For decades, families in Black, Brown, immigrant, and historically underserved communities have been told to wait for traditional educational systems to improve. Many are still waiting. Charter schools emerged not because public education was working for everyone, but because too many children were being pushed through systems that prioritized compliance, bureaucracy, and graduation statistics over literacy, identity, and intellectual development. While charter schools are far from perfect, they may represent one of the few opportunities to fundamentally redesign education around community needs, cultural understanding, innovation, and accountability rather than institutional survival. Lock in!
A common narrative about American public education centers on Horace Mann, the Common School Movement, and the creation of a democracy as a product of public schooling. Mann believed in education as a crime reduction tool and societal stabilization agent, but also as a prerequisite for citizenship in democratic societies. This idea gave birth to the concept of public education as we know it today. But the truth, as always, is more complicated. The above story of American public schools is sanitized, easy to remember, and easy to discuss at educational conferences. The truth is, however, that this narrative does not speak to whom education was meant to serve and who was excluded by design.
For instance, in the period between 1800 and 1860, Black Americans had a better understanding of the power of literacy than any current U.S. policymaker. Enslaved Africans and free Blacks faced torture, mutilation, incarceration, and death in their pursuit of education. In many Southern states, literacy was illegal for the enslaved population since planters understood that it increased their awareness, allowed them to communicate, and created opportunities for resistance. Literate Blacks were considered a threat to the entire institution of slavery, thus making teaching them literacy punishable by death (Loewen, 2007).
Even under such conditions, Black men, women, and children continued educating one another in secret churches, cabins, barns, woods, and fields. Enslaved people risked punishment to learn letters, words, and numbers, often using whatever materials were available. Education was not merely academic; it was an act of liberation, resistance, and survival (Gundaker, 2007; Library of Congress, 2022).
Why is it important? Because today, when we talk about fixing education in the Twin Cities, we cannot ignore the fact that schools did not always stand for equity, justice, and opportunities for all. The oldest school established for Black children in the United States was the African Free School, which opened its doors in New York City in 1787 due to systematic exclusion. Black schools in America were not an exception; they existed in response to exclusion (Anderson, 1988).
Indigenous children in the United States were educated in residential boarding schools where the goal of education was to eliminate language, culture, identity, and families. Schools in America have always been built on contradictory principles: on the one hand, they are places of democratization; on the other, of control, segregation, and marginalization.
As industrialization expanded, schools began resembling factories and industrial processes. Bell schedules, standardized practices, age-based grouping, hierarchical organizations, and instruction focused on compliance became standard in schools because they were supposed to produce orderly industrial workers. Modern schools still have such structures to a large extent.
What has happened? The Twin Cities educational complex got trapped. The problem is not with children’s intellectual ability, creativity, or culture in Minneapolis and St. Paul. No, the real problem lies in the fact that many educational systems have not changed their industrial-era approach to schools while claiming to prepare the younger generation for a drastically different future. Schools still focus on compliance, attendance, and superficial graduation rates. How many students are actually ready for university, a professional career, entrepreneurship, civic engagement, and independent thinking?
Unfortunately, the Twin Cities educational complex tends to speak about equity while reproducing systems that are highly discriminatory. Minnesota ranks in the top ten states in terms of general educational performance; at the same time, this state maintains one of the worst racial achievement gaps. Why? Because it is a structure.
It will take more than another diversity committee, a strategic plan, and a motivational slogan like “All Children Learning” to improve the Twin Cities’ educational complex. The region has learned how to make educational symbols and slogans; what it needs now is systemic alignment.
To change education in the Twin Cities in favor of students in PK–12, it is necessary to make a paradigm shift. Firstly, schools need to see communication as an infrastructure element rather than as a public relations tool. Parents, teachers, kids, and communities need to know their roles, responsibilities, goals, and ways to succeed. Instability leads to unstable schools.
Schools should move beyond personalities and charismatic leaders and focus on structural integrity. Instead of searching for a “heroic leader,” it is necessary to evaluate organizational coherence first. Good schools will last and prosper not because of a strong administrator but due to the alignment of governance, operations, instruction, staffing, and the community.
It is crucial to connect education to the child’s identity and purpose in life. Students from historically marginalized groups – Black, Indigenous, immigrant, multilingual, and neurodiverse students – need to be exposed to an environment where they can affirm their identities while striving to be intellectually competitive and knowledgeable. When educational systems focus only on affirmation, they become symbolic. When they emphasize rigor without cultural knowledge, they drive kids away. Only schools with both qualities can survive (Ladson-Billings, 1995).
Finally, Minnesota must address its structural inequities. Schools working with historically oppressed populations tend to function in situations characterized by unstable resources, high turnover, facility instability, and excessive pressure from accountability. The problem of equity should no longer remain on a rhetorical level; resource equity needs to become an infrastructure element in the Twin Cities educational complex.
Education in Minnesota must be redefined. The primary goal of schooling should not be the efficient movement of kids across systems but the creation of literate, intellectual, competent, ethical, and self-sufficient individuals able to shape society rather than survive in it.
The point is that the enslaved Africans tracing letters with wooden sticks in the dirt had already realized something that schools sometimes forget. It is not enough to teach kids how to read and write; education should provide them with freedom, literacy, empowerment, and identity affirmation.
Minnesota must learn from this and build systems worthy of the dedication of past generations.
Sources
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465
Gundaker, G. (2007). Hidden education among African Americans during slavery. Teachers College Record, 109(7), 1591–1612.
Library of Congress. (2022, August 16). Education in enslaved communities. Teaching with the Library of Congress.
Rury, J. L. (2016). Education and social change: Themes in the history of American schooling (5th ed.). Routledge.
Williams, H. A. (2005). Self-taught: African American education in slavery and freedom. University of North Carolina Press.
Societies’ elites are ok with the public school system turning into a mix of a mental institution and daycare. I think we are stuck in a way of thinking from the 50’s to maybe the early 2000’s where America needed a highly educated and STEM fluent work force, society and business partnered to upgrade education to produce these needed workers in the quantities required. I remember IBM paying for an establishing a computer lab in my middle school for example.
It is 2026, everyone is trying to educate AI not humans. There is no ROI in educating a human any longer, especially one of lower than average intelligence or skills. It actually bennefits the system to fail all these children because it makes military recruiting easier and also maybe they can be funneled into a private prison. The jobs requiring smart children are over seas now or AI will do them.
This is why there will be no serious effort to turn this around, in fact the money incentive are actually to make this situation worse so that everyone needs AI even more since humans can no longer function correctly. Eventually teachers themselves will be replaced with AI and discipline achieved through automated shock or pepper spray drones. This is all written in the stars. Get right with god.
Don, Thanks for another good article in your series. One line stood out to me – one you probably didn’t expect would be central to your arguments, and perhaps it’s not..
“…schools need to see communication as an infrastructure element rather than as a public relations tool.”
You’re too young to remember when public schools first began to communicate on a regular basis with their students’ parents, aside from the ol’ in-person “parent-teacher conference”. At 70, I’m not too young to remember. Every change in the communication dynamic was enabled by technology. In my elementary school years, is was the mimeograph machine (look it up!). Then the photocopier (which at least meant that the school newsletter, sent home with a child, no longer had a noticeable smell…!). Then, e-mail. Then, of course, the internet and websites.
You’re the Ed School Ph.D. student, not me, so you’d be more likely to know when a more important transition occurred – the transition *from* some form of publication directed at parents that was employed to make them aware of what was going on (facts) at the school; *to* communication specifically designed to influence *how parents would think about* whatever inconvenient truth(s) could not be hidden if one were to keep communicating at all. The “newsletter” as Public Relations Tool. I know it happened after I graduated High School (1973), but before my daughter entered middle school (1991).
One thing parents can do to protect themselves against this practice is to be very mindful about reading everything the school and school district provides them, both what it “pushes” to them, AND what it just makes available to those who look (websites, etc.) and ask, as one is reading, “Am I being told factually what is happening, or am I being “sold” a perspective on what I should think about it?” As the P.R. industry has continued to develop (also a “within my lifetime” thing…) it has become harder and harder to do this. The techniques employed can be pretty sophisticated,, and the practitioners are ever-more-talented. But at least trying to “see through it all” has long since become an important parental duty.
Unions, especially teachers’ unions today, are political sanctuaries for groupthink (IMO).
How about a *real* experiment? If parents should be involved, “industrial” training ended, and learning standards raised, why not abolish public schools altogether? Let municipalities establish and fund local schools, hiring non-union teachers, while reducing the athletics budget to $0? State funding to be apportioned according to school age population, period.
This is not intended as satire.
It would work. The irony of the situation is that the people at the very top want to stay at the very top. To change an educational system into a highly functional and beneficial one would cause a collapse of current systems (Twin Cities-specific).
So true. But we need to think about which ‘systems’ are really necessary. When government is willing to fund alternatives to what it is providing–e.g., vouchers– we have a problem. By the way, a real experiment would apply to all existing schools, including charters and any denominational seeking public $ for anything.
Parents need to take part in their children’s education, both parents. We also have to get rid of DEI and teach reading,writing and math and also some basic skills such as managing money and how to obtain a good credit rating. The teachers union also needs to be abolished, public unions just don’t work. Also social media needs to be monitored by parents and teachers. Kids need to be allowed to be kids in an ever changing society.