Educational Arrogance And Destructive Ignorance

The StarTribune editorial on Saturday (2/22/20) was on Minneapolis Public School reorganization.

Let me quote the editorial, the top three paragraphs: In a series of recent public meetings, push back against Minneapolis school reorganization plans has been formidable. Supporters of mostly south and southwest schools have turned out by the dozens to voice objections. Some are upset because the reorganization could break up K-8 schools. Others worry that there would be too few language-immersion programs. Still others don't want their school closed or their kids moved to a school outside their neighborhood.

Yet despite all those legitimate concerns, leaders of the Minneapolis Public Schools must do something differently to address stubbornly entrenched learning disparities between student groups. And that means the district must work to adopt a final reorganization plan that strikes a balance between making needed changes and preserving the most popular, academically effective programs.

The five reorganization proposals being debated aim to stem the flow of students out of the district, to reduce race and class segregation, to slash transportation costs and to use those savings to enhance classroom instruction. The plans include cutting the number of magnet schools and locating them in the center of the city. . .

Superintendent Ed Graff told an editorial writer that the primary goal of the change is to improve academic achievement. The reconfiguration is intended to offer equal access to effective programs across the city, in hopes of boosting learning outcomes for students of color who make up more than two-thirds of the district's enrollment."

Now, Minneapolis is largely more white and middle class on the south side, and more white and upper middle class south of Lake Street southwest Minneapolis. These parents do not want their kids bussed out of their neighborhood schools. They wanted their kids attending neighborhood schools until they graduated from the 8th grade. Ed Graff is going to do away with that. Families with high achieving students and white families favor the language-immersion and magnet schools so their kids can get a better public education. Ed Graff is going to close many of those neighborhood schools and put them downtown in the center of commerce away from neighborhoods.

What that fool Graff is pulling will further drive white families and upper class families out of the city, or will force them to send their children to private schools or to superior suburban schools outside of Minneapolis. How will that help a barely functioning urban school system where 2/3rds of all students are already persons of color. How does his integration of north and south side Minneapolis and the closing of magnet schools do anything for the kids left behind. How does this stabilize an already failing school district.

He wants to reduce race and class segregation but, if they are honest, most middle and upper class families, white or non-white, do not want their children going to school with lower class and poor children of any color, because human nature being what it is, it is the lower common denominator rule prevails. Mixing higher achievers with lower achievers lowers the academic performance of the high achievers but does little to increase or raise up the performance of the low achievers. Let me refer you to the euphemistic wording offered by the editor up above: " . . . leaders of the Minneapolis Public Schools must do something differently to address stubbornly entrenched learning disparities between student groups." All the millions and millions of dollars, and integration efforts and head start initiatives are not working and non-white and lower class kids still perform far below academically on average than do white kids and upper class kids.

All Graff, a typically arrogant and ignorant Progressive that will fail no matter what he does because he only doubles down on already failed urban schools policies. He will further integrates classes and races and now all of Minneapolis schools will be converted into low functioning, academically failing ghetto quality schooling for all. He will destroy the south side and southwest side schools too in the name of political correctness, to end "discriminatory practices that have not existed for 30 years", all for the sake of fairness, equal opportunity and equal education access. These socialists and social engineers are utterly helpless, clueless and destroy everything they touch. The entire K-16 educational system in America  needs to be upended and rebuilt from the ground up.

I have a list of proposals that are not exhaustive but would help:

1. Abolish the federal Department of Education.
2. All or most control of local educational practices and rulings should be determined and controlled by the local school board.
3. Pass strong, real voucher programs so that whatever a school district gets per child (say $22,000 per year per child, is allocated to all parents, regardless of race or class identity, interested in removing their children from public schools in order to enroll them in suburban school districts, private schools, religious schools, home schools or magnet schools, would have the resources to get a good education for their children.
4. Encourage all young men to get married to their girl friends so that children born to them have a married mother and father, so that the family unit can concentrate on bringing up well educated children that love learning and regard school as their childhood mission, a privilege as well as a right.
5. Perhaps most important of all is to build an American culture where most adults in future generations grow up to be very accomplished individuators.  Where moms and dads are individuators, their children are far more likely to love learning, reading and intellectual pursuits, and they will take school studies much more seriously. When children are burning with intellectual ambition, hungry for math, the printed word and knowledge itself, it is almost irrelevant how good the school is, or how inspirational and skilled the teachers are. This would move the meter significantly regarding that entrenched low achievement meter mentioned in the editorial above.
6. Ed Graff, his hierarchical army of educational bureaucrats, and army of teachers are all or mostly public employees, government employees, socialist in political orientation, very group-oriented and engaged in progressive ideological purity which they are indoctrinating the young with. The young are impressionable little bureaucrats, groupist, ideological and nonindividuating. How do you raise the academic achievement of all these little rascals after you have bled all the personality, fire, brains, ambition, work ethic, love of learning and individuality out of them.
7. We need to deschool society somehow, and get these children into little educational pods, perhaps in the neighborhood fire station, church, senior center or town hall. By flattening the hierarchy and letting kids be kids as individualists and individuators will spark a learning revival unlike anything we have ever seen.

Unless Minneapolis school system adopts these reforms, and they will not, they are doomed to failure and further decline in city public education as the ghettoization of their northside school reorganization guts what is still working somewhat on the south side of town.

It is astounding that Progressives destroy all that they touch and demonstrate constant failure at whatever city, nation or school system that they run, but they never internalize, acknowledge or apologize for their failure and switch to free market, non-governmental alternative strategies. The intellectuals, the academics and the media all lie all the time and give them a pass as they tank our entire economy, and way of life. They never learn and will never learn. We need to fire all these administrators and teachers and go in a whole different direction.