Ed Graff’s Tenure as Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent is On A Course Toward Termination, and An Electoral Shakeup of the MPS Board of Education is in Motion

In the months ahead, we are likely to look back on the week that ran from Sunday, 13 August, through Saturday, 19 August 2017, as the point at which Ed Graff’s tenure as superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) began a course toward termination and at which an electoral shakeup of the MPS Board of Education commenced.

 

This is a school district that has failed its students for four decades now.

 

Graff and the current membership of the MPS Board of Education have been particularly suspect for the quality of leadership that they have personally exhibited for a full year.

 

Ed Graff gained the position of MPS superintendent at the end of the second stage of a prolonged, 17-month, botched search.  The board failed to recognize the superior talent represented in at least two other candidates over the course of the two-stage search.  The outcome produced, the happenstance that after 17 months the board would opt for Graff, an administrative mediocrity whose contract in Anchorage was not renewed and who left behind an academic track record comparable to the miserable achievement rates that were waiting for him when he arrived in Minnesota, would be stupefying if the incompetence of the school board were not so abidingly manifest.  

 

This a school board that since the election of November 2017 has been weakened badly by the loss of three of its best members:  Tracine Asberry and Josh Reimnitz, who lost narrowly to teacher union-backed candidates;  and Carla Bates, who did not run for election after 12 years of service.  These three were replaced respectively by Ira Jourdain, Bob Walser, and Kim Ellison (the latter of whom vacated her District 2/ North Minneapolis seat to run for Bates’s at-large seat;  the District 2 seat went to KerryJo Felder).  The current board is now comprised of eight Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT)-backed candidates and the ineffective Don Samuels.  

 

As I detail in many articles below as you scroll on down this blog, Graff and the school board gathered  for their annual retreat on 14 and 15 August 2017, a week after they lost control of their regular monthly meeting to a rowdy crowd animated in opposition to placement of School Resource Officers (SROs) in the schools.

 

For those details you, my readers, can peruse articles posted in the aftermath of that 14-15 August meeting to discover just how clueless Graff and this iteration of the MPS Board of Education were in mounting a defense of, still trying to plug on with, their inept Strategic Plan Acceleration 2020.  Stuck with this plan, and with this inept school board membership, Graff confronts a situation that would be extraordinarily challenging even for a foremost administrative talent, which he decidedly is not.  In the context of a situation in which the same academic failure describes the public school district in its core function, Graff mumbles on about social and emotional learning, equity, community engagement, an unspecified multi-tiered system of support, and accountability---  without offering any viable plan of action.

 

You will find in one of the articles as you scroll on down my own vision for the Minneapolis Public Schools, rendered with the specifics that Graff is incapable of offering.

 

Graff maintains a countenance of yoga-induced cool and is rarely rattled.  His responses to me have proved the exception, as I have definitely gotten under Graff’s skin multiple times;  I have rattled Graff in the absence of any attempt to do so, the rattling coming only as a byproduct of my efforts to get Graff to detail his academic program.

 

Frustrated that I was exposing his lack of any definition of an excellent education or any sense of how to advance the academic achievement of students in Minneapolis, Graff in one moment of lost cool emitted this question: 

 

“Well, why don’t you just be superintendent, Gary?”

 

As you will read as you scroll on down, I have accepted his offer.

 

I have become superintendent in an alternate universe and have assembled a team ready to take over in the conventional universe as the months ahead ensue.

 

The ineptitude displayed at the 14-15 August retreat on the part of both the school board and Graff now makes this displacement of the current board membership imperative.

 

Ed Graff’s tenure as Minneapolis Public Schools superintendent is on a course toward termination and an electoral shakeup of the MPS Board of Education is in motion. 

                                                                                         

The termination and the shakeup will occur in the course of the period running from the present (late August 2017) through the school board elections of November 2017.

 

The K-12 Revolution is in motion, meticulously planned in the style of pragmatic revolutionaries:  Think Saul Alinsky, Mohandas K. Gandhi, A Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinhem.

 

The K-12 Revolution is in motion, open to all people with love of young people, knowledge, and democracy for people of all demographic descriptors.