Feb 28, 2017

New Article, Tuesday, 28 February, on the Ineptitude at the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning >>>>> From Sections in >Curriculum< and >Bureaucracy< Chapters in PART TWO: Analysis, from My Nearly Complete New Book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect


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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