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.