A Note to My Readers
You will observe in these recent and
ongoing placements on this blog a shift toward snippets from PART TWO:
Analysis, from my nearly complete new book, Understanding the Minneapolis
Public Schools: Current Condition,
Future Prospect. This phase of
the book follows sequentially upon PART
ONE: Organization, which conveys a
bevy of objective facts pertinent to the inner workings of the Minneapolis
Public Schools. By contrast, PART TWO:
Analysis, features my interpretation of the objective facts, giving
my view of the many weaknesses but also the strengths that I see in the
organization of the Minneapolis Public Schools, particularly those pertinent to
the vital areas of curriculum, teaching, tutoring, family outreach, and
resource allocation.
Please now read another section from PART TWO:
Analysis, parts of which find their way into both my chapter on Curriculum and the chapter on Organization.
Department of Teaching and Learning as
an Impediment to Teaching and Learning in the Minneapolis Public Schools
The Department of Teaching and Learning
at the Minneapolis Public Schools is responsible for
Curriculum adoption and development,
professional development of teachers, online learning, and special programming
such as the college preparatory AVID program and initiatives such as Focused
Instruction.
This is the largest single department
in the central offices (Davis Center, 1250 West Broadway) of the Minneapolis
Public Schools: The Department of
Teaching and Learning has in excess of 50 current staff members, or 9.5% of the
total 550 employees at the Davis Center.
There are
three (3) staff members in office support roles, four (4) connected to the AVID
program, six (6) for elementary education (including the staff member
designated for “talent development and advanced academics”), ten (10) for
secondary education (including the middle school and high school staff members
designated for “talent development and advanced academics”), three for Focused
Instruction, three (3) for material management, ten (10) for online
learning, four (4) designated at the
Science Center, four (4) assigned as art, media, and physical education
specialists, and two (2) for the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics) program.
Too often
public bureaucracies take on a corporate world ethos and spawn all sorts of
assistants whose functions are extraneous.
The office and executive assistant positons in the Department of
Teaching and Learning are not necessary;
and there are staff members in the MPS Department of Finance who could
absorb the functions of the business specialist.
Most
positions in the Department of Teaching and Learning should not be necessary if
teachers were properly trained in departments, colleges, and schools of
education. If K-12 teachers came to
their school districts with the kind of knowledge base possessed by college
professors, their curriculum would be embedded in their brains and the eighteen
(18) elementary and secondary curriculum and instruction staff members would be
imminently dispensable--- as indeed they
should be now, since they are so ineffective.
Decision-makers
at the Minneapolis Public Schools would be much the wiser for putting teachers
through a rigorous, knowledge-heavy teacher training program such as I advanced
in the September 2014 edition of my Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis,
Minnesota--- before staff
members officially occupy teacher
positions in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools. With such well-trained and knowledgeable
teachers in all classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools, the Department of
Teaching and Learning could then be disassembled and revamped as a small group
of perhaps ten staff members.
For, indeed,
most positions in the Department of Teaching and Learning would also be
expendable if teachers were well-trained from the beginning of their employment
experience at the Minneapolis Public Schools.
If art, media, physical education, math, science, and technology
teachers arrived as genuinely skilled practitioners and scholars, at least six
(6) of the above given positions would fade away.
Focused
Instruction is a worthy program intended to implement curriculum coherently and
consistently by grade level throughout the schools of the district. But Tina Platt does not have the subject area
knowledge to direct such a program, and the program has not been effective in
the half-decade of its existence. All
three (3) staff members assigned to Focused Instruction would be dismissed, to
be replaced by professionals of general scholarship and familiar with
knowledge-intensive curriculum such as that of E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge
Foundation.
Ten
instructors for online learning should be examined for efficacy and
necessity.
Department
of Teaching and Learning Director Macarre Traynham was hired by Chief Academic
Officer Susanne Griffin to bring expertise in “culturally responsive
curriculum.” A Core Knowledge approach
provides extraordinary cultural responsiveness in a meaningful context of
knowledge-intensive curriculum across the key subject areas of mathematics,
natural science, history, literature, and the fine arts. Traynham has little knowledge of such
curriculum, and her own training has been primarily in iterations of those
notoriously weak programs overseen by education professors, rather than in the
legitimate subject area disciplines.
Traynham should be dismissed and her position examined for its necessity
and level of remuneration.
Macarre
Traynham reports to Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin. Ms. Griffin is a compassionate and dedicated
educator, but as discussed in the pages above she has no training in any of the
main academic programs that should define a knowledge-intensive
curriculum. This absence of scholarly
credentials and the wretched academic performance of the Minneapolis Public
Schools argue powerfully for the termination of Ms. Griffin as Chief Academic
Officer.
The
Department of Teaching and Learning saliently represents the bloat and
superfluity endemic to the central offices of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
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