I have high regard
for a few staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools. These include Chief of Assessment, Innovation
and Accountability Eric Moore; Chief
Financial Officer Ibrahima Diop; Chief
of Academics, Leadership, and Learning Michael Thomas; and Executive Director of Communications Gail
Plewacki (who was passed over for the newly created position of Chief of
Communications in favor of Tonya Tennessen).
These four know that the sort of highly intentional,
well-researched questions that I ask and comments that I make are those that
need to be tendered, precisely because no one heretofore has ever as persistently
and comprehensively asked these types of questions as I do.
Among the questions
that I have recently posed to Michael Thomas and Ibrahima Diop themselves, Superintendent Ed Graff,
Director of the Department of College and Career Readiness Terry Henry, Director of the Office of Black Male Achievement Michael Walker, Director of the Department of Indian Education Anna Ross, and Director of the Department of Student, Family, and Community Engagement Lynnea Atlas-Ingebretson are
those of a philosophical quality that public school administrators, by the nature
of their training, are not well-prepared to answer. My topmost expectation is that they have no
previously well-considered answers to these questions pertinent to educational
philosophy or even to matters of policy that actually have a chance in
elevating student academic performance, so that they have no ability to answer
the qualitative questions that I pose--- if I am right, non-answers then
become the answers that I will record, consistent with my supposition, as I complete
one of my two new books, Understanding
the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect.
I have faith that
Eric Moore and Ibrahima Diop will eventually endeavor to do good
things for our children; they have had very substantive educations and
have not been too intellectually corrupted by education professors. Michael
Thomas in my view has the natural intelligence, savvy, and depth of caring to
overcome such intellectual corruption; I believe that he is going to try
to do good things from the leverage of his current position.
Michael Walker is talented but minimally effective as that talent is currently
being used. At this time, little information available to me on the
others instills confidence.
I do have a newly
solidifying confidence in General Counsel Amy Moore, who has been very helpful
in expediting responses to questions that I have sent to MPS Data Requests. I wonder what Ms. Moore must think of the
education establishment in whose house she dwells. In the absence of any
readily available information or any desire to seek such information
aggressively, most people blithely assume that education administrators are
trained well to do what they do. Consistent with what I
counseled the school board about the pointlessness of a nationwide search for a
superintendent, the nature of their training in fact strongly presupposes
mediocrity.
I would think that a
highly trained true professional such as Ms. Moore (and this is true, too, for
Eric Moore and Ibrahima Diop) would find school board meetings and the general
atmosphere alternately amusing and maddening.
The level of competence of people such as Superintendent Ed Graff,
Executive Director of Teaching and Learning Macarre Traynham, and Project Director
for Focused Instruction Christina (Tina) Platt is very low; but inasmuch as this trio and others of
their ilk have received degrees that purportedly qualifies them for what they
do, and bear titles that reward them for that putative training, those not
thoroughly versed in the silliness and philosophical corruption of education
professors may assume that as professionals the likes of Graff, Traynham, and
Platt know that they are doing.
They do not know
what they are doing.
This is one of the
most important conveyances that I will make to readers of Understanding the Minneapolis Public
Schools: Current Condition, Future
Prospect.
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