Third Major Communication to MPS School Board
If the Minneapolis Public Schools as an administrative and academic entity is ever going to transform itself into a model centralized school district, decision makers at the district must approach the service of students from economically challenged circumstances in a fundamentally different way.
The academic and personal relationships that I have forged with young people and families of North Minneapolis via my numerous roles in the New Salem Educational Initiative have transformed the lives of those I have been fortunate to meet and know and love. Those seriously interested in educating the children of the very poor should read carefully the following account of a single Saturday in the life of the New Salem Educational Initiative--- from which there is much that can be extrapolated for application by the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The names used in the account given below are data privacy pseudonyms.
A Saturday in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative
Part One: 9:00 AM
Ginger Taylor-Myers splits time among three different residences in North Minneapolis. Her maternal grandmother lives on 6th Street North not far from the intersection of West Broadway and Lyndale Avenue North. Her father lives on Thomas Avenue North, a block southwest from the intersection of 26th Avenue North and West Broadway. From either of those residences, either Russell Wilson or Tom Brady could throw a football to a waiting receiver positioned in front of the Minneapolis Public School administrative building at 1250 West Broadway. Ginger’s Mom lives at a location that would provide Russell and Tom more of a challenge, inasmuch as she lives on Aldrich Avenue North in far North Minneapolis; the two quarterbacks might prefer to station their receivers at Jenny Lind K-5 school.
Ginger was at her dad’s house on this particular Saturday in January 2015. She had company, a friend I’ll dub Monica Freeman, also a Grade 5 student at Jenny Lind. I have known Ginger since she was two years old, and she has been a participant in the New Salem Educational Initiative since she was in Grade K. From the time that Ginger was a toddler, living at the time exclusively at grammy’s, I would pick her up, swing her around, and begin to teach her informally by speaking to her with a subtly sophisticated vocabulary and running additive and subtractive exercises by her on my fingers. She loved all of this and was proverbially chomping at the proverbial bit to start the program by the time she reached kindergarten.
Ginger asked me on that Saturday morning if Monica could come along, and I said that she could--- but would have to study separately since Ginger and her cousin Barnard would be continuing their reading of Macbeth. I have also known Barnard Williams, who lives at the 6th Street North address of grammy, since he arrived in the world, and he, too, enrolled in Grade K. He began reading Shakespearean literature with me when he was in Grade 6 at Olson Middle School, and he is now on his fifth work of the Bard: He previously read King Lear, Twelfth Night, Othello, and Hamlet.
Ginger first read Shakespeare with me as a Grade 4 student: She read Hamlet as a Grade 4 student, played the part of Osric in my compressed version of the play (all original language, emphasizing the most important scenes in a thirty-minute presentation) at our June 2014 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, and traveled with me to Winona for the Great River Shakespeare Festival to witness a first-rate take on the dilemmas of the Prince of Denmark. Barnard has already accompanied me to Winona on three occasions (for performances of King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet; he was in the audience at the Guthrie with me for Othello). He has played the part of Kent in King Lear and the part of Laertes in Hamlet in my compressed versions at the banquet.
So Ginger and Barnard, whom I have known for many years, are traveling high in the academic cosmos; Monica, whom I just met on this particular Saturday, is doing fine as a conventional Grade 5 student but not anywhere close to being able to sit and read with the same alacrity as Ginger and Barnard. So I told Monica that I was so happy to have her along and would have some important assignment for her once we arrived at the church (New Salem Missionary Baptist Church at 2507 Bryant Avenue North, where I do all of my academic instruction with students).
As we made our way from the 26th and Broadway intersection to pick up Barnard at the 6th Street North abode, I quizzed Monica on multiplication tables that Ginger and Barnard have known since Grade 2. Monica, in Grade 5, came up short on the products (multiples) of at least five sets of factors, so I knew that this was where we would start once we got to the church. Barnard piled into the car at about 9:15 AM, and over to the church and down to our basement classrooms we went.
Monica sat in one room, going in logical sequence through the problematic multiplication factors, quickly getting those under control. We then successively practiced double and triple-digit multiplication, division by two digit-numbers into dividends of three digits, decimal application of these skills, and addition and subtraction of fractions and mixed numbers--- all skills concerning which Monica felt insecure but in performing with me she emerged confident after our two hours together. She asked if she could participate in my program, and I said that I was mighty full but that I’d make space for her. She wrote out her mom’s phone number and is now attending weekly.
My work with Monica was all done as quick, intensive check-ins as I read Macbeth in another room with Ginger and Barnard. The three of us were at the point in the play at which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are implementing their plan of assassination on poor King Duncan and setting the guards whom the inebriate up for a fall. This is all engaging stuff, and at the end of the two hours these two young people, whom I love as if they were my own, and with whom I indeed interact as I did with my son Ryan Davison-Reed when he was at the K-12 stage---- were disappointed that we had to leave after two hours, even though we were headed to Taco Bell for lunch.
Part Two: 11:30 AM
We swung by 6th Street North again and picked up Barnard’s brother and sister, Natalie and
Desmond. The six of us went to Taco Bell for lunch, at which I sat and worked with Natalie (Grade 1, Jenny Lind) doing mental math and writing out vocabulary items on my yellow pad. Natalie counts backwards from 20 with great skill and can apply that skill to higher starting points in subtractive exercises; similarly, she can count to a hundred and beyond, so she can perform the mental addition exercises that I give her adroitly. Natalie, for example, added 7 to 45 with the correct outcome of 52; and she took 8 away from 72 to get 64--- all in her head.
I sketched out the words freedom, pause, family, mother, father, residence, compare, grandmother, and wisdom for her on my yellow pad--- and before we departed what I call “Taco Shells” (my malapropism for Taco Bell, to mess with the kids’ brains and bring a smile to their faces as they correct me), Natalie had learned definitions as necessary and spelled all of these words correctly.
I then drove Barnard and Natalie to grammy’s; I took Monica and Ginger to the latter’s dad’s house.
“Nice to meet you today, Monica,” I told my new student. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Nice to meet you, too, Gary,” she returned. “Don’t forget to call my mom.”
“Hey, wassamatta, you think the ol’ man can’t remember nothin’?” I joked.
“I just meant---“
“Bye-bye, Snodgrass,” I said to Ginger, using the silly name with which I’ve addressed her since she was knee-high to a tadpole.
“Good-bye, Harry,” Ginger said with her own chiding appellation.
I acted like I was going to get out of the car to chase the girls and they both squealed with delight as they ran to dad’s front door and I drove away with Desmond still in the car.
Part Three: 12:30 PM
I’ve known Desmond since he was an approximation of humanity in his momma’s womb. We went down to the same room at which I had read Macbeth with Ginger and Barnard. I ran him through his multiplication tables, on which he started in Grade 1 and mostly mastered in Grade 2. He’s still perfecting the inevitably most difficult factorial sets to remember: 6 x 7, 7 x 7, 7 x 8, and 8 x 8. By the time that we departed that day, Desmond had these under control. He is among only five students in his Grade 3 class who has all of the multiplication tables through nine committed to memory.
Desmond and I also read some lively stories that are part of the compilation put together by scholars and teachers working to produce What Your 3rd Grader Needs to Know: The Fundamentals of a Good Third-Grade Education under the editorship of E. D. Hirsch. We read “The People Could Fly,” “The White-Bone Demon,” and a selection from One Thousand Arabian Nights ("Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”) . We then did some explicit vocabulary work form those selections, including words as follows: staggered , overseer, snarled, scroll, monk, demons, feast, niche, wondrous, and precious. Before I ran Desmond to grammy’s at 2:00 PM he could define and spell all of these words.
Part Four: 2:30 PM
I went back over to the church for a few moments to put some materials in order and then went by three different homes to check on matters of concern to the families of my students. One child had been acting out in his Grade 1 class at Nellie Stone Johnson; another (Grade 7 at Northeast had gotten in a fight that week and been suspended for three days. These two students are relatively new to my program; these sorts of difficulties tend to abate upon several years of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, and they almost never start for children whose families I have known for a long time.
My third visit came when I went over to the new residence of a family whose members I have known for a decade. The New Salem Educational Initiative participants are now Grade 9 and Grade 10 female students at North High School. The family is dysfunctional in the extreme and presents me with my gravest weekly challenges. North is the eighth school that these girls have attended in three years. Their Mom is chronically volatile, mercurial, and occasionally abusive. The Grade 10 student met a guy on Facebook who raped her, got away with it, and left her with emotional scars several depths below those she already had. I talked momma out of a diatribe-laced funk as I worked with the Grade 10 student on the introduction to an essay and led the Grade 9 student through the logical steps of an algebra problem of mid-level difficulty.
This latter family seemed less likely to cut each other’s throats as I headed over South to pick up a brother duo (Marco, Grade 5; and Mateo, Grade 7) and their cousin (Maria, Grade 7), all students at Folwell.
Part Five: 4:00 PM
Hispanic kids make up about 35% of an otherwise African American student contingent of participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Marco, Mateo, and Maria have familial roots to Mexico; their parents have periodic immigration issues and at times have had to leave the United States for as many as three months at a time. These three have participated in the New Salem Educational Initiative for four years each in the cases of Marco and Maria, a total of five years in the case of Mateo.
Maria is razor-sharp mentally but at times has been inattentive to homework. She fell far behind on assignments as a Grade 6 student, caught up during that academic year (2013-2014), and has mostly charted a better course during this academic year 2014-2015.
Marco is academically gifted but psychologically spacey and still bears separation anxieties due to a long absence by his mom when he was in Grade 2. But he is inevitably cheerful with me and a genuine mathematics whiz, having learned his multiplication tables with me during Grade 1, read Hamlet with me at Grade 4, and now proceeding to algebraic tasks conventionally learned at Grade 9 and now being introduced in Minneapolis Public Schools classrooms during grades 7 and (more intensively) at Grade 8.
Mateo is an interesting case of a student who entered my program at Grade 2, was lost in a residential netherworld wherein even I could not locate him (I maintain multiple phone numbers and generally know when the families of my students are moving), and then reemerged into the light of my universe in Grade 4. Mateo is not as intellectually gifted as younger brother Marco, and when he first reentered the program he had fallen two years below level of school enrollment in both math and reading. His confidence was at low ebb and his mood was frequently surly. But he came back around in good time and has been on an academic ascent ever since.
On this particular day, I guided Mateo and Maria through a mathematics homework assignment wherein they were asked to figure ratios from stated student population situations and from participant composition in various organizations. Both came in very confused but went out confident and smiling.
Marco had no homework and rose to every algebraic and geometric challenge I put before him. I also led him through a reading from a Barron’s ACT exam preparation manual, defining along the way words such as disposition, acquiescent, truculent, detachment (military unit), and raw-boned. Even enormously bright Hispanic and other immigrant kihuge English language vocabulary deficiencies that I have to be continually addressing through very aggressive acquisition efforts.
Marco, Mateo, and Maria were all smiles and frenetic action when I told the “church ghost--- Phil” to get off of Maria’s shoulders; The students beat me to the car by a full minute in their escape from the frightful spirit.
Part Six: 6:30 PM
About this time every Saturday I drive over to the apartment a block off Maryland Avenue, just east of I-35N in St. Paul., that houses two half-brothers, their mother (Evelyn), and her significant other (Marcel); the latter functions as a stepfather to the boys, Damon Peterson (Grade 6) and Terrill Baker (Grade K).
These are the only participants in my program who live in St. Paul. The students in the New Salem Educational Initiative live overwhelmingly in North Minneapolis, with a few Southsiders and a smattering of students who live in Northeast Minneapolis. How Damon and Terrill landed in St. Paul quite a story.
Terrill was just a babe in arms when Damon first entered my program at Grade 1. Evelyn and Marcel had just moved to Minneapolis from Southside Chicago, finding housing on Dupont Avenue, a block off Glenwood Avenue North in a venerable old section of the Northside that is long past its residential prime. Damon thrived in the program, overcoming a perceived speech impediment and numerous unfavorable teacher reports to gain solid academic footing by the end of his Grade 2 year. Evelyn was very attentive and enormously thankful for my help, always sharing information pertinent to grade reports and conferences at school.
But the apartment, shabby as it was, apparently became too expensive by the end of that academic year 2010-2011, and the family moved into a high-rise just off Olson Highway, not all that far on a trek northward from the Glenwood area residence.
There had always been a sort of reefer stench about Evelyn and Marcel’s apartment and personages. This condition seemed to intensify with the move to the high-rise. The apartment was soon cluttered with debris of various sorts. Evelyn and Marcel seemed less happy with each other. But Damon’s participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative continued almost every week, and he prospered as a Grade 3 student at Bryn Mawr K-5 next to Anwatin Middle School.
Then, as I returned from Dallas, Texas, in the late summer of 2012, following a visit with my then 90 year-old mother, the family had vamoosed from the high-rise. Evelyn’s cell phone number had changed, and Marcel’s seemed to be out of order due to unpaid bills. Four weeks went by as I sought leads to the family’s whereabouts. Then finally, as I was driving northward from Olson Highway close to Harvest Prep with Damon’s academic session mates one Saturday, Marcel came running up behind the car, waving his hands. He told me a story that included separation at the insistence of Evelyn, who had moved he knew not where.
Then, two Saturdays later, Evelyn called me on my cellphone from her own new phone. I got the address of her new apartment complex in far South Minneapolis, close to a Cub Foods just north of the Crosstown Highway. I connected with Damon, who had already fallen behind in school and was clearly suffering from the dislocations. He was acting out in school and not turning in assignments.
Then in the summer of 2013, Evelyn moved again. She was concerned that Damon might be separated from me again. I assured her that my relationships with students and families are forever. I began during the 2013-2014 academic year to drive over to St. Paul every Saturday evening about 6:30 or 7:00 PM. When I could, I took Damon over to New Salem to get him into a different physical environment and mental space. But my Saturdays eventually became so packed and the time so tight that we began conducting our academic sessions in the hallway outside the apartment. The apartment had too little furniture and was too messy and dimly lit.
Terrill clamored for entry and I allowed him to start formal academic sessions with me when he was a preschooler. He is now a Grade K student at Bruce Vento K-5 in St. Paul, thriving with the math and reading skills that would do an upper middle class student proud. Damon and I continue to work in that same hallway, sitting on the floor, back against the wall. He of the former speech impediment has mastered oratory full of eloquent Frederick Douglass flourishes. His most recent report card revealed all “A’s” but one. He bats not an eye at the challenges of algebraic equations that I place before him.
Prior to last June’s Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, I got a gloomy text message from Evelyn that confided that the family might not have bus fare to make it from St. Paul. I drove over to the apartment and slipped Marcel (the adult at home at the time) a twenty dollar bill before returning to the church and preparations for the banquet.
That night, Damon did his Frederick Douglass speech. Terrill showed the crowd that as a preschooler he could count backward from twenty. The boys beamed. Evelyn andTerrill fought back tears amid competition with broad smiles.
I wondered why I should be the one so blessed to spend my life this way.
Feb 5, 2015
On the Matter of the Search for a New Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent: Select Michael Goar, and Get on with What’s Important
Second Major Communication to MPS School Board
There are two important categories of consideration for the members of the Minneapolis Schools Board of Education to keep in mind as they articulate and implement a process for hiring a new superintendent: 1) the new superintendent should be absolutely committed to the three key programs of outgoing Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson: Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift; and 2) the school board should move as swiftly as possible to hire a superintendent dedicated to those programs, with the logical decision appearing to be that of hiring Michael Goar.
Hiring a New Superintendent Committed to Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift
Focused Instruction
Focused Instruction is the name given to the program articulated during the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson under which the leadership of the district is striving to bring a higher quality and more cohesive curriculum to students throughout the public schools.
For many years, consistency of curriculum in the Minneapolis Public Schools was lacking, particularly at the K-5 level. Students in a Grade 3 class at Jenny Lind, for example, might be working on projects focused on the family and community, with students reflecting on and perhaps writing about how their own families affected and were affected by the communities in which they lived. Students in a Grade 3 class at Green Central, quite by contrast, might be sharing ideas and seeking information about warfare, perhaps writing up their personal reflections about war, citing any family members who had served in a military capacity in Vietnam, the first Persian Gulf War, or more recent engagements in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The problem with this approach to education is that it lacks consistency and rigor. The topics identified by the teacher (perhaps in consultation with students) resonates with the misguided “constructivist” education-speak of education professors, who have failed our students so miserably. This approach to education has little respect for knowledge as incrementally, logically imparted information from teacher to student. Students whiling away time in the classroom of a teacher under the sway of constructivism dive into projects without the proper background.
In the project cited above for Jenny Lind, the student is unlikely in the extreme to have much knowledge of the family as an anthropological form and the various ethnic contexts in which family life unfolds. Children from immigrant families may have little knowledge of how family life in their country of origin differs from situations into which they have been thrust in the United States; or how their particular community of immigrant families differs from other native and immigrant communities in the United States. Children of African American families may have little information on the impact of slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, or the dislocations of the Northern Migration for families in the course of time and in the present.
In the project identified for Grade 3 Green Central students, students are unlikely in the extreme to have studied particular wars in any depth, to have any real sense of the causes of the Vietnam War or the first Persian Gulf conflict; they almost certainly could not convey any comprehension of British and Russian involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan or the internecine struggles that have made for turbulent history in those countries, those regions.
This failure to provide strong bases of information falls most heavily on children from economically challenged families, the formal education of which has typically not reached beyond high school and may not have included even high school graduation. Children from such families may still learn a great deal about life from hardworking and dedicated parents, who have had experiences from which middle class and upper middle class parents could learn. But in terms of academic matters, children of impoverished parents lacking formal education are not likely to get as much information and sophisticated vocabulary as a function of family conversation as do the offspring of more affluent, better educated parents.
Children of impoverished families also tend to follow their parents’ search for affordable Section 8 housing, often in a quest that may find them at three or four different residences in the space of a school year. This often involves transfers from one school to another, or among multiple schools within the academic year. When there is so much variance in what is taught from classroom to classroom, residentially mobile students are forever confused, ever in an educational netherworld, wandering from classroom to classroom like odd parts to decrepit machines, never able to fit and with tremendous deficits in knowledge and skill sets.
Focused Instruction addresses the unacceptable situation that has abided for decades in our K-12 schools, most notably during the crucial K-5 years. According to Focused instruction, students in one Grade 3 classroom studying meteorological change from season to season will be learning the same body of information as those in another classroom, at any school. A student in one Grade 4 classroom studying the conflict between the British government and the American colonists in the run-up to the American Revolution will find students in another classroom engaged in the same course of study at about the same time, should she or he have to switch schools. And a Grade 6 student who must move from one school to another will not have to wonder what students at another school will be studying, because she or he will know that (for example) proportions and ratios are the abiding topics at that time of year from school to school.
Initiating Focused Instruction was one of the major achievements of leaders in the Minneapolis Public Schools during the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson. Focused Instruction proceeds according to sound principles of educational excellence and equity. The next superintendent must embrace, implement, and continue to improve curriculum under the aegis of Focused Instruction.
High Priority Schools
For many decades, students from economically challenged families have been concentrated at certain schools. The academic skills of students at these schools have consistently languished below grade level. Currently the schools identified as High Priority Schools include Bethune, Jenny Lind, Sheridan, Green Central, Lucy Laney, Green Central, Hall International, Hmong International Academy, Broadway Arts and Technology, and North Senior High.
Administrators of the Minneapolis Public Schools have endeavored to gain greater flexibility in the hiring and retention of excellent teachers to preside in the classrooms of students at High Priority Schools. Over time, the effort will be to staff every classroom in High Priority Schools with teachers of proven capability to move students with math and reading skill deficits toward grade level performance in those key skill areas. While recognizing that pedagogical skill matched with many years’ experience can produce a powerful teacher talent, and making an effort to attract and retain teachers both excellent and experienced, decision makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools will consider pedagogical skill paramount, and teacher quality will trump the sort of experience represented by tenure alone.
Efforts to address the skill deficits of students in High Priority Schools have resulted in more in-class and after school time focus on fundamental math and skill development. These efforts must be intensified in the days to come, sooner rather than later. Much more needs to be done to train tutors, some of them college students and qualified elder volunteers, some of them professional teachers and aides, to instruct students directly in those skills, particularly those in math and reading, languishing below grade level.
Only when a student has mastered mathematics at the prevailing grade level can she or he look toward high achievement in math, natural science, and technical subjects in the years to come. Only when a student is able to comprehend reading material pertinent to the key subject areas of language arts, history, economics, natural science, math, and the fine arts will she or he be capable of receiving an excellent liberal arts education from teachers who themselves will increasingly possess elevated levels of knowledge and skill. The next superintendent must fully embrace the designation of High Priority Schools and oversee efforts to bring every single student within the broad range of normal intelligence and above up to grade appropriate achievement in mathematics and reading.
The fundamental issue of equity is manifest in the concept of High Priority Schools, a program from the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson that must be continued.
Shift
Central school district bureaucracies are notoriously overstaffed. My own estimate is that central office staff could be reduced to 25% of current levels without any negative outcomes as to administrative functioning or student performance. Over time, the emphasis in resources expended on positions in the central office now at 1250 West Broadway should shift toward positions in school buildings, and particularly in the classrooms where students actually receive their education.
If key administrators in the central school district bureaucracy were to establish overall curriculum and policy to be implemented consistently across the school district, then place responsibility for implementation in the hands of those at the school building level, drastic reductions could be made in central office staff. Principals would be held responsible for teacher performance. Teachers would be held responsible for student performance. Family and community outreach workers would be responsible for establishing relationships with the families of students. Counselors and health workers would administer to student mental and physical health. Young people would be much better served by a school district designed to focus clearly and relentlessly on imparting a consistently excellent education, and therefore on attracting, retaining, and compensating excellent professionals who actually interact with students.
The idea of moving resources closer to the students themselves is inherent in the Shift program, also articulated during the tenure of Bernadeia Johnson. The evidence for implementation in this program is not strong, though. There has been some movement of resources from affluent schools of the southwestern neighborhoods of the Minneapolis Public Schools to schools populated by students from economically challenged families, and by implication from schools wherein student academic performance is high by the standards of the district to those schools where academic performance lags. But key additions have been made to central office staff during the Bernadeia Johnson tenure. Decision makers at the district created Michael Goar’s position of Chief Executive Officer. They increased the number of Associate Superintendents. The Office of Black Male Student Achievement was added, with the positions of Director Michael Walker and staff coming onto the payroll. And so it has gone.
So, very soon, as the Minneapolis Public Schools implements its plan to dramatically increase student achievement by the year 2020, much work needs need to be done to realize the promise of the Shift program. By moving resources to the school building level, holding professionals at that level responsible for raising student achievement, a greatly reduced central administrative contingent could increase compensation for those actually working directly with young people, including additional tutors for bringing academically faltering students up to grade level.
Carefully but Quickly Hiring a New Superintendent
My West Texas pappy was an ol’ farm boy who rose to a high-level of executive management for a previous incarnation of Southwestern Bell Telephone Company on the strength of his ability to make good decisions. He was fond of telling me, “A decision maker needs to gather all of the available information quickly and completely. Then that person needs to study that information with great care. And when that has been done, it’s time to make the decision, because you’re not likely to know any more later than you do at that point, and you can be just as right or wrong later as you can at an earlier stage--- so at a certain point it’s time to quit hemming and hawing and just take responsibility for the decision.”
This is what the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education now need to do: Make a decision on a new superintendent. Currently the board is considering a recommendation from the Human Resources Department to hire outside talent researchers and recruiters to conduct the superintendent search. There is another option to have the Human Resources Department itself do the job. And there is a third option, intermediate between the other two, that would involve hiring an outside firm to make more limited recommendations from a smaller pool of candidates, to the Human Resources Department and to the members of the Board of Education.
The tendency of the central school district to hire outside consultants grates on me. One would think that with a $720 million budget, a central office building staff of 651 people, and a department for every function of which the human brain is likely to conceive, there would be the wherewithal to make key decisions based on the research and decision-making prowess of the staff already being paid, many overly generously.
In this case, former CEO Michael Goar appears to have the inside track. In an interview with Star Tribune reporter Alejandra Matos, Goar expressed strong support for the kinds of initiatives necessary to fulfill the potential of High Priority Schools and Shift. He appears to be intent on pushing forward with the key programs of the Bernadeia Johnson administration of which he was a part. Goar is a person of sound administrative experience, having held two other posts in the Minneapolis Public Schools, as well as positions in Memphis and Boston. Complaints that he does not have classroom teaching experience are inconsequential. Administrators administrate and teachers teach. The main thing is that he knows that he must accelerate the initiatives begun under Bernadeia Johnson and that he has the spine to persevere in the likely event of opposition from those bent on the status quo.
Those being paid at the Human Resources Department of the Minneapolis Public Schools need to take responsibility for questioning Goar aggressively on his apparent enthusiasm for continuing the course for change that will be necessary to realize the goals of the 2020 plan. School board members need to do their own homework and consider the best evidence available to them. Then they should make a decision. They can consider other applicants as they wish and as legally obligatory. But Goar’s familiarity with the policies and inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools are legitimate considerations that will work to his advantage, given his viable administrative experience.
Goar is the likely candidate to emerge at the end of the process, whether hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on outside consultants or not. So why wait? The amount of talent available from the universe of administrators trained in departments, colleges, and schools of education is in any case not great. The notion that there is talent to match the territorial splendor of this vast nation is ill-considered. Central school district superintendents who get caught up in some sort of malfeasance, false claims, or political controversy are replete in the sordid history of the search for the position atop the institution charged with the responsibility of educating our precious children. The reality is that we should strive for someone who will first do no harm during the three to five years typical for the post.
So check him out. Consider all of the evidence in Goar’s case, and in the cases of other applicants as necessary. Then make the decision.
As my West Texas pappy would tell everyone concerned, the decision is not likely to be any better many months from now than it will be in the much nearer future.
There are two important categories of consideration for the members of the Minneapolis Schools Board of Education to keep in mind as they articulate and implement a process for hiring a new superintendent: 1) the new superintendent should be absolutely committed to the three key programs of outgoing Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson: Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift; and 2) the school board should move as swiftly as possible to hire a superintendent dedicated to those programs, with the logical decision appearing to be that of hiring Michael Goar.
Hiring a New Superintendent Committed to Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, and Shift
Focused Instruction
Focused Instruction is the name given to the program articulated during the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson under which the leadership of the district is striving to bring a higher quality and more cohesive curriculum to students throughout the public schools.
For many years, consistency of curriculum in the Minneapolis Public Schools was lacking, particularly at the K-5 level. Students in a Grade 3 class at Jenny Lind, for example, might be working on projects focused on the family and community, with students reflecting on and perhaps writing about how their own families affected and were affected by the communities in which they lived. Students in a Grade 3 class at Green Central, quite by contrast, might be sharing ideas and seeking information about warfare, perhaps writing up their personal reflections about war, citing any family members who had served in a military capacity in Vietnam, the first Persian Gulf War, or more recent engagements in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The problem with this approach to education is that it lacks consistency and rigor. The topics identified by the teacher (perhaps in consultation with students) resonates with the misguided “constructivist” education-speak of education professors, who have failed our students so miserably. This approach to education has little respect for knowledge as incrementally, logically imparted information from teacher to student. Students whiling away time in the classroom of a teacher under the sway of constructivism dive into projects without the proper background.
In the project cited above for Jenny Lind, the student is unlikely in the extreme to have much knowledge of the family as an anthropological form and the various ethnic contexts in which family life unfolds. Children from immigrant families may have little knowledge of how family life in their country of origin differs from situations into which they have been thrust in the United States; or how their particular community of immigrant families differs from other native and immigrant communities in the United States. Children of African American families may have little information on the impact of slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, or the dislocations of the Northern Migration for families in the course of time and in the present.
In the project identified for Grade 3 Green Central students, students are unlikely in the extreme to have studied particular wars in any depth, to have any real sense of the causes of the Vietnam War or the first Persian Gulf conflict; they almost certainly could not convey any comprehension of British and Russian involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan or the internecine struggles that have made for turbulent history in those countries, those regions.
This failure to provide strong bases of information falls most heavily on children from economically challenged families, the formal education of which has typically not reached beyond high school and may not have included even high school graduation. Children from such families may still learn a great deal about life from hardworking and dedicated parents, who have had experiences from which middle class and upper middle class parents could learn. But in terms of academic matters, children of impoverished parents lacking formal education are not likely to get as much information and sophisticated vocabulary as a function of family conversation as do the offspring of more affluent, better educated parents.
Children of impoverished families also tend to follow their parents’ search for affordable Section 8 housing, often in a quest that may find them at three or four different residences in the space of a school year. This often involves transfers from one school to another, or among multiple schools within the academic year. When there is so much variance in what is taught from classroom to classroom, residentially mobile students are forever confused, ever in an educational netherworld, wandering from classroom to classroom like odd parts to decrepit machines, never able to fit and with tremendous deficits in knowledge and skill sets.
Focused Instruction addresses the unacceptable situation that has abided for decades in our K-12 schools, most notably during the crucial K-5 years. According to Focused instruction, students in one Grade 3 classroom studying meteorological change from season to season will be learning the same body of information as those in another classroom, at any school. A student in one Grade 4 classroom studying the conflict between the British government and the American colonists in the run-up to the American Revolution will find students in another classroom engaged in the same course of study at about the same time, should she or he have to switch schools. And a Grade 6 student who must move from one school to another will not have to wonder what students at another school will be studying, because she or he will know that (for example) proportions and ratios are the abiding topics at that time of year from school to school.
Initiating Focused Instruction was one of the major achievements of leaders in the Minneapolis Public Schools during the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson. Focused Instruction proceeds according to sound principles of educational excellence and equity. The next superintendent must embrace, implement, and continue to improve curriculum under the aegis of Focused Instruction.
High Priority Schools
For many decades, students from economically challenged families have been concentrated at certain schools. The academic skills of students at these schools have consistently languished below grade level. Currently the schools identified as High Priority Schools include Bethune, Jenny Lind, Sheridan, Green Central, Lucy Laney, Green Central, Hall International, Hmong International Academy, Broadway Arts and Technology, and North Senior High.
Administrators of the Minneapolis Public Schools have endeavored to gain greater flexibility in the hiring and retention of excellent teachers to preside in the classrooms of students at High Priority Schools. Over time, the effort will be to staff every classroom in High Priority Schools with teachers of proven capability to move students with math and reading skill deficits toward grade level performance in those key skill areas. While recognizing that pedagogical skill matched with many years’ experience can produce a powerful teacher talent, and making an effort to attract and retain teachers both excellent and experienced, decision makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools will consider pedagogical skill paramount, and teacher quality will trump the sort of experience represented by tenure alone.
Efforts to address the skill deficits of students in High Priority Schools have resulted in more in-class and after school time focus on fundamental math and skill development. These efforts must be intensified in the days to come, sooner rather than later. Much more needs to be done to train tutors, some of them college students and qualified elder volunteers, some of them professional teachers and aides, to instruct students directly in those skills, particularly those in math and reading, languishing below grade level.
Only when a student has mastered mathematics at the prevailing grade level can she or he look toward high achievement in math, natural science, and technical subjects in the years to come. Only when a student is able to comprehend reading material pertinent to the key subject areas of language arts, history, economics, natural science, math, and the fine arts will she or he be capable of receiving an excellent liberal arts education from teachers who themselves will increasingly possess elevated levels of knowledge and skill. The next superintendent must fully embrace the designation of High Priority Schools and oversee efforts to bring every single student within the broad range of normal intelligence and above up to grade appropriate achievement in mathematics and reading.
The fundamental issue of equity is manifest in the concept of High Priority Schools, a program from the tenure of Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson that must be continued.
Shift
Central school district bureaucracies are notoriously overstaffed. My own estimate is that central office staff could be reduced to 25% of current levels without any negative outcomes as to administrative functioning or student performance. Over time, the emphasis in resources expended on positions in the central office now at 1250 West Broadway should shift toward positions in school buildings, and particularly in the classrooms where students actually receive their education.
If key administrators in the central school district bureaucracy were to establish overall curriculum and policy to be implemented consistently across the school district, then place responsibility for implementation in the hands of those at the school building level, drastic reductions could be made in central office staff. Principals would be held responsible for teacher performance. Teachers would be held responsible for student performance. Family and community outreach workers would be responsible for establishing relationships with the families of students. Counselors and health workers would administer to student mental and physical health. Young people would be much better served by a school district designed to focus clearly and relentlessly on imparting a consistently excellent education, and therefore on attracting, retaining, and compensating excellent professionals who actually interact with students.
The idea of moving resources closer to the students themselves is inherent in the Shift program, also articulated during the tenure of Bernadeia Johnson. The evidence for implementation in this program is not strong, though. There has been some movement of resources from affluent schools of the southwestern neighborhoods of the Minneapolis Public Schools to schools populated by students from economically challenged families, and by implication from schools wherein student academic performance is high by the standards of the district to those schools where academic performance lags. But key additions have been made to central office staff during the Bernadeia Johnson tenure. Decision makers at the district created Michael Goar’s position of Chief Executive Officer. They increased the number of Associate Superintendents. The Office of Black Male Student Achievement was added, with the positions of Director Michael Walker and staff coming onto the payroll. And so it has gone.
So, very soon, as the Minneapolis Public Schools implements its plan to dramatically increase student achievement by the year 2020, much work needs need to be done to realize the promise of the Shift program. By moving resources to the school building level, holding professionals at that level responsible for raising student achievement, a greatly reduced central administrative contingent could increase compensation for those actually working directly with young people, including additional tutors for bringing academically faltering students up to grade level.
Carefully but Quickly Hiring a New Superintendent
My West Texas pappy was an ol’ farm boy who rose to a high-level of executive management for a previous incarnation of Southwestern Bell Telephone Company on the strength of his ability to make good decisions. He was fond of telling me, “A decision maker needs to gather all of the available information quickly and completely. Then that person needs to study that information with great care. And when that has been done, it’s time to make the decision, because you’re not likely to know any more later than you do at that point, and you can be just as right or wrong later as you can at an earlier stage--- so at a certain point it’s time to quit hemming and hawing and just take responsibility for the decision.”
This is what the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education now need to do: Make a decision on a new superintendent. Currently the board is considering a recommendation from the Human Resources Department to hire outside talent researchers and recruiters to conduct the superintendent search. There is another option to have the Human Resources Department itself do the job. And there is a third option, intermediate between the other two, that would involve hiring an outside firm to make more limited recommendations from a smaller pool of candidates, to the Human Resources Department and to the members of the Board of Education.
The tendency of the central school district to hire outside consultants grates on me. One would think that with a $720 million budget, a central office building staff of 651 people, and a department for every function of which the human brain is likely to conceive, there would be the wherewithal to make key decisions based on the research and decision-making prowess of the staff already being paid, many overly generously.
In this case, former CEO Michael Goar appears to have the inside track. In an interview with Star Tribune reporter Alejandra Matos, Goar expressed strong support for the kinds of initiatives necessary to fulfill the potential of High Priority Schools and Shift. He appears to be intent on pushing forward with the key programs of the Bernadeia Johnson administration of which he was a part. Goar is a person of sound administrative experience, having held two other posts in the Minneapolis Public Schools, as well as positions in Memphis and Boston. Complaints that he does not have classroom teaching experience are inconsequential. Administrators administrate and teachers teach. The main thing is that he knows that he must accelerate the initiatives begun under Bernadeia Johnson and that he has the spine to persevere in the likely event of opposition from those bent on the status quo.
Those being paid at the Human Resources Department of the Minneapolis Public Schools need to take responsibility for questioning Goar aggressively on his apparent enthusiasm for continuing the course for change that will be necessary to realize the goals of the 2020 plan. School board members need to do their own homework and consider the best evidence available to them. Then they should make a decision. They can consider other applicants as they wish and as legally obligatory. But Goar’s familiarity with the policies and inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools are legitimate considerations that will work to his advantage, given his viable administrative experience.
Goar is the likely candidate to emerge at the end of the process, whether hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on outside consultants or not. So why wait? The amount of talent available from the universe of administrators trained in departments, colleges, and schools of education is in any case not great. The notion that there is talent to match the territorial splendor of this vast nation is ill-considered. Central school district superintendents who get caught up in some sort of malfeasance, false claims, or political controversy are replete in the sordid history of the search for the position atop the institution charged with the responsibility of educating our precious children. The reality is that we should strive for someone who will first do no harm during the three to five years typical for the post.
So check him out. Consider all of the evidence in Goar’s case, and in the cases of other applicants as necessary. Then make the decision.
As my West Texas pappy would tell everyone concerned, the decision is not likely to be any better many months from now than it will be in the much nearer future.
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