Evaluating the Personnel at the Minneapolis Public Schools: Are Board and Staff Up to the Responsibility of Delivering an Excellent K-12 Education?

You folks reading about the needed overhaul in K-12 education must remember that the Minneapolis Public Schools are just that: public schools.


Inasmuch as they are public institutions, their staff members are paid from public funds and serve because the public allows them to do so. People tend to be intimidated by people who have their offices in large buildings of bureaucratic institutions, forgetting that those very employees should be intimidated by the public. They should be constantly on edge, ever thinking that if they are not doing their jobs they could be dismissed at a moment’s notice.


This means that current staff members of the Minneapolis Public Schools should be very much on edge, indeed: They have they not done their job for at least 35 years.


The Minneapolis Public Schools as a central school district responsible for properly educating everyone has educated no one very well, and has been absolutely neglectful in educating young people from families of dysfunction and poverty. The time is now, so we must be fast about evaluating those currently responsible for the education of the children and adolescents of Minneapolis.


Perpend:


Interim Superintendent Michael Goar served under recent Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and should have come in with full momentum to implement the programs pertinent to the Shift, High Priority Schools, and Focused Instruction initiatives. He is 66.6…% successful, which is not enough, especially since he has neglected the most important program.


>>>>>  He has done a marvelous job in cutting staff, reducing the former 651-count burden in the central office on West Broadway to 531 (an elimination of 120 positions); this is consistent with the Shift initiative.


 >>>>>  Limited but reasonably persuasive evidence suggests that progress is being made in lifting the academic performance of the High Priority Schools.  A presentation made last spring by Laura Cavender, the district official responsible for superintending the program at those schools, strongly indicates progress--- but with a long way still to go to ensure that the academic performance of students from impoverished circumstances at least matches that of their economically better situated peers.


So Goar can be given credit for overseeing advances in the Shift and High Priority Schools programs.


>>>>>  But the best evidence available to me suggests strongly that Interim Superintendent Goar has failed to implement Focused Instruction in a way that fulfills the potential of the program. 


Focused Instruction is the initiative begun during the Bernadeia Johnson administration to bring curricular consistency to each grade level and to make the curriculum more knowledge intensive.


Although many teachers have indicated that they have enjoyed the training to deliver such a knowledge-based curriculum, there have been protestations from Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) president Lynn Nordgren and other hard-core teacher union types. These latter strongly manifest the tendency to object to any initiative that takes them out of their comfort zone, into which they have long brought faulty concepts from their abysmal training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.


Goar may very well be accommodating Nordgren, et al, in failing to move the Focused Instruction initiative forward. Or he may be listening to the shallow thinkers in much of the education change community, for whom the search for new, innovative approaches avowedly points the way to better education.


This constitutes what I term the “hail Mary pass” approach, whereby in the absence of any sense of the nature of an excellent K-12 education (achieved via knowledge intensive curriculum, logically implemented in grade by grade sequence; by knowledgeable teachers able to impart this education to all students), these gadflies advocate for charter schools and vouchers. Lacking the conceptual acumen and the energy necessary to induce change at the central school district level, they put their trust in the ability of putative innovators to experiment their way to better education.


This sort of approach is what Goar prevailed upon school board members to take in a unanimous vote last spring for four new pseudo charter schools called Community Partnership Schools. The school board thus abdicated adult responsibility to specify the cultural inheritance of knowledge that we want our students to have as they walk across the stage to claim a diploma after 13 years in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools.


This is the sort of responsibility that I assume on this blog; in my monthly editions of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; and in my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.


Goar and his staff are your employees. The public pays them.


And the public elects the members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.


If any of these people cannot specify the constituent elements of an excellent education, and the qualifications of teachers able to impart an excellent education, they need to go.


We should first prevail upon Goar to do his job. The sad reality is that he may be as good as we can get, given the paltry pool from which we can draw in deciding upon a longer-term superintendent. But if Goar does not seize the opportunity provided by Focused Instruction to provide a knowledge-rich education to our precious young people, the public should send a message that he is not the person to lead the Minneapolis Public Schools.


And the same message should be sent to all central office personnel; and to Tracine Asberry, Carla Bates, Kim Ellison, and Josh Reimnitz. The latter four are Minneapolis school board members who will be up for reelection in 2017. If they have no ability to articulate a definition of an excellent education; or to specify the retraining program that will be necessary to produce teachers capable of imparting a truly excellent education; then they should not be returned to their positions in 2017.


If we are serious about overhauling K-12 education and thus making of our nation the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be, we will take responsibility as adults and apply all necessary pressure on educators to do their jobs.


And if anyone at the central office or school buildings of the Minneapolis Public Schools; or on the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education; is not doing her or his job by ensuring educational excellence for young people of all demographic descriptors, that person must go.


The overhaul of K-12 education is the paramount domestic issue of our time. Without doing this, we get nothing else right.


Our efforts are long overdue.


The time is now.


Look in that mirror again.