Tracking Events in 2015-2016 and Revolutionary Prescriptions for 2016-2017: New Superintendent Ed Graff Must Proceed on the Basis of Four Key Principles or Go the Way of the Guomindang in China and the British in India

I have been inspired in my activism especially by the seminal revolutionaries Mao Zedong, Mohandas Gandhi, and Saul Alinsky.


Mao was the leader of the Chinese Communist revolution that ultimately succeeded in 1949. In 1934 he and his comrades were pinned in by the rival Guomindang (Kuomintang) in the far southern province of Jiangxi, precipitating the vaunted Long March through southern and western China, northward to the province of Shaanxi. Arriving in Shaanxi in 1935, Mao holed up in a cave by night to theorize, write, and plan the revolution. By day he circulated among the peasantry and established the on-the-ground relationships with workaday people that gave him the mass support critical to his ultimately successful revolution against a better armed opponent.


Gandhi served in the Indian National Congress from 1885, earned a law degree in England, opposed apartheid in South Africa, then during the opening decades of the 20th century developed his satyagraha (“truth force”) approach to aggressive nonviolence as a precipitator of revolutionary change. By 1947 the mighty British Empire no longer contained India.


Saul Alinsky was the author of Rules for Radicals who, at a time when revolutionary 1960s groups such as the Black Panthers and Weathermen spouted leftist slogans but faded within a decade, fomented practical and effective change in numerous factories and businesses in behalf of working people and impoverished communities.


These revolutionaries gave their lives to their causes.


They looked to the future, maintained the long view, and committed their efforts for whatever time required to achieve the change in which they fervently believed.


This is the credo and work ethic that I bring to my efforts to overhaul K-12 education.


I am relentless, dauntingly frank, absolutely dedicated to the cause.


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When I first dedicated my efforts to the cause of fomenting change in the Minneapolis Public Schools, Bernadeia Johnson was superintendent. She had formulated three programs that addressed the most critical needs of the central school district:


Shift, by which resources were to be concentrated closest to students and those who worked directly with them;


High Priority Schools, identifying for enhanced attention and resource investment schools wherein students struggled most to attain grade level academic performance; and


Focused Instruction, establishing grade by grade academic standards with topics to be studied uniformly across the district according to grade level.


Johnson’s greatest achievement was astutely establishing programs that directed attention where due. But she resigned, effective February 2015, after six years as superintendent, with very little progress as to effective implementation of her signature programs.


I counseled school board members (in conversations and Public Comments at second-Tuesday meetings) to forego a temporally prolonged search in favor of a brief call for applications nationwide while giving great consideration to candidates close at home. I told members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education that most candidates are trained in the same way by the same sorry lot of education professors and that very few rise above the level of mediocrity. I suggested that Michael Goar, who had been serving as Chief Executive Officer under Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and had been tapped as Interim Superintendent was most likely as good a candidate as they were going to find: He should just be given the job to see what he could do and evaluated for extension as the three-year contract ensued.


But the school board went ahead with a nationwide search that I have detailed in my blog articles. During the summer-through-autumn 2015 phase of the search, six candidates emerged as semifinalists, of whom three (Charles Foust, Michael Goar, and Sergio Paez) became finalists. I recommended strongly for Foust, an energetic dynamo with a communicative manner and intellectual grasp that could have brought academic excellence of the type for which I have advocated; the board voted 6-3 for Paez (the losing three votes were for Goar). I then defended Paez when he was the victim of innuendo detailed in blog articles I wrote in December 2015.


But the board lost its spine on the Paez matter and was about to retreat to the Goar option when a rag-tag group of protesters shut a December 2015 meeting down, inducing the board to opt for another search. The second phase search lasted from January 2016 through May 2016. Under the guise of engaging the community more openly, the board voted to hire a community engagement firm for $70,000, in addition to a superintendent search firm for $85,000; and also created a search committee that included several parents and community representatives, along with three school board members.


By May 2015, Minnesota State Commissioner of Education Brenda Cassellius and outgoing Anchorage (Alaska) Superintendent Ed Graff were identified as the two finalists. I recommended forcefully for Brenda Cassellius for reasons given in blog articles of May 2016; the board voted 6-3 for Graff.


At the second-Tuesday June 2016 meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education I told the members of that board (in my Public Comments) that they had just done what I told them 17 months ago that them they would do: waste an unacceptable amount of money (in tabulation for the two searches, over $200,000) for a very conventional candidate (Graff).


They listened.


At least two of the three members who cast the losing three votes considered my comments on target.


Those who voted for Graff seemed variously taken aback or chastened.




I also told the members of the school board that my calculations indicated that of the 603 staff members at the central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools at 1250 West Broadway, 58 make $100,000 or more in salary; another 29 make between $90,000 and $100,000; while 82 make between $80,000 and $90,000 and 84 make between $70,000 and $80,000. I suggested strongly that they investigate these 253 positions to see if they are getting proper value for the great expenditure.


They aren’t.


Brenda Cassellius knew this: She effectively said that she would not be needing the six associate superintendents who now make $141,500 apiece.




I’ll be encouraging Ed Graff to make the same determination.




I’ll be pressuring Ed Graff to do many things, consistent with the four paramount principles relevant to curriculum, teachers, tutoring, and community outreach indicated above.




If he doesn’t do what is necessary to give life to the four principles, I’ll be working to make sure that he goes the way of the Guomindang and the British.