4 Comments

Nice and factual article that all boils down too. 1. The MPS curriculum continue to 1776 US history, we are in the 21 century.

2. The MPS staff is not being appreciated, supported, and paid accordingly for the time and labor that they do on a day to day basis. 3. It’s all about numbers that will continue to leave the disadvantage disadvantage. The objective is not to make sure the student are educated enough to start a business of their own. The objective is to make sure the becomes citizen of working for any company. Basically to become an employee for ever. I could continue but why the change has to come once the truth is recognized. That you can not live the so called AMERICAN dream on being a disadvantage employee for ever. This just means that those that are advantages will always have the advantages at reach.

Expand full comment

The problem is not more school days. The problem is parent accountability. Students who are failing typically have parents who don’t attend parent teacher conferences, don’t work with their children at home and sometimes have poor attendance. Teachers are already killing themselves to help the children in their classrooms. But they fight poor attendance, behaviors and extremely large class sizes (40+ In many cases). If you want to get results, start mimicking the successful school districts. Decrease class sizes, fully fund education like it is done I. Wealthier surrounding districts and require certain levels of parent participation in their child’s education. Added school days won’t work because MPS buildings are well over 100 years old with no air conditioning and the rooms get up over 90 degrees in the heat. You’ll be wasting your time and money because parents won’t send their kids to school on those days which will further spread the achievement gap. Let’s not forget to ask the question..”How well can you focus on learning material in a room pushing 100 degrees?”

Expand full comment
founding

The question is what resources can we actually control? Even a child absent 50% of the time would get three more weeks of education if the year were 30 days longer.

Expand full comment

But what you need to understand is that the pacing guide for education would then be spread out farther over those 30 days. And so a child who may have attended for that scheduled material during the original school schedule will now miss those days due to heat or vacations. Your question about what resources can we control, is simple. We can control the physical environment. I have no problem teaching a longer year, but you need to retrofit my 130 year old building with air conditioning. So that the children can sit comfortably with 30 to 40+ children in a classroom and learn. We can control class sizes. We can control the resources used to help the children. Such as books, computers, teachers, special education teachers, paraprofessionals, social workers psychologists and nurses. All these resources are important to the success of students and yet in MPS we still share some of these positions with other schools. We need to control the message with parents and have the district have the tough conversation with the community. Tell them parents need to be more accountable. Beating up teachers telling them they aren’t doing enough isn’t working anymore. It didn’t get results. If we have it so easy as teachers, why aren’t there people flocking for the position. You don’t! In fact, you have a critical shortage, so bad classrooms are being maned by people not qualified to do so. When a teacher is sick, there are no subs. The room gets covered by a paraprofessional. Someone who is legally able to be put there but is not qualified to teach. Republicans did that! They did that with Act 10 and all there other games. Sorry but this is simply a crisis that was purposely created by Republicans

Expand full comment