Understanding the Depth of Incompetence on the Part of Superintendent Ed Graff, the MPS Board of Education, and Our Public Institutions: The Subtext of the Current Crisis

Our iteration of the locally centralized school district, the Minneapolis Public Schools, is in crisis.

You must look at the subtext in any reportage of recent events to understand the genesis of the crisis.

 

First, the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools operates in the context of an education establishment of multi-culpability for the low quality of our K-12 institutions.  Departments, schools, and colleges of education operate from a philosophically debased ideology that with head-scratching cluelessness devalues the impartation of knowledge as the purpose of public education.  University administrations are deeply complicit in this situation, content to celebrate the revenue generated by their teacher and administrator training programs, cash cows contributing heavily to the coffers of institutions of higher education while producing lightweight bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees.

 

Second, we get the result that we should expect from this situation.  A few teachers of excellence find their own way to the delivery of knowledge-intensive education, while the generally mediocre teacher corps serves under even more incompetent central office and site administrators.   In the Minneapolis Public Schools, merely our local manifestation of the inadequacy of public education in the United States, the K-5 years are mostly wasted;  some students learn to read and do math acceptably, most do not, and no students learn what they need to know about history, government, economics, or natural science;  and none of these precious specimens who are our future have quality experiences at the K-5 level with fine arts and literature.  The middle school curriculum at grades 6-8 represents continuation of knowledge depravity;  at the high school level of grades 9-12, a few students who can claim adequate preparation thrive in Advanced Placement courses, but otherwise most students go forth either without graduating or claiming a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only.      

 

Third, school boards are elected with the support of teachers unions and echo their dictums, which ideologically resonate with the debased ideology learned in those institutions of teacher training.  This is true now in St. Paul, where the school board is dominated by the union-backed Caucus for Change.  On the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education, KerryJo Felder, Siad Ali, Nelson Inz, Rebecca Gagnon, Bob Walser, Jenny Arneson, and Ira Jourdain were elected with Minneapolis Federation of Teacher (MFT) endorsement or that of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, politicians from which are elected with heavy DFL support.  Of the current Minneapolis school board members, only Don Samuels did not receive MFT or DFL backing;  but Samuels has not lived up to his reformist reputation.

 

Fourth, local media figures such as Star Tribune reporter Beena Raghavendran and Minnesota Public Radio hosts Tom Weber and Keri Miller are, whether by sins of omission or those of commission, mere mouth pieces for the education establishment, content to report their failures without probing deeply into the causes for perennial K-12 deficiency.  Either these journalists have little idea of the questions that they should be asking, or where to look for the truth, or they are more insidiously culpable for proceeding on the basis of the fact that failure and incidents provoked by failure make good copy.

 

Thus we have situations such as that currently prevailing in Minneapolis, where an incompetent and politically coopted school board wasted 17 months to hire a predictably mediocre superintendent.  Neither Superintendent Ed Graff nor the school board is in a position to offer the strong leadership necessary to overhaul curriculum and teacher training, to design a coherent approach to remedial instruction, to articulate a program of outreach to families of struggling students, or to scale down the central bureaucracy so as to shift resources to such efforts with the capability of upgrading the quality of education at the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

We are as a result ever in a crisis mode, here provoking and there assuaging sensibilities of particular constituents and staff members, as in the recent controversy over the jettisoning of junior staff members of color by principals operating under the exigencies of a $28 million dollar budgetary shortfall, the school board recommendation to rehire those members, and the vigorous opposition of principals to that perceived affront to their efforts to make tough staff cuts that they were requested to make by the central administration.

 

Strong leadership would present a program of K-12 overhaul suggested above, pertinent to curriculum, teachers, remediation, outreach, and stewardship.  Such leadership would move us out of perpetual crisis toward academic excellence.

 

But the necessary overhaul is beyond the capability of either Ed Graff or the school board that hired him. 

 

For the necessary change to happen, you the public must be ever aware of the subtext that bespeaks the grave flaws of the education establishment and the complicity of the media.  To avoid being yourselves culpable in the processes that produce the inadequacy of K-12 education, once aware of the subtext, you must be ever active in demanding the changes that will bring skill-replete, knowledge-intensive education to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.