
‘cause alla these is people,
all of these are people,
alla these is people,
all of these are people.


And if we understood each other
maybe we wouldn’t kill each other,
maybe my little brotha wouldn’t a taken that bullet,
my big brotha wouldn’t be in prison,
and
my big sista wouldn'ta
gotten pregnant
with a baby
while she was still a baby,
and
there wouldn’t be all that fightin’
any more---
no mo’
no mo’
no mo’.


We want to know all there is to know.
I gotta a mighty fine brain.
I’m ready for you to teach me.
So show me that you can,
now---
This school year, in 2014 and 2015, too.
Now.
We have waited a long time
for the
education
that you promised
and
we ain’t gonna wait no more.
We aren’t going to wait any more.
We ain’t gonna wait no mo’.
We aren’t going to wait any more.
We ain’t gonna wait no mo’.
We aren’t going to wait any more.


Give us our education,
so I can face my
great-great-great-great-granny
and
tell her what you won’t tell her
what you won’t tell her:


“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am so, so, sorry.”


But now you and I both
can sweep away all that
stench
urine
feces
chains
fever
blood.


‘Cause we’re gonna look at that
hot sun
in a whole
new way.


My future is gonna be bright,
And I ain't gonna be no
baby havin' a baby.
I'm waitin' to be woman
with a real family of my own,
and then my family will have that
education.
just like I’m gonna have mine,
now,
now,
now.




‘Cause there’s so much I wanna know
want to know
wanna know
want to know,
and
will know
will know
will know.


I will be what I want to be
what I wanna be
what Melissa want to be
wanna be
want to be
and
will be
because
at long last I will have my,
Melissa will have her.
we will have our


EDUCATION.

The K-12 Education Revolution Will Come at the Central School District Level (So Disregard the Ideas of Ted Kolderie)

For those of you truly interested in K-12 education, understand that we need revolution (not reform), that this transformation will occur at the level of the central school district, and that you should reject all of the major points made by Ted Kolderie in his “The Big Idea? Lots of Little Ones” (Star Tribune , Opinion Exchange, Sunday, August 10, 2014).


Kolderie first of all asserts that the chief question when seeking change should always be, “How?” The real problem, though, is that we never ask, “What?”


So let me answer that question:


What is an excellent education?


An excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a rich liberal arts curriculum in grade-by-grade sequence to all students throughout the K-12 years.


And what is an excellent teacher?


An excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge, possessing the pedagogical ability to impart rich liberal arts content to all students.


Kolderie’s main point is that meaningful change toward reaching the goal of educational excellence must come with innovations outside centralized systems. This is nonsense. The best educational systems of the world are located in East and Southeast Asia (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) and the social democracies of Europe (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France). All of these nations centralize education at the national level and implement a standard curriculum in all schools of the nation.


This is the correct approach, ensuring a common knowledge base for all students, regardless of demographic descriptors. It is consistent with Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the creation of an informed electorate, and with the ideas of Horace Mann concerning education for all as delivered through “common schools.”


In the United States, though, we labor under the pretense of local control. Professors who train teachers in university departments, colleges, and schools of education throughout the nation impart a harmful “constructivist” creed that takes student experiences, and current student and teacher interests, as the driving forces for curriculum. This seems appealing until one realizes that such a creed devalues knowledge as common cultural inheritance to which all students should have access.


The pretense of local control extends to school boards, which tend to rubber-stamp superintendent initiatives until some offending behavior moves board members to action, or until (typically after a three to five year tenure) the superintendent abandons the district with a careerist move to another position. Sometimes there are board members who are so bought and sold by teachers unions that they do obstruct superintendent initiatives.


Either way, the same sort of attitudes and political struggles tend to occur for school boards throughout the United States. Meanwhile, teachers and administrators are almost all trained according to the same “constructivist” ideology, so that the approach to K-12 education tends to be the same from central school district to central school district. Local control is chimeric.


We can dispense with Kolderie’s other misguided notions, as follows:


1) With regard to Kolderie’s unfavorable view of whole class instruction, we should remember that the whole class approach dominates in East Asia and is generously used in the European social democracies. It is very efficient, very conducive to teacher story-telling and to discussions, and it in no way precludes technological and individualized approaches.


2) As to age grading, ensuring that all students at grade level are reaching an absolute standard is critical; maintaining conventional grade level designations in no way prevents teachers from making more advanced material available to students who have attained grade level performance.


3) Kolderie implies that reliance on standardized tests is too one dimensional. But standardized tests are the fairest, most objective measures of student performance, and they prepare students for a format that will also pertain to ACT and SAT exams used to assess college readiness. Teachers may always use such adjunct assessment instruments as portfolios, demonstrations, and presentations for their own classroom purposes.


4) Kolderie also objects to what he calls the “boss/ worker model of school.” But central school district personnel and building principals have the responsibility for devising and implementing programs designed to reach certain standards. Teachers have the obligation to ensure that students reach standards. School systems work best when administrators and teachers perform their very demanding jobs with a keen sense of their particular roles.


We can hereby dispense with Ted Kolderie’s main argument and his supplementary assertions. Then we should insist, in Minneapolis, that Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson follow through on her very promising Focused Instruction (curriculum content and consistent delivery) and High Priority Schools (efforts to raise achievement levels for lowest performing students) initiatives--- and give her full support as she does so.


In doing this, we will be fomenting revolution at the central school district level, which in the United States is where such a transformation will have to occur.


Gary Marvin Davison is teacher and administrator for the New Salem Educational Initiative. He is the author of eight published books and the editor of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Article #1 Introductory Thoughts

Article #1


Introductory Thoughts


First in a Five-Article Series:  The Essence of the New Salem Educational Initiative in the Expanding Mission to Revolutionize K-12 Education, Summer 2014


Human Relationships:    Enduring, Loving, Substantive


The Power of Knowledge and Love




Love and knowledge fuel the New Salem Educational Initiative.


I have been on my central mission in life for over forty years now. As a sophomore at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, I began coordinating and teaching in academic programs for students in the Dallas Independent School District who received instruction from fellow students and myself through SMU Volunteer Services (now called MOVE). I began my professional career teaching at L. G. Pinkston High School, near what were then the West Dallas projects. From the 1970s forward, I have taught in most situations that one could imagine: a prison (Missouri Eastern Correctional Center), overseas (in Taiwan, as an English as a Second Language instructor); at universities (University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota); and high schools that have covered the rural, suburban, and urban.


I have always believed in knowledge. I always aspired to be primarily a high school teacher, but I trained in the manner more typical of the college professor, studying through to the M. A. at the University of Iowa and the Ph. D. at the University of Minnesota. I put the knowledge that I have acquired to use every day in the teaching that I do now as the director of the New Salem Educational Initiative, conveying to my students a respect not just for the process of learning but for the knowledge that should be the goal of learning.


I emphasize the love that I have for knowledge and the love of knowledge that I instill in my students because the K-12 education establishment, astoundingly, devalues knowledge. Education professors operate on the basis of a bankrupt ideational formulation called “constructivism,” which calls for the generation of topics for study on the basis of the experiences and interests of students, who are assisted in their quests for information on those topics by teachers in the role of facilitators.


This approach to education has been particularly damaging in urban school systems, wherein many a student is impoverished and comes from a family of low educational attainment; such students need well-defined skill and knowledge sets delivered in grade-by grade sequence throughout the K-12 years, by teachers possessing deep and broad subject area knowledge. They are ill-served when their own whims, or those of their teacher, are given more curricular weight than the cumulative knowledge inherited from the greatest scholars and thinkers across the centuries of the human experience.           


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


Thus, in the two-hour weekly academic sessions that I conduct for my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, I show my love for them by imparting to them the knowledge that I have accumulated over many decades. We read Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth) in full and in the original Elizabethan language.


We study African American history in the context of United States history, so that they know what few public school students know--- about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; the Compromise of 1877; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Northern Migration, Harlem Renaissance (Countee Cullen, Paul Dunbar, Angelina Grimke, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes), A. Phillip Randolph, and the great figures, issues, and organizations of the contemporary Civil Rights Movement.


My students know the difference in the central tenets and cosmological focus of Newtonian versus Einstein’s physics; the difference between humanist and behaviorist psychology; the major components of Freud’s psychoanalysis; the main structures of the brain and the importance of neuroscience. They learn and utilize all key major mathematical concepts from those first numbers, time, and money in Grade K; to the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus near the upper level of high school mathematics.


My students get an education. Empowered by their accumulation of knowledge, they then define their own raging interests and follow these, in the context of major courses of study across the liberal arts--- doing research papers, properly including citations, whether internal, footnoted, or end-noted.


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


  I love working as hard as I do, but I shouldn’t have to. We have now traversed over 30 years since the federally commissioned study, A Nation at Risk (1983), detailed the sorry state of education in the United States. We have endured fad after fad. We have created charter schools that are typically worse than the public schools; there are some academically better outliers, but for the most part, we have wasted money and reduced pressure on schools of centralized school districts to define high quality education and deliver academic excellence to all students, regardless of demographic descriptors.


Similarly, some people have forlornly placed their hopes in a future of K-12 education dominated by vouchers for impoverished children to attend private schools. But there are not enough private schools to accommodate the masses of students currently enrolled in public schools; private schools vary greatly in quality; and both the charter school and voucher approaches would deny our children a common set of knowledge and skills of the sort that make the nationally centralized systems of East Asia and the European socialist democracies much more successful by comparison with the United States.


We will not any time soon have a nationalized system of K-12 education in the United States. We claim a penchant for local control, even though our local systems of public education function much the same, with classrooms filled with teachers who are trained by education professors touting the philosophically degraded constructivist pap; teachers unions that block any initiative that would redound to the benefit of students but require adjustments or sacrifices from union members; school boards that largely rubber stamp superintendent decisions until she or he commits some illegal act or moral peccadillo; principals who hide out in their offices until time for transfer or retirement; and central school district offices vastly overstaffed by outlandishly overpaid bureaucrats.


But understand me. I am a vehement critic of the way the education establishment of education professors, central office bureaucrats, and teachers unions function, but I am a strong supporter of the institution of the centralized public school district. At this level of operation, educators are in a position to articulate a challenging, coherent, logically sequenced liberal arts curriculum for acquisition grade by grade throughout the K-12 years; and to retrain teachers to impart those knowledge and skill sets to students of all demographic descriptors.


They are in a position to do so, but they don’t. So I have decided to intensify my efforts to revolutionize K-12 education. I have come to respect greatly the courage and acumen of Minneapolis Pubic Schools Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson. In the inaugural (Volume I, No. One) edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, I discuss the promising initiatives that educators under Superintendent Johnson’s leadership are pursuing in the form of High Priority Schools (identified for enhanced efforts to raise achievement levels for students facing multiple challenges); and of Focused Instruction (a fine nascent effort to achieve the necessary challenging, sequenced, coherent, comprehensive liberal arts curriculum for impartation to students of all demographic descriptors). These are the sorts of approaches that promise to bring well-defined skill and knowledge sets to students in Minneapolis served by the most important unit of academic instruction: the centralized public school district.


                          ............................................................................................................
       
But the superintendent is just beginning. There is much work to be done in fully upgrading the curriculum defined for Focused Instruction. Teachers must be retrained, since they have been so horribly trained in departments, schools, and colleges of education. Delivery of strong liberal arts content demands knowledge and skill sets on the part of teachers themselves that they are not likely to have at any level, especially those teaching at the K-5 elementary level.


And at the High Priority Schools, teachers must be rallied to rise to the very particular challenges of students who attend those institutions. These teachers must be recruited specifically for their sacred mission, they should be imbued with a sense of that mission, they should be materially rewarded for excellent performance in the pursuit of the mission, and every effort should be made to retain these most important of professionals at the height of their success.


The superintendent will also need to work to slim the bureaucracy that she heads, eliminating many central office staff positions and retraining individuals in those positions as needed tutors, teachers’ aides, and family liaisons who are truly needed to enhance student learning and establish strong relationships with parents and other family members of students.


Over the course of the next many months, years, to the end of my days if necessary, I will be variously supporting and critiquing the efforts of Bernadeia Johnson and her staff. Superintendent Johnson shows promise to be a truly transformative leader, capable of creating a centralized school district worthy of emulation as a national model. I intend to encourage her to do this by every means at my disposal--- through my seven-day-a-week-academic sessions in the New Salem Educational Initiative; the new Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; personal attendance at school board meetings, contract negotiations between the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and the Minneapolis Public Schools, and other important gatherings of educators and professionals whose actions affect the academic and therefore life prospects of our children; by taking my message to many forums and media; and by organizing community members who will help foment the necessary revolution in K-12 education.


The following three articles (followed by an article in which I express concluding thoughts) offer accounts of student experiences in the New Salem Educational Initiative, with much that discerning readers can extrapolate for application in the needed revolution. These students are thriving in a program that offers love and knowledge. They are on their way to a better life.


And so it should be with every young person in the city of Minneapolis, in the state of Minnesota, and in the nation formed by these United States.

Article #2: Brothers Damon Preston and Javon Jakes

Article #2


Second in a Five-Article Series:     The Essence of the New Salem Educational Initiative in the Expanding Mission to Revolutionize K-12 Education, Summer 2014

Human Relationships:   Enduring, Loving, Substantive


Brothers Damon Preston and Javon Jakes,





A block south of Glenwood Avenue, and therefore several blocks south of Olson Highway, on Newton Avenue North in Minneapolis stand apartment buildings that feature the cheapest rents for those desperately seeking Section 8 housing. From the early decades of the 20th century through the 1960s, this area of North Minneapolis was occupied by Finns and a smattering of others from Scandinavia, and from East Europe. The East Europeans included Jewish folks who, though, more typically resided along with African American neighbors on streets closer to Olson Highway to the south and in an expansive area extending northward from the highway.


Until the new thoroughfare was built with Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) funds in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Sixth Avenue famously occupied that land as the most important commercial hub of the Northside. The area through which Glenwood Avenue now runs is occupied mostly by African Americans, and by Hispanic, Somali, and Hmong immigrant families.


I first met Damon Preston (data privacy pseudonym, as with all names in this five-part series) in March 2010, when he was a Grade 1 student at Bryn Mawr K-5 School, located across the bridge to another world in the residential area that gave its name to Damon’s school. Mother Evelyn Patterson and de facto stepdad Marcel Gifford had brought Davon and then-infant brother Javon Jakes to Minneapolis looking for more promising economic and life prospects than they had found on the hunt in Southside Chicago.


The family had just moved to Minneapolis in that spring of 2014 when Damon became my student. He was making ones and twos in most subject areas on a Minneapolis Public Schools grading scale for Grade K-5 students of one to four (1-4), with four being the highest for extended accomplishment; three indicating grade level mastery; two signifying below grade level performance; and one giving evidence of significant lag below grade level. The ones for Damon included the key skill areas of math and reading, and the concern over Damon’s verbal shortcomings deepened when his teachers seemed to observe a speech impediment.


By the end of that Grade 1 year of school enrollment, Damon was rising toward grade level on formal assessments of his math and reading ability and, just as important for his long-term success, this young student was demonstrating keen knack for focusing on the task at hand, and an elevated interest in achieving academic success. The speech impediment, concern about which I had from the beginning thought overwrought, had faded. Damon spoke confidently, crisply, articulately.


As is the case for all students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Damon has remained in the program for each succeeding academic year. By Grade 3, Damon was attaining threes in the key skill areas of math and reading, and his grades in every subject never again fell below a two. Damon mastered his multiplication tables (a typically Grade 3 skill) ahead of most members in his class, and he seemed poised to rise well above grade level during his Grade 4 academic year.


Then, during his Grade 4 academic year 2012-2013, many dislocations threatened the survival of Damon’s family. Evelyn gave Marcel notice that she was splitting with him. She speculated that she might move to South Dakota to live with a brother. In the course of spring 2012, the family had relocated to a subsidized apartment complex just south of Olson Highway, but in early autumn 2012 I arrived to pick up Damon for three successive weeks without finding the family at home. This meant that the family had vamoosed very quickly, because I maintain a store of multiple contact numbers for all of my students and keep keenly abreast of pending residential shifts.


One Saturday thereafter, as I was driving on a street leading northward from Olson Highway, Marcel came running up from behind, having recognized my car. I had the two students (brothers Orlando Martinez and Mateo Martinez) with me who at the time were Damon’s academic session mates. I stopped the car, and the three of us listened to Marcel catch us up on the family’s travails. Marcel told me about Evelyn’s struggles with depression and her erratic behavior, none of which surprised me, given her emotional state at the time of numerous interactions that I had with her in the run-up to these recent events. Marcel also said that she had moved again but had not let him know where. She had also changed phone numbers. So, at the end of our conversation, the best I could do was to urge Marcel to call me in the event that he did reestablish contact with Evelyn, and to let her know how badly I wanted to talk to her and to reengage Damon with my academic instruction and mentoring.


Two weeks later a call came in from Evelyn as I was emerging from a Northside restaurant at which I typically treated a group of students on early Saturday afternoons. She let me know that she, Damon, and Javon had indeed moved, to an apartment complex in far South Minneapolis, almost to Richfield, near the Cub Foods store just south of the Crosstown Highway.


From that time forward, I picked Damon up as usual on late Saturday afternoon. He was emotionally unsettled by the sudden residential shifts and the absence of Marcel, to whom he was genuinely tethered in a father-son relationship. At times he acted out at school, but he would go for weeks without incident once he and I had a heart to heart talk. He remained academically focused with me, and although his grades at school suffered a bit during that 2012-2013 academic year, we would work through any difficulties, and by late spring Damon had regained his confidence and was demonstrating grade level performance in math and reading.


But Evelyn struggled to pay even the humble rent at the apartment complex. In early June 2013, she informed me that she would be moving the family again, this time to St. Paul. She was distraught, fearing that Damon would not be able to study with me anymore. I assured her that I would always keep Damon in my fold as long as the family was anywhere in the Metro, telling her that I even kept up with students who moved to another state by phone. Evelyn gasped a bit in disbelief, her eyes watering as I made this pledge. Thereupon there radiated from her sweet, plump face a smile that seemed wide enough to encompass that Metro wherein I vowed we would always meet.


And this has been the case since July 2013. Every week, I go over to the eastern reaches of St. Paul to pick Damon up for his two-hour academic session in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Little brother Javon, who as a toddler and pre-K student had whimpered when I would come for Damon because he could not accompany us, now came under my wing when he entered Grade K (kindergarten) during the 2013-2014 academic year. Occasionally, on a day of particularly inclement winter weather or during times of notably heavy traffic, I would work with the boys in the hallway outside their apartment. The apartment itself did not have enough furniture or lighting to be suitable for our academic sessions.


But wherever we met, we studied with great seriousness. Damon underwent moments of academic insecurity at school; ever fearful of failure, he would worry grievously if he did not catch on to a concept presented by his teacher at school (which with the move to St. Paul, became Bruce Vento K-5) immediately. But there, crouched with me in the hallway outside an apartment in disarray, he would feel his academic shift gain ballast again as comprehension rose to match his drive for achievement, and he would upon my departure give evidence of that level of confidence to which Damon always aspired and inevitably rose during his academic sessions with me.


One the day (5 June 2014) of the most recent Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, Evelyn texted me that she and the family might not be able to make the yearly celebration of student skill and talent because she did not have bus fare. I went over to the St. Paul residence on the day of the banquet to deliver the fare to Marcel, who by now was reestablished in a relationship with Evelyn and living again with the family.


That evening, Damon gave his best in delivering part of a Frederick Douglass speech that he had practiced. Javon demonstrated that he could count backward from the number 20. Both boys beamed with pride. I shivered with the thought that, absent my delivery of bus fare, they might not have experienced what in the life of an inner city child very well could be a transformative moment.


Damon Preston and Javon Jakes, two of the most impoverished students I have ever encountered in my forty years of teaching the children of the very poor, are each securely on an academic trajectory that more typically describes the life course of the offspring of the upper middle and upper economic classes in the United States. Damon has moved several skill notches upward in the weeks leading up to the posting of this article, he is brimming with confidence, and he believes me when I tell him that he can be one of my very best students.


This delights him, because at the banquet he has witnessed the kind of feats of which my very best students are capable. He, too, will act in one of my compressed versions (shortened for banquet performance but maintaining original Shakespearean lines in the Elizabethan poetic renderings) of Hamlet, King Lear , Othello, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, or one of the other great dramas or comedies from the Bard. He, too, will demonstrate his knowledge of history and government; perform mathematics tasks well above grade level; continue to give speeches identified with important public features; graduate from high school; and chart a viable course to an excellent college or university.


None of this would be possible without my willingness to go wherever my students land, follow them throughout numerous residential shifts, mentally file the constantly changing phone numbers, pick them up for two hours of challenging and engaging college preparatory instruction across the liberal arts curriculum, and forge emotionally rich and satisfying relationships with many members of their families.


This is what it takes. This is what is necessary to reach the children of the very poor. This is what is required to meet the needs of families who struggle but show me every day my feet hit the ground how much they want a better life. Highest quality academic instruction, delivered in a format whereby students from extraordinarily challenging circumstances can thrive: This is the only route that will eliminate cyclical poverty and establish genuine democracy in the world’s richest nation.       So this is what I do.


And this is what we will do for all children in these United States when we have revolutionized K-12 education with strong liberal arts curriculum, delivered throughout the K-12 years in logical grade by grade sequence--- knowing that this will require excellent teachers possessing broad and deep knowledge, keen pedagogical ability, fired by the mission properly to educate all of our precious children.

Article #3: Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz

Article #3


Third in a Five-Article Series:  The Essence of the New Salem Educational Initiative in the Expanding Mission to Revolutionize K-12 Education, Summer 2014



Human Relationships:   Enduring, Loving, Substantive


Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz





Consider the challenges confronted by the student who does not speak English at home by reflecting on the following passage from an ACT practice test:


>>>>>


Gaspar Ruiz, condemned to the death of a deserter, was not thinking either of his native place or his parents, to whom he had been a good son on account of the mildness of his character and the great strength of his limbs. The practical advantage of this last was made still more valuable to his father by his obedient disposition. Gaspar Ruiz had an acquiescent soul.
But it was stirred now to a sort of dim revolt by his dislike to die the death of a traitor. He was not a traitor. He said again to the Sergeant: “You know I did not desert, Esteban. You know I remained behind amongst the trees with three others to keep the enemy back while the detachment was running away!”
Lieutenant Santierra, little more than a boy at the time, and unused as yet to the sanguinary imbecilities of a state of war, had lingered nearby as if fascinated by the sight of these men who were to be shot presently--- “for an example”--- as the Commandante had said.
The sergeant, without deigning to look at the prisoner, addressed himself to the young officer with a superior smile. “Ten men would not have been enough to make him a prisoner, mi tenente. Moreover, the other three rejoined the detachment after dark. Why should he, unwounded and the strongest of them all, have failed to do so?”
“My strength is nothing against a mounted man with a lasso,” Gaspar Ruiz protested eagerly. “He dragged me behind his horse for half a mile.”
At this excellent reason the sergeant only laughed contemptuously. The young officer hurried away after the Commandante.
Presently the adjutant of the castle came by. He was a truculent, raw-boned man in a ragged uniform. His spluttering voice issued out of a flat yellow face. The sergeant learned from him that the condemned men would not be shot till sunset. He begged then to know what he was to do with them in the meantime.
The adjutant looked savagely round the courtyard and, pointing to the door of a small dungeon-like guardroom, receiving light and air through one heavily barred window, said, “Drive the scoundrels in there.”


<<<<<


The text above represents one-third of a Reading Section passage on an ACT practice test, for which there are a total of four passages. The passage given constitutes challenging reading (taken from Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Gaspar Ruiz: A Romantic Tale”) for most high school students. For students from families the members of which are not well-educated, do not own many books, or do not themselves read very much, the challenges are hugely greater. And for students of immigrant families wherein English is seldom if ever spoken, the hurdles in the way of a good performance on the ACT can be Herculean.


Professionals in the public schools should be alert to the need of children from challenging circumstances to be very aggressive in their vocabulary development, so that from a very young age students should be reading a great variety of materials, explicitly developing an extensive vocabulary, and with great intentionality keeping pace with young people from better educated families. But the public schools have never instituted an effective program for engaging all students with a college preparatory course in reading and literature across the liberal arts curriculum.


In the New Salem Educational Initiative, students are now reading Shakespeare as early as Grade 4, they are similarly introduced to the Iliad and Odyssey in elementary school, they read a wide variety of traditional African American, African, Native American, Latin American tales, and they learn to appreciate the drama of Lorraine Hansberry, as well as the poetry of such authors as Langston Hughes, Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou. They love this literature, never shrink from it. They know that I love great literature, and that I love them, so we come to love many of the same books and subjects for study--- just as happens within families.


And this latter follows naturally according to the processes of the New Salem Educational Initiative, which delivers an abundance of academic content of heavy substance, dispensed with a fervent love that never goes away.


And so it has been for Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz.


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


Felicia enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 5 student at Nellie Stone Johnson K-8 School in North Minneapolis. From that time forward, she and her sister have attended a two-hour session on Wednesday evenings. As a Grade 8 student during academic year 2010-2011, Felicia also began attending on Sunday evenings, along with two other students whom I had identified as having the ability and the intellectual drive to pursue a course of very advanced study, whereby I started to train them in the kind of skills required to do well on the ACT, to position themselves to receive good academic scholarships upon applying to colleges or universities, and to thrive once ensconced in a collegiate setting.


Raul enrolled as a Grade 6 student struggling in all ways at school. He had serious anger management issues, and he was failing every subject at Sheridan K-8 (now K-5) School in Northeast Minneapolis. By the end of that academic year (2008-2009), Raul was passing all of his classes. During the following academic year, he was consistently on the “B” honor roll. By the end of his Grade 8 year, Raul was making “A’s” and “B’s” in every subject, even in math, a subject that had been a perennial problem for him through his late elementary school years.


Felicia and Raul are now both in Grade 11. These students, because of their half-decade of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, have an array of skills necessary to succeed at the four-year college or university level. Since academic year 2010-2011 Felicia and Raul have read numerous Shakespearean plays, performed roles in our annual Shakespearean production, and traveled with me to Winona to see performances in successive years of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. They also attended another production of Hamlet at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis Uptown and Othello at the Guthrie.


Felicia and Raul are very keen intellectuals who often seem as if they are going to stare a hole in my face when I am telling them something about history, government, economics, literature, natural science, and mathematics. But (in adaptation of the Bard) the course of love for academics does not always run smooth.


Despite undertaking a very advanced course of study with me, Felicia did not engage well with her high school teachers as a Grade 9 student. She was sloppy about turning in assignments and compiled a GPA far below her knowledge and skill level.


Felicia recovered considerably at Grade 10 and Grade 11. Having been blindsided at the point in Felicia’s Grade 9 year when I realized how unexpectedly haphazard she had been in her studentship, I began to grill her weekly as to whether she was turning in assignments, getting to class on time, and doing all of those nitty-gritty tasks necessary to make grades earned match knowledge and ability. As Felicia continued to accumulate vast knowledge across the liberal arts curriculum in the sessions with me that she found so much more engaging that the worksheet-DVD approach of so many of her teachers at school, she also began to develop better skills necessary for elevating her in-school academic record.


Raul’s chief challenge was focused on the particular area of math. During his high school years, Raul has continued to manifest good study skills and to be good about turning in assignments. But, disappointingly, especially since we had worked so hard to get his math skills to grade level by the end of his middle school years (Grades 6-8), Raul received some bad advice from a high school counselor and was enrolled in a mathematics course that was over his head. Raul had not had enough basic algebra to be ready for geometry, the course in which he was enrolled. Raul and I have been in a constant scramble ever since that time to keep Raul’s grade in math at a strong passing level, even as we prepared him to pass the Minnesota Grade 9 Writing Exam and the Grade 10 Reading Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA), and to engage with a range of subjects across the liberal arts curriculum, building vocabulary and the knowledge base to take on challenging college preparatory readings.


Thus does the love that endures become so important in the lives of students who come from impoverished families of low educational levels. Just as caring parents take action when their children show signs of floundering, so do I assume this role with my students. Felicia now is a good high school student, as well as a brilliant and scholarly person. William is performing acceptably in mathematics, even as he earns top grades in all other subject areas and continues to manifest a level of curiosity about the world around him that makes him one of the most genuinely intellectual people I have ever met.


Without the love that never goes away, and that comes with heavy doses of college preparatory content, it is entirely possible that at certain junctures either Felicia or Raul might have become discouraged, dropped out of school, or relegated themselves to a position from which attendance at a four-year college or university would not be a viable proposition. After spending half of their academic lives attending weekly sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative, though, Felicia and Raul have engaged with the best literature the world has to offer, acquired vast stores of knowledge from across the liberal arts curriculum, and developed a skill set that gives them a chance, with further explicit training, to aim for an ACT score that would put them at about the 75th percentile, which would in turn give them the opportunity to attend a selective college or university.


                  ……………………………………………………………………………………


Most high school students would not know the meaning of many of the words from the opening passage from Conrad that appears on a practice ACT college preparatory exam. Heading the list of unfamiliar vocabulary would be the words, “deigning,” “sanguinary,” and “truculent.’ So these words would either have to be learned from context or explicitly taught. An ACT exam is a good place to put the skill of vocabulary acquisition from context as necessary, but given the fact that a student only has 35 minutes to complete four passages in reading (one each for the categories of prose fiction, humanities, social studies, and natural science [the latter is in addition to a complete section entitled, “Science Reasoning”]), students likely to score at the highest levels already have an enormous vocabulary ready to apply to the art of reading comprehension.


Many other students, especially those from homes wherein adult members are not well-educated or speak little English, furthermore are very likely not to know the word, “acquiescent,” and may also need explanation for the following vocabulary items:  "condemned," "disposition," "imbecilities," "mounted," "lasso," "contemptuously," and "scoundrel."


I compile vocabulary lists for all reading assignments that my students undertake, and for the ACT practice reading section now under discussion, found 176 words that from my over 40 years of experience teaching students from impoverished and ill-educated families I know may cause difficulty. Notable among these are words that might give even fairly adept adult readers pause.


Those words include the following:


alacrity
evanescent
indolent
copious
capacious
ineluctable
ingenuous
ingenue


Whatever smugness the better readers among you may now be feeling if you yourself know the meaning of all of these words, do step outside your own ego to understand that for most students from impoverished and ill-educated families (and for many high school students from across the demographic continuum), these words are effectively foreign. They must be taught, either from context, explicitly, or both.


I do a lot of oral reading with my students, and in the course of reading challenging material out loud, we combine contextual and explicit vocabulary instruction. We compile vast lists for ongoing review in a process that focuses a great deal of attention on explicit vocabulary acquisition.


Vocabulary acquisition is hugely important for students who do not speak English at home. Remember that Felicia Benitz and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz have been studying on an advanced track with me for a long time. They have read many Shakespearean plays and other classical literary works, fully comprehending works that are daunting to much of the American public. But this is because Felicia and Raul consciously acquire the needed vocabulary that I teach them. With all of this reading that they have done, for all of the sophisticated vocabulary that they have in their mental files, they can still leave my mouth agape at words that they do not know, because no one speaks these words at home, and because they have not learned them at school.


So, in addition to those most difficult vocabulary items given above, understand that when teaching the student from impoverished, ill-educated families; and those that speak little or no English at home; they very likely will not immediately grasp, know at all, or know completely, the meaning of these words, just a few examples from that list of 176 items compiled from the practice ACT Reading section:


disposition
adjutant
inference
folklore
spur
zeal
garrison
discretion
indelible
placidity
sentry
intercession
moral
morale
paradox
contravene
bestirr
prudence
quintessential
par excellence
detachment
insolence
behest
paragon
prodigious


Again, those are just 20 items from a list that includes 176 words that I predicted (very correctly) students would not know. And often, we end up adding 25 to 50 words for which students did not have perfect understanding.


If students who are most likely to need explanation to comprehend fully the words that they are reading include Felicia and Raul, who have been under my wing since they were in late elementary school, how much more will this include students of similar demographic descriptors who have done nothing but attend classes in the Minneapolis Public Schools?  


I know if I ask a Grade 11 or Grade 12 student who has taken either a practice ACT or the actual ACT what she or he scored, that person--- even one who has been given mostly “A’s” and “B’s” in high school courses--- is likely to tell me that the score was a 13 or 14. This is an objectively wretched score that indicates the atrocious education that even the best of our children of impoverished, ill-educated, or immigrant families receive.


Thus Felicia and Raul have quite an advantage in being able to undergo rigorous academic training with me, regularly reading challenging material and undergoing training specifically focused on the ACT.


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


This is the power of love that never goes away. Felicia and Raul know that I love them. I tell them so. I walk the talk. I have credibility. Therefore, they know that I’m for real, whether I’m praising them or letting them know that they’ve screwed up. In the latter case, they will scramble to get their acts together, because they don’t like to disappoint me, just as one does not like to disappoint a loving and caring parent whom a young person respects.


Felicia and Raul have a legitimate chance to score a 25 on the ACT. If they do this, they will double the scores of students who bear similar demographic descriptors.


If we as a society cared more deeply; if we revolutionized our systems of K-12 educational delivery to fill them with challenging liberal arts curriculum sequenced for acquisition grade-by-grade, imparted by excellent teachers who by definition possess broad and deep subject area knowledge in history, government, geography, literature and language, fine arts (music and the visual arts), natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), and mathematics; we would give all of our precious children an equality of social terrain on which to achieve their deepest aspirations.


Why do we not do this?


As Ross Perot once asked me in the context of an interview concerning his gifts to and his interest in an inner city school in Dallas,


“Where are our guts? These are our children. What could be more important?”


Why, indeed, don’t we get moving to establish the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be?

Article #4 Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor Myers, and Orlando Martinez

Article #4


Fourth Article in a Series:  The Essence of the New Salem Educational Initiative in the Expanding Mission to Revolutionize K-12 Education, Summer 2014


Human Relationships:     Enduring, Loving, Substantive




Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor-Myers, and Orlando Martinez







The imperfections witnessed in the performances of Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz (see immediately preceding article) are absent in those of Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor-Myers, and Orlando Martinez. As good as Felicia and Raul are, as high as their native intelligence is, however piercing their intellectual drive--- Felicia and Raul have at times been high maintenance students. To get them positioned as prospectively successful four-year college and university students has taken a lot of effort on my part, effort deeply rewarding, but requiring hours and hours of an additional sort of energy expenditure nevertheless.


I use the phrasing, “an additional sort of energy expenditure,” because I expend the same aggregate energy for each one of my students, with the sort of energy expended differing from student to student.


With Monique Taylor-Myers, almost all energy expended has been to take a child who was languishing below grade level upon enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative at Grade 3, superintend a rise to grade level by the end of Grade 4, deal with a few remaining issues in Grade 5, witness a rapid rise above grade level in Grade 6, observe near-genius intelligence respond to the highest academic instruction with magnificent results in Grade 7, place her on a very advanced college preparatory course of study from Grade 8, and make adroit decisions regarding her own best trajectory from the end of her Grade 10 year.


This is a truly felicitous case that has made me even more aware than I have always been of the great potential waiting to be tapped in the academic soul of many an impoverished but abundantly talented urban youth.
             
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From the very beginning, Monique manifested a vibrant spirit, in love with life, excited about the world of learning. When New Salem Missionary Baptist Church was located at the corner of Lyndale Avenue North and 26th Avenue North (two blocks east of its current location), I would hold my academic sessions in a large room on the third (top) floor at the eastern extent of a long hallway. I would give Grade 3 Monique her math and reading assignment, she would smile and go to work with alacrity, finishing quickly, asking for more.




At school, Monique’s teachers would fret over an occasional lapse of performance on a reading comprehension exercise, or over some apparent failure to grasp a math concept at desired swiftness. I counseled Monique’s very attentive mother (Lana Taylor) to stay calm. “What I am witnessing in my own academic sessions with Monique,” I would tell her, “indicates strong ability, a perfect disposition, and an intense desire to learn.”


And so it was. Monique mastered her multiplication tables, a classic Grade 3 task, ahead of most of her class, and she began to take on mathematic tasks typically identified with Grade 4 before her first academic year (2005-2006) of enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative had ended. She worked through a Grade 3 level reading skill development book without difficulty, and I gave her generous amounts of classic reading material (Norse mythology, “The People Could Fly,” “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”), as well.


At the end of our sessions, Monique would rise from her seat, go to the big, broad window looking out on Lyndale to the east, peer at her reflection, and do a ballerina’s spin with great joy and pride. This child was joy. This child was life. This life was the embodiment of potential for great success.


By Grade 6 Monique’s rise was meteoric, seemed without bounds. She had great success as a student during her first two years at Olson Middle School, so that by Grade 8 her teachers were scrambling to keep her productively occupied. By this time, I had placed Monique in a special Sunday evening advanced session of the New Salem Educational Initiative with two other highly adept Grade 8 students, Felicia Benitez (highlighted in the immediately preceding article) and Lana Okoye.


All three of these young women were and are highly talented. They would each focus with great intensity in academic sessions in which we studied, deficit and debt, minimum wage, the Wahhabi sub-sect of Sunni Islam, domestic violence with the relationship of Rihanna and Chris Brown as points of departure, the phenomena of falling asteroids and meteorites--- and many, many other topics, even as we trained toward mastery of mathematical, reading, grammatical, and scientific material directly germane to the ACT.


At the end of their Grade 8 year, these students read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its entirety, then traveled with me to Winona the following summer (2011) for the first of what would become our annual trips to the Great River Shakespeare Festival. The play of Shakespeare that we read and witnessed in summer 2012 was King Lear, which these students again read in its entirety; then the following spring, I assembled a compressed version of the play, maintaining all Shakespearean (Elizabethan) language, for performance at the June 2013 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet. I performed the part of King Lear, with Monique appearing as my daughter Regan; and Felicia and Lana portraying my daughters Cordelia and Goneril respectively.


And indeed I loved these three students as if they were my own daughters. But one of them was clearly excelling at a more rapid rate than the others, lifted into the academic stratosphere by a mighty work ethic in tandem with native intelligence and six years of the challenging liberal arts course of study in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
     
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Monique had become frustrated that Felicia and Lana had not always done their reading assignments in a manner consistent with her own ethic of diligence. I could tell that she was restless, that even these very talented students were not up to Monique’s performance level, and that they were holding her back. So in mid-June of 2013, Monique and I sat on the steps of her dad’s house (she splits residential time with dad, mom, and grammy) in the 2300 block of Thomas Avenue North. I gave her advanced study materials, including her own copy of an ACT preparatory book, and several newspaper articles.


“I know that you have become frustrated in the Sunday evening class," I told her.  "That’s understandable. The other students are talented, but they don’t have your drive; you are much more the self-starter.”


“What you have to remember,” I continued, is that you are not just any student…” I paused. Monique nodded affirmatively.


“…even as I am not just any teacher…”   Monique smiled and nodded in the same way.


“So I’d say that the time has come for us to meet together in the manner of an Oxford/ Cambridge style tutorial--- we’ll sit across from each other and discuss and learn an even greater amount of material than has thus far been the case. You’ll carry the whole load, and the reading will be heavy in substance and quantity. Would you be willing to do that?” I finished.


“Yes, I would.” Thus were Monique and I off on a fabulous tour through the works of August Wilson; the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Ramayana of the Hindu tradition, Dao Dejing of the Chinese tradition, select Buddhist sutras, oral accounts of Creation from Africa and Native America, and overviews of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; history of the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas; fundamental constitutional principles; Civil Rights Movement with reference to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--- and many, many, other subjects and topics.


At the 5 June 2014Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, Monique performed the lead role in my adaptation of the great work of Shakespeare as (given the change in gender for the title role) Hamlet, Princess of Denmark, absolutely commanding the stage in delivering the great soliloquies that begin “I have of late, lost all my mirth…” and “To be or not to be, that is the question…”


And now, in July and August of 2014, Monique and I are bearing down on additional ACT preparatory materials as we aim for a top-tier performance at a score in the 28-36 range. Monique Taylor-Myers is the best student I have had in more than 40 years of teaching in all possible circumstances, including students of widely varying ethnicities, economic statuses, and in most available educational settings (K-12, university, overseas, prisons, many urban and a few rural and suburban settings). Teaching her has been one of the greatest joys in my life.


As Monique enters her Grade 12 year and prepares to go off to an excellent four-year college or university, how wonderful for me that I have been graced with a couple of students, poised for entry into Grade 5, who are showing the kind of promise that Monique has shown and is fulfilling.


                   ……………………………………………………………………………


Monique’s little sister, Ginger, was a babe in arms when I first started picking Monique and cousin Marcia Johnson up for their weekly academic sessions. I have watched her grow up, and she has witnessed the older members of her family go off with me each week for as long as she can remember. She would often be at grammy’s in those early days, at whose house in the 2200 block of 6th Street North I would pick her up and hold her way over my head as she squealed in delight.


Ginger Taylor-Myers entered the New Salem Educational Initiative formally when she was in Grade K (kindergarten). She would overhear members of her family reading and practicing college preparatory words, learning them along with them, so that at the June 2010 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, Ginger stunned the crowd by perfectly defining words such as quintessential (“the essence of the essence, the absolutely most important thing”), lassitude (“laziness”), and mercurial (“puzzling, mysterious, unpredictable”).


Ginger knew her multiplication tables by the end of Grade 2, was performing all basic mathematical operations in multiple digits and in the context of real-life situations during Grade 3, and by Grade 4 was figuring percentages, proportions, and ratios. At the end of Grade 4, she and I sat one day while she quickly memorized her part as Osric for our performance of Hamlet at the 5 June 2014 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, and in addition memorized one-fourth of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” By the time of the banquet, Ginger had all of the great work of oratory memorized and delivered it to the audience with great passion and expression.


So this summer of 2014 I have paired her with my other most precocious young student, Orlando Martinez. Early on, Orlando seemed even more advanced for his age than did Ginger. He entered the New Salem Educational Initiative at Grade 1. I took him through standard addition and subtraction exercises for that grade, proceeded to multiple digits, carrying and borrowing (“regrouping”), and when Orlando took those tasks on without breaking a sweat, I said, “Okay, well, let’s see what he can do with multiplication tables.”


Thus it was that Orlando did memorize multiplication tables for numbers zero through nine (0-9), demonstrating this conventionally Grade 3 skill by the spring of his Grade 1 year. By spring 2014, Orlando’s Grade 4 academic year, I decided that he, too, was ready to perform in our Shakespearean production and assigned him the part of the murdered king (paralleling the scenario whereby the elder Hamlet was murdered) in the play within the play at which Hamlet “catches the conscience of the king.” This summer of 2014, Ginger and Orlando are now attending a weekly academic session together, moving through mathematical tasks that more typically describe Grade 7 and 8 skill levels. They are reading the full version of Hamlet with me and will travel to Winona as part of the second group that I will take this summer to the Great River Shakespeare Festival. Ginger and Orlando are remarkable prodigies, and their talent is being fully captured and developed as students of mine in the New Salem Educational Initiative.


                           …………………………………………………………………………


The discovery and nurturing of the marvelous talent of Monique Taylor-Myers induced me to raise the already high expectations that I have for all students, regardless of demographic descriptors. The fact that she put me on heightened notice of the power and potential waiting to be tapped in urban youth has worked to the benefit of Ginger and Orlando. How wonderful to be fully developing such precocious young brains whose cogitations will now rise far above their Grade 5 level of enrollment.


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Locally centralized public school systems must be our chief units of K-12 educational delivery in the United States.



The district of the Minneapolis Public Schools under the leadership of Bernadeia Johnson has great potential to address the longstanding underperformance of students of color, and those from families of low economic wherewithal. The road to true excellence will not be easily traveled, for there is much repaving and improvement to be done on that road. The road must feature carefully sequenced gradations leading to the acquisition of advanced skill and knowledge sets across a rich and well-defined liberal arts curriculum. The knowledge and skill sets must be delivered by teachers of great knowledge and pedagogical ability, with a passion for learning that inspires similar emotions in students.


This is what has happened in the New Salem Educational Initiative in the cases of Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor-Myers, and Orlando Martinez. I feel so blessed every day that my feet hit the ground for the way that these young people have responded at the very apex of the strong academic structure that is the New Salem Educational Initiative. These students, all of my students, have enriched my life abundantly, and they move forward each day knowing that the prospects for their futures are excellent. On some level they know that they will be the ones to end generational poverty that has endured for too many cycles. They know that they have the power to do that, because the enormous latent talent that they had at birth has been tapped and now pours forth ineluctably.


So it should be for all of our precious children in a revolutionized system of K-12 education.