After a half-year now of observing all school board meetings and attending numerous other gatherings sponsored by the Minneapolis Public Schools, numerous ideas and responses flow from the mental processes stimulated by what I have witnessed. If the school district were a runner trying to move quickly toward a finishing line ahead, that person would need to get much leaner, stronger, and humbler.
Getting Leaner
The bureaucracy of the Minneapolis Public Schools is bloated--- with personnel but also carrying a surfeit of ideational blubber that weighs heavily and distracts decision makers as an ongoing matter. Every department suffers from excess staff members, many of whom do little but stare at a computer most of the day or monitor schedules and keep the calendars of more highly paid staff who fancy themselves important and busy as they rush off to attend meetings that do nothing to advance the educational prospects of students.
Within the last few months, beginning in those immediately prior to the start of the 2014-2015 academic year, a new associate superintendent position was added, in addition to a kind of supra-associate superintendent position the occupant of which monitors other associate superintendents. And a position was created to head the new Office of Black Male Achievement, as decision makers opted for the sort of bureaucratic response to a very real problem that proves to be pointless as an answer and costly as a budgetary item.
There is a sluggish inefficiency that pervades the building at 1250 West Broadway that houses the Minneapolis Public Schools. Reimagined metaphorically as a runner, the school district needs to jettison excess weight, remove impediments to a clear road ahead, and get motivated for moving swiftly toward the finishing line.
Getting Stronger
Investigation of the bureaucratic bloat of the Minneapolis Public Schools exposes the fact that weight does not mean strength. The central school district carries a great deal of excess fat that saps rather than adds to vigor for the most important task--- the impartation of excellent education to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors. A strong runner moves swiftly and efficiently toward the line that will indicate completion of the race; the body is leanly muscular and moves without excess pumping of arms and in the absence of other distracting motions. Similarly, decision makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools should move forcefully to eliminate a high percentage of the jobs currently having merely titular impact on the real task of educating our children.
These decision makers need to take responsibility for setting policy with regard to curriculum and teacher quality and then communicate clearly and forcefully to building principals that they must implement these policies and will be held responsible for results. Building principals in turn should communicate matters of curricular content that teachers should deliver to students, rewarding teachers who deliver results and retraining those teachers who fail to deliver; in the latter case, should retraining prove insufficient to produce the desired student outcomes, the inadequate teacher should be encouraged to seek employment in a field more consonant with her or his skills and dedication.
Such an approach would establish a very different model to be followed by decision makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools. There is a great deal of verbiage that flows at school board meetings and other gatherings wherein school district policy is discussed, suggesting that there should be a move toward empowerment of those at the school building level. This sort of rhetoric may be seen in the decision to create Community Partnership Schools. These schools will follow a pseudo-charter school approach, in which management flexibility theoretically is extended in exchange for academic accountability. But the results for which accountability is to be held have been at best suggested in shadowy formulation, with only the implication that math and reading scores should rise for all students and that academic outcomes for students of color and those from challenged economic and familial circumstances should move much closer to the rising standard for all.
These latter results would be felicitous but insufficient. All students at all schools of the Minneapolis Public Schools deserve immediate, energetic attention to their academic needs. These needs most certainly do include grade level skills in math and reading but also the stores of knowledge that is their rightful inheritance as members of the human family. The key responsibility for identifying the knowledge sets that should be delivered in grade-by-grade sequence throughout the K-12 years should reside with decision makers in the central administration of the Minneapolis Public Schools. The need to impart these knowledge sets should be communicated to building principals. Building Principals and teachers should be held responsible for delivery of a well-defined, rich liberal arts curriculum including most especially knowledge from the realms of math, natural science, history, economics, literature, the fine arts, and international languages--- but also, especially from Grade 6 forward, training in technical trade skills for all students.
Implicit in this approach are the values of bureaucratic efficiency and uniform academic excellence. There would be no need to kick responsibility for curricular decision making to those at the school building level. The creation of Community Partnership Schools is not necessary and the model is undesirable. Curriculum is properly decided at the central office level; delivery is naturally the responsibility of principals and teachers at the school building level. Actors at each level should take their particular responsibility. Those actually needed to define curriculum and deliver skill and knowledge sets are limited to a few key central office staff members; and those principals, teachers, teacher’s aides, and tutors (volunteer and professional) operating within each school building.
Accordingly, central office staff at 1250 West Broadway should be dramatically reduced, those formerly occupying unneeded positions would be retrained and moved out to the school building level, and full focus should be trained on the delivery of well-defined knowledge and skill sets to students of all demographic descriptors.
With this approach emphasizing bureaucratic slimming and focus on well-defined academic goals, the promising programs initiated by Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson could realize their potential during the tenure of Interim (and probably longer-term) Superintendent Michael Goar:
1) Focused Instruction would gain better definition as a system for the delivery of rich, logically sequenced K-12 academic content.
2) High Priority Schools would gain the excellent teachers, skilled teacher’s aides, and the properly trained volunteer and professional tutors that will be necessary to lead all students through the exciting world of skill and knowledge.
3) And the Shift program would have realized its promise as an aegis under which bureaucratic bloat is reduced, with concentration of resources on students and those who interact with them right at their schools of attendance.
Becoming Humble
There is an arrogance that suffuses bureaucracies, which suffer under the conceit that those under their employ are experts and authorities, as certain job titles and descriptions would suggest. But this claim is tenuous at best. In the case of the Minneapolis Public Schools, the implicit belief is ludicrous. This is a school district that has failed its students for at least 35 years.
Anyone occupying a position in such a bureaucracy should be humble in the extreme. When one enters the new building at 1250 West Broadway (North Minneapolis), arrogance rages and an undercurrent of racism may be discerned. At the old location on East Broadway, one could sign in and secure a sticker for posting on one’s shirt, indicating the department for which one was headed for business or for seeking address of concerns. Now one engages with a security desk employee, identifies the person with whom one is assumed to have made an appointment, and an administrative assistant comes down the elevator to usher the visitor up to the relevant person with whom the appointment has been made. Those arriving more informally and in the absence of an appointment are not welcome. The attitude on the part of those in the building is that a favor is being extended to the visitor and that the presumably busy and important person with whom a meeting has been arranged is extending a favor.
In fact, most employees of the Minneapolis Public Schools are holding down unnecessary jobs. Those who occupy posts that by some stretch can be considered justifiable do their jobs at a level within the range of mediocrity. They work for leaders (or are themselves such leaders) who have not defined the meaning of an excellent education and in most cases would be dumbfounded if asked to describe an excellent education and the qualities of an excellent teacher. They all work for a school district that has failed its students for 35 years. Such people should be humble in the extreme, but even the best of a lousy lot carry themselves with a certain arrogance.
This must change. Students, parents, and all of those interested in the functioning of the Minneapolis Public Schools should be welcomed, humbly and openly. The preeminent 19th century African American leader Frederick Douglass declared at a gathering in 1882:
If the Republican Party [the party of Lincoln but in the process of reneging on the programs of Reconstruction] cannot take a demand for justice and fair play, it ought to go down. We were human beings before that party was born, and our humanity is more important than any party can be. Parties were made for people, not people for the parties.
Officials and employees at the Minneapolis Public Schools should take note. Any person in any post who does not regard herself or himself as a humble servant of the public should resign or have employment terminated: School districts were made for students and those interested in their education--- not for bureaucratic functionaries in the administrative offices of public schools that by definition exist to serve students and the public.
...............................................................................................................
Hence, there is an abiding need for decision makers in the offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools, and on the Board of Education, to get busy redesigning the school district to be bureaucratically leaner, academically stronger, and attitudinally much, much humbler. The public should then, in another appropriate rendering of Frederick Douglass, “exercise judgment” on their work.
No comments:
Post a Comment