Don't Be Fooled by Ted Kolderie and Acolytes Jay Haugen, Jeff Ronneberg, Lisa Snyder, Les Fujitake, and Lars Esdal: They Share a Flawed Ideology with Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff

Quick, all you critical thinkers and lifelong learners who read the opinion pages of the Star Tribune, answer this question:


What common ideology do Ed Graff and Ted Kolderie share?

First, in case you are among the many members of the Minnesota populace who claim to care about K-12 education but are in fact not very informed, you may need to know that Ed Graff is the new (six months into his tenure) superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools;  and that Ted Kolderie is a founder and senior associate at an organization named, Education Evolving.

Are you still having a hard time answering the question?

Then know also that Ed Graff’s job is to try to make the institution of the traditional locally centralized school district work;  Ted Kolderie helped to craft the 1991 Minnesota law that made possible the use of public funds for charter schools, institutions that promise successfully innovative solutions not utilized by traditional public schools.

Now, again, what common ideology do Ed Graff and Ted Kolderie share?

Take one more moment to try to use those critical thinking and lifelong learning skills to respond to the question. 

Then consider the answer:

Both of these figures on the education scene in Minnesota advocate an approach to school programming, derived from college and university professors of education, asserting that a set body of sequentially imparted knowledge does not matter;  as to any piece of factual information that you need, you can always “look it up.”

Over the last four decades, many pedagogical emphases of the moment have emanated from departments, colleges, and schools of education.  These programs include group learning, inquiry learning, service learning, and experiential learning.  None of these pedagogies include the supposition that a well-established body of knowledge is necessary to guide group work on a topic, to inform the inquiry,  to give and get benefit from service rendered, or to maximize value for the student’s experience.  None of these pedagogies seek to add to an incrementally accumulated body of knowledge.  None of these pedagogies seek directly to impart the full array of skills that will allow students to demonstrate grade level performance in reading and math.

Ed Graff offers “social and emotional learning” as his main new contribution to academic programing and teacher professional development at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  At the core of this approach is the notion that a student who possesses firm self-esteem and respect for other human beings will be well-prepared to succeed in academics.


Ted Kolderie and his acolytes (witness Jay Haugen, Jeff Ronneberg, Lisa Snyder, Les Fujitake, and Lars Esdal, “Education  in Minnesota Badly Needs Innovation,” Star Tribune, January 23, 2017) have great faith in innovation to bring better quality education.  The latter four writers, consistent with Kolderie’s advocacy in previous articles for the Star Tribune, call upon the Minnesota legislature to establish Innovation Zones (IZ) for personalizing student education, freeing teachers to make key decisions, replacing “test days” with “learning days” and “new methods of accountability,” and allowing site-based decisions to maximize student learning.


Education professors maintain that students should be guided by classroom professionals motivated to nurture students who become critical thinkers and life-long learners;  academic instruction should be “constructivist,” building on the individual experiences of each student.  According to this dogma, an established body of sequentially acquired knowledge is not necessary.    

The social and emotional learning creed of Ed Graff is undergirded by very similar assumptions of the constructivist sort that all of you critical thinkers and lifelong learners can now discern also in the innovation ideology of Kolderie and his adherents.  You should also be able to contextualize the fact that four of the writers (Haugen, Ronneberg, Snyder, and Fujitake) of the Star Tribune opinion piece mentioned above are, like Graff, public school superintendents.

The “progressive” and “constructivist” disregard for commonly shared knowledge has had very unprogressive and unconstructive consequences for our students.  They have had deleterious effects on you.  They have given us a United States president whose political trump was a fearful and ignorant electorate.


Don’t be fooled by facile reasoning rooted in the approaches of education professors.


Understand that Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann still call from their graves that a successful democracy must be founded on citizens who share common knowledge.


If you do not know how to think critically about that statement for lack of lifelong learning, I guess you should go “look it up.”