Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> A School District in Deep Trouble

The Key Vexations of the Minneapolis Public Schools, to Be Revealed in the Forthcoming Second Edition of My Book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect

 

The district of the Minneapolis Public Schools manifests all of the features that make public education in the United States so abominable.

 

The key vexations are knowledge-deficient curriculum and inept teaching at the median.

 

Both of these vexations are traceable to departments, colleges and schools of education, wherein those campus embarrassments known as education professors espouse an anti-knowledge ideology and train public school teachers and administrators imbued with that ideology and themselves lacking the knowledge necessary to impart to students a knowledge-intensive curriculum across the liberal, technological, and vocational arts.

 

Elementary school teachers are especially inadequately trained;  few ever obtain a degree in any key subject area, obtaining bachelor’s and often master’s degrees in education that are the least academically substantive on any college or university campus:  They have little knowledge of mathematics, natural science, history, geography, government, economics, the visual and musical arts, or high-quality Western, international, and ethnic-specific literature.

 

Secondary teachers often do obtain a bachelor’s degree in a key subject area but almost all teachers for many decades have obtained any graduate degrees in education programs yieldingly meaningless master’s degrees in education (M.Ed.) or the similarly academically insubstantial doctorate of education (Ed.D.).

 

Superintendents are drawn from the ranks of teachers and administrators trained in this intellectually vacuous manner.  Those superintendents whose teaching experience was entirely in elementary education typically have never acquired expertise in any academic subject area;  and, as indicated above, the knowledge level of secondary teachers is also inadequate.

 

Superintendent searches, therefore, inevitably fail to locate a leader capable of overseeing a district imparting knowledge-intensive education.  Our precious students have little chance of graduating  with the knowledge and skills necessary to live as culturally enriched, professional satisfied, and civically active and informed citizens.

 

Elections for boards of educations rarely attract high-quality candidates.  The number of such candidates who understand the vexations of the public schools as indicated above tends toward zero.  Once in office, board members come to view their task as supervisory, rather than managerial, leaving matters of curriculum and teacher quality to administrators who themselves were never knowledgeable and pedagogically effective teachers and have no idea as to the constituent elements of an excellent education.

 

Members of any given board of education are collectively the boss of the superintendent, but neither board members nor superintendent have any idea as to the design and implementation of  high-quality, knowledge-intensive education.  Important decisions are often deferred while the Board and the superintendent wait for the other to move assertively.  Key decisions necessary for the delivery of educational excellence are never made.

 

Put starkly, no one with the responsibility for improving academic quality in the public schools knows what she or he is doing.           

 

Lack of knowledge of the key vexations of the public schools applies also to the electorate, the general public, community members, and those in the media.  Very few individuals or entities external to the public education establishment have any idea themselves of the impediments to achieving academic quality;  hence, little outside pressure can be exerted for the needed change.

 

The Minneapolis Public Schools is essentially the typically terrible public school district.

 

But beyond the typicality, this particular Board membership is worse even than the usual, having dithered in making necessary decisions pertinent to building usage, assistance for students whose proficiency lags far below grade level, and pursuing lines of questioning that would at least indicate some understanding that academic quality is substandard in the extreme.  This Board---  especially in the personages of Chair Collin Beachy (At-Large) Clerk Lori Norvell (District 5), and District 6 member Greta Callahan---  has a decidedly authoritarian streak that seeks to protect the education establishment and prevent candid criticism.

 

And the administration, led by Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams, is among the worst that one will find in any public school district. 

 

Sayles-Adams, who insists in every forum and situation on being addressed as “Dr.,” wrote the worst dissertation that I have ever read;  has made no decisions pertinent to the improvement of academic quality;  has maintained a numerically burdensome central staff, despite grave financial circumstances;  has authored no new revenue-generating initiatives, is incapable of presiding over an open-mike public forum that invites genuine criticism;  and has unconscionably attempted to shift the blame for the district’s financial woes onto former Senior Finance Officer Ibrahima Diop and others who had worked under him in the finance division, despite in Diop’s case a ten-year tenure in which he adroitly guided the district to recovery of a top bond rating, inevitably favorable financial audits by outside evaluators, and innovations that in recent years had enabled the Minneapolis Public Schools to struggle on financially, in the absence of the initiatives by administrative decisionmakers that would improve educational quality, rationalize building usage, and improve security so as to retain current students and attract more to the district.

 

The district of the Minneapolis Public Schools is in deep trouble under the current leadership and manifests all of those key vexations that call for overhaul of existing practices for the delivery of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.

The Origin of Historical Occurrences

Historical events occur according to the same processes that determine human behavior.

 

The behavior of human beings is determined by the combination of positive reinforcement (rewards for given behaviors), punishment (aversive results from certain behaviors), and negative reinforcement (the withdrawal of punishment) for certain behaviors that a person of certain genetic and biological propensities experiences in life.

 

Operants (punishment and reinforcement), as these interact with the genetic and biological qualities that define each individual, produce all behavior.

 

Notice, then, two important implications:

 

1)  Human beings do not have free will;

 

2)  The interaction of operant conditioning and biogenetic inheritance in determining human behavior renders irrelevant the issue of nature vs. nurture. 

 

The more important debate has been between the determinists of behaviorist psychology, versus the free will advocates of humanist psychology. 

 

The processes that actually determine human behavior resolve the issue in favor of the behaviorists.

 

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This has enormous implications for the origin of historical occurrences.

 

Historical events occur due to the interaction of individuals whose behavior is determined by operant conditioning:

 

A combination of aversive and rewarding outcomes produce human behaviors and neurally recorded experiences that create cultures and communities of particular prevailing circumstances, which  interacting individuals seek to maintain or to change.  Preference for change occurs when a critical mass of interacting human beings agree that current conditions are aversive enough to seek alteration.

 

When masses of people seek alteration, rebellions (vigorous action against established norms and those who preserve those norms) may occur.

 

But revolution (social, cultural, or political transformation) depends on the presence of leaders whose operantly determined behavior renders them capable of and inclined toward directing or provoking mass discontent so as to achieve transformation: 

 

The United States revolution and constitution were produced under particular historical conditions due to the brilliance of leaders saliently represented by Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison.

 

The Civil War was conducted under particular historical conditions by a flawed but prescient Abraham Lincoln.

 

Vladimir Lenin (Vladimir Ulyich Ulyanov) interpreted the works of Marx and Lenin so as to determine  the course of the Bolshevik Revolution under particular historical conditions of early 20^th century Russia.

 

Joseph Stalin (losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), under particular historical conditions, redirected the Bolshevik Revolution so as to create the totalitarian Soviet state.

 

Adolf Hitler, under the particular historical conditions of late 1920/early 1930s Weimar Republic, conceived and implemented Nazi (National Socialist) policies associated with that combination of factors associated with the Holocaust and the attempt to establish a global empire.

 

Mohandas Gandhi under the particular historical conditions of 20^th century British colonial India, led a movement guided by the tenets of satyagraha to induce the exit of the colonialists from the subcontinent.

 

Decades of life under the particular historical conditions of Jim Crow prevailed until a unique combination of courage, eloquence, and organizational capabilities in Martin Luther King made possible the 1950s/1960s Civil Rights Movement.

 

Centuries of oppression of half the world’s population abided until the particular historical conditions of the 1960s induced Gloria Steinem to create Ms. Magazine as a fulcrum for success in the feminist movement.

 

Under the particular historical conditions of lingering racist and sexist reactionary attitudes, Donald Trump won the presidency and established an administration under policies that were uniquely conceived or assembled to create the circumstances of current life in the United States.

 

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Other important historical figures assisted the above Great Moral Actors or Uniquely Immoral Actors;  but the precise course of history was unlikely in the extreme to have occurred without these historical presences.

 

The behavior of these historical presences was determined by the particular operants and genetic factors of each individual.

 

The particular historical conditions that provided the context for the actions of these Great Moral Actors or Uniquely Immoral Actors were the result of the interaction of citizens, each manifesting operantly determined behavior and then gathering with others to produce the prevailing social environment conducive to change.

 

Great Moral Actors or Uniquely Immoral Actors do not change history merely as matter of personal biographies;  they require certain prevailing conditions for achieving the outcomes for which they become famous.

 

Also, beyond and below the occurrence of nation-wide social transformation, the lives of the nonfamous, the peasant, the worker, the nonliterate, the woman in patriarchal society, must be known, often through the work of anthropologists and oral historians, for a full account of history.

 

But in the absence of Great Moral Actors or Uniquely Immoral Actors, nation-wide historical change does not occur at all, occurs more slowly, or happens according to different processes than would be the case without their leadership.

 

Hence,

 

Great Men, Great Women, particular personalities: 

 

They indeed matter very much.

A Review of Stephen Fry, >Making History< (London: Arrow/Random House, 1996): How Determinative is the Great Man, Great Woman, the Particular Personality in History?

In this novel, Fry gives rein to his vivid imagination and keen penchant for detail as to human quirks and personalities in a variety of settings and historical periods. 

 

The novel is organized into Book One and Book Two.

 

The protagonist and narrator in both books is Michael Young, a child prodigy with a great natural fascination with history, who becomes a student (two years in advance of the typical age) at England’s Cambridge University.  In Book One, Mike introduces us to his chemistry graduate student girlfriend, Jane (who calls Mike, “Pup,” originating in a story of Mike’s youth in which a misunderstood pronunciation of Shakespeare’s character, “Puck,” becomes the name embraced by Jane), with whom he jousts as to the relative importance of history and the natural sciences as object of academic focus.  Mike is insecure as to Jane’s devotion and is unsettled when she accepts a fellowship for study at Princeton University in the United States and departs without informing him of the development, though he comes to learn that she remains interested in continuing their relationship.

 

We also meet Cambridge students Edward Edwards (“Double Eddie”) and James MacDowell, gay paramours who are as important as part of the English University landscape and their role in conveying enlightened social attitudes as for their interactions with Mike.

 

Mike conveys to the reader considerable skepticism that he has developed as to the university environment, in which he finds professors as interested in tenure and professional status as in the scholarship for which they angle to be known.  Tension in the academic setting is prominently witnessed, also, in his exchanges with his dissertation adviser, supercilious Professor Alexander Hugh-Stewart, who is not amused at the zippy popular insertions that accompany the more straightforward scholarly presentation in what Mike alternately proudly and satirically dubs his masterwerk: From Bayreuth to Munich:  The Roots of Power.  The dissertation details, with combination of firm fact and deft conjecture based on the shreds of evidence discovered in meticulous research, the story of Adolf Hitler’s life from birth up to that historical juncture he successfully maneuvers to take power in 1930s Germany.

 

Fry utilizes an innovative approach in advancing the plotline of the novel that includes not only Mike’s first-person narrative but also events revealed in cinematic script, as well as in third person prose.  The latter authorial form is utilized in conveying scenes from Hitler’s life as a child of Alois and Klara Hitler and as a gefreiter (corporal) in World War I.

 

With most major characters introduced and the Cambridge setting established, Fry focuses increasingly on the terrors and lingering trauma of the Nazi regime, especially after Mike meets a person whom he at first knows as Leo Zuckerman, a physics professor at the university.  Gradually, though, Mike comes to understand that the real name of the professor is Axel Bauer, son of Marthe and Abel Bauer;  the latter was a brilliant physician in the service of the Nazi regime, including as adviser on the efficacy of chemicals used to exterminate captives at Auschwitz.  But as the war turns against Germany, Abel facilitates the emigration of Marthe and Abel under the identities Hannah and Leo Zuckerman, to the United States.  As the Nazi regime falls, Abel is executed.  Leo, though, only six years of age at the time of his arrival in the United States, is convinced by Marthe that his father was a courageous Jewish doctor who resisted the Nazis;  only on her deathbed, while Axel is a student at Columbia University, does he come to know the true familial story.

 

Axel retains the identity of Leo Zuckerman but is haunted with guilt.  He secures the assistance of Mike, combining the latter’s knowledge of the Nazi regime and world history with his own esteemed scientific expertise to construct a computer device (dubbed, “TIM,”) with the capability of eliminating Hitler from history.  With explosive apparent success, TIM does remove Adolf Hitler from the historical record, but in the process---  the reader discovers as Book Two opens---  transports Mike into the entirely different setting of Princeton University in a significantly altered history far beyond the erasure of Hitler.  Germany remains powerful in the postwar world, dominating the European nations, which now have a tense relationship with a United States that also manifests many authoritarian tendencies.

 

Mike recognizes many faces on the Princeton campus as those he knew at Cambridge, but they have  different names and attitudes that reveal a far less progressive political and cultural climate, including on issues such as gay relationships.  Many cultural icons that Mike knew as prominent in the United States and the Western world are not known in the altered postwar world.  And worst of all, Mike finds out that not only did Germany emerge from World War II with much power maintained, the person who ruled instead of Hitler was a character, Rudi Gloder, introduced as a self-promoting gefreiter in Book One and in Book Two revealed even more to be much like Hitler in background, temperament, and character.

 

Eventually, Mike comes to know a Princeton physics professor Chester Franklin, who turns out to be a transported Leo Zuckerman (Axel Bauer).  Mike and Axel work through their fuzzy memories of the life that they knew at Cambridge to agree that their experiment with TIM made life actually worse.  With the help of a facially and by personality new character, Steve Burns (fellow student and friend of Mike), Mike and Axel reconstruct a device potentially able to return humanity to those known while the two were at Cambridge.  Burns helps the two gather materials for the device and to fend off suspicious detectives investigating Mike, whose name and physical appearance were known at Princeton but whose sudden acquisition of a British accent and odd cultural references had aroused suspicion.

 

The new experiment appears to work:

 

Mike and Zuckerman (Bauer) return to Cambridge and the people, places, and culture that they had known.  Jane, who had never surfaced during Mike’s transported experience at Princeton, eventually does make contact from that city and university under the circumstances of her fellowship and vows her continuing love for Mike.  A complicating factor in Mike’s love life, though, may come with the only major revealed change upon return to Cambridge:  Steve Burns, a gay young man who had developed a flirtation with Mike at Princeton, appeared to have died by gunfire in fending off the detectives when the latter arrived on the scene just as Mike and Zuckerman (Bauer) were finalizing their second experiment in historical alteration;  but at novel’s end, Steve reveals himself to have also been transported to Cambridge and ready to explore life under the original historical conditions as described by Mike back at Princeton.

 

In this very well-written and enormously entertaining novel, Fry advances the case against the Great Man concept in history and very well may succeed in altering or confirming many readers’ views on the matter.

 

He does not convince me, though:

 

Magnetic personalities and skillful operators, in combination with historical circumstances conducive to the utilization of their talents, do in my view have determinative impact on history.  Rudolph Gloder had a different name but life circumstances and personality approaching an identity with that of Hitler.  Those particular life circumstances induced the development of the unique personality that appeared on the scene and rose to power by exploiting the vulnerability of the German populace in the late Weimar era.

 

Whether the person be called Adolf Hitler or Rudi Gloder is not consequential;  rather, the personality, in combination with prevailing historical circumstances does have determinative consequences.

 

Great Men, Great Women, Particular Personalities:  

They indeed matter very much.