The Decision for a Particular Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools Is Not As Important as You Think

The decision looming for the school board as to the new Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools is not as important as you think.


Remember that most candidates for superintendent in any school district have been trained in terrible programs in departments, schools, or colleges of education. They are infested with the same fundamental disrespect for knowledge as the goal of an excellent education as are teachers, the latter of whom are also disserved by education professors, who are the chief culprits impeding progress toward the knowledge-intensive education for which our students wait.


We have just undergone a wholly unsatisfying search for a superintendent who can lend definition to Strategic Plan: Acceleration 2020, which can work but will require people possessing the proper definitions of an excellent education to fill in the missing details and articulate the needed plan of action--- as I have done in my writing and my many venues for public commentary, including the time designated for such at the meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education each month.


No such leader assuredly emerged. The process eventually gave us three finalists: Interim Superintendent Michael Goar, the unfairly treated Sergio Paez of Massachusetts, and the enormously gifted Charles Foust of Houston.


Goar has given no indication that he has the definition for an excellent education in his gut.


Paez recognizes the on-paper inadequacies of Strategic Plan: Acceleration 2020, and he knows that filling in the many gaps will require great effort from the central office--- but his precise plan for filling in those gaps was still undetailed when he was first given and then denied the superintendent position by an inconstant and ultimately irresponsible Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.


Foust, despite his magnificent gifts as a communicator and school turn-around artist, like the two above-named candidates had no knowledge upon my questioning of E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation or the many publications that have emanated from this chief proponent of knowledge-intensity in K-12 education.


Foust was the best candidate of the three; his future holds great promise, and his intellectual nimbleness holds out the possibility that he might internalize the precepts of a knowledge-intensive education, toward which he seems to lean intuitively.


But the furor around Sergio Paez’s candidacy now brings new circumstances to the search for a superintendent, a passionately followed but little understood reality. Foust may or may not be in the mix.




What we need to understand more fundamentally is that the importance of the actual occupant of the position could be greatly exaggerated. As I have maintained from the beginning of the misguided national search, the pool of candidates is mediocre, at best.


Nothing in the training or culture of the education establishment is conducive to the development of great superintendents--- so any nationwide search would at best be a diversionary tactic on the part of the MPS Board of Education conveying to the public an attempt to attract the best candidate available.


And the track record of superintendents across the nation suggests an exit after two or three, and at most five, years on the job--- before any substantive achievements can be recorded. So any superintendent search tends to be a distraction from the real issues vexing the public schools, creating the Shakespearean Macbeth's proverbial "sound and fury, signifying nothing."


We must first get the definition of an excellent education right, understanding that


an excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced curriculum in the liberal (mathematics, natural science, history, economics, literature, fine arts), technological, and industrial arts to students of all demographic descriptors throughout the K-12 years.


School board members will need quite some time fully to internalize this definition and to understand that for the delivery of such a knowledge-intensive education, we will have to train teachers at the level of the central school district, remembering that


an excellent teacher is a professional of deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.


That also will take a long time to get lodged into the collective mental consciousness of the school board, the members of whom must then remember that


the purpose of a strong K-12 education in the liberal, technological, and industrial arts is to provide maximum probability that students will graduate with the likelihood of living lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.


Until we get enough people in the public, and in the central offices and classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools, who have fully internalized these precepts, we will forever be running circles around the K-12 education of high quality for which our precious students have been long waiting.


Any new Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools, having been largely ruined by education professors, will need lots of help from those few who understand that excellent education requires knowledge intensity and teachers possessing great knowledge--- and that the purpose of K-12 education is to provide for our students futures of cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.


My chief life mission, which shall never change, is to provide the guidance that the education establishment must have, via the example of my own teaching; public speaking appearances; television show; academic journal; new book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education); and in the many already posted articles and hosts of those to come on this blog.


The decision on the precise personage for occupancy of the post of Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools is not as important as you may think.


Whoever gets the nod will need lots of help along the pathway toward defining excellence in K-12 education.


I’ll be providing that help, and I invite those few of you who grasp the requisite precepts to do the same.