The current condition of the Minneapolis Public Schools
is in essence as follows:
Ed Graff has made many favorable moves in his two
years as MPS superintendent (Graff commenced his tenure on 1 July 2016). Since spring 2017, Graff has trimmed the
central school district bureaucracy at the Davis Center (MPS central offices,
1250 West Broadway) from 651 staff members to 449, a reduction of thirty-one
percent (31%). This is a momentous achievement, unrivaled in any other major
urban school district. He has done the
paring with discernment, wielding not an ax but rather a sharp knife. A number of departments have been dismantled
and a raft of dead-weight staff members have been jettisoned. At the level of the "Chief" positions (finance,
operations, information technology, human resources, and assessment and
accountability), Ibrahima Diop, Karen Devet, Fadi Fadhil, Maggie Sullivan, and
Eric Moore respectively form the best school district cabinet anywhere in the United States); the formation of such a cabinet is a major achievement
on the part of Ed Graff.
I was livid when the district revealed its World’s
Best Workforce (WBWF) programs, submitted to the Minnesota Department of
Education (MDE) to meet requirements for addressing low achievement of economically
impoverished students, who are overwhelmingly African Americans and other
students of color. But generously
granting that the WBWF submissions are a legal obligation that must be submitted
when few effective programs funded by government or private entities exist, I
then focus on a couple of programs that do seem to indicate Graff’s at least
partial understanding of the academic dilemmas that face the Minneapolis Public
Schools, and show a nascent promise.
These programs are the new Benchmark reading
curriculum and the Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS). The former is better than most at building reading
comprehension and vocabulary in the context of a fairly broad range of literary
and subject area readings. The
Multi-Tiered System of Support program is a well-designed approach to
monitoring individual student achievement in reading and mathematics, so as to
make timely skill-specific interventions.
Graff also is an advocate of Social and Emotional
Learning (SEL), which seeks to induce student understanding of her or his own
behavior and to cultivate conduct that is both rewarding over time to the
individual and promotive of productive and caring human relationships. My
abiding response to this initiative is that SEL is mere labeling for good
social behavior that we should cultivate in our students as a given. To the degree that SEL promotes good human
conduct that we most definitely should inculcate in our students, that social
and emotional foundation should be clearly utilized to achieve the central mission
of the locally centralized school district:
the impartation of an excellent education.
Such an education is by definition knowledge-intensive
and skill-replete, imparting strong knowledge and skill sets in mathematics,
natural science, literature, history, economics, and the visual, musical, technological,
and vocational arts. This broad and deep
education must be imparted by teachers with the knowledge and pedagogical
ability to deliver subject area information and skills to students of all
demographic descriptors.
And it is in delivering such an education that
Graff and staff are at present as woefully remiss as have been administrations
that have presided for many decades. But
I also record that Graff and his staff are coming to terms with their failure
to impart broad and deep knowledge-intensive education in a way that the MPS
Board of Education is not.
The current school board of Jenny Arneson (District
1), KerryJo Felder (District 2), Siad Ali (District 3), Bob Walser( District
4), Nelson Inz (District 5), Ira Jourdain (District 6), Don Samuels (At-Large),
Rebecca Gagnon (At-Large), and Kim Ellison (At-Large) is full of party hacks
beholden to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and Democratic Farmer
Labor (DFL) Party. Arneson, Ali, Inz, and
Gagnon are up for reelection this coming November 2018; Samuels’s seat is up for reelection, but he
is not running. Samuels is a member of
the DFL but did not run with MFT or DFL endorsement, making him singular in his
political independence among the members of this board; he must be replaced by someone who likewise is
unfettered with MFT/DFL bonds. Among those
running for reelection, Inz and Gagnon are particularly objectionable party hacks; I am going to do everything that I can to stall
the MFT/DFL juggernaut that typically propels school board candidates of that
ilk into office.
We have, then, this essential situation:
Ed Graff has been an excellent administrator with
regard to matters pertinent to personnel, finance, and bureaucratic streamlining. He has overseen the inauguration of the
promising initiatives represented by the Benchmark reading curriculum and the
Multi-Tiered System of Support.
But Graff’s skills and his promising programs
must be put to the purposes of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete
education. Without a strong subject area
curriculum defined in grade by grade specificity throughout the (pre)K-12
years, and the training of teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum, all
else will founder and the delivery of an excellent education will not be
possible.
Thus, my revolutionary activity will produce Understanding the Minneapolis Public
Schools: Current Condition, Future
Prospect, detailing the woeful deficiencies of this iteration of the
locally centralized school district; and
will feature much community organizing to defeat Gagnon and Inz, to produce a
school board who understands and insists on academic excellence, and to get a large
swath of the public behind the curricular and teacher training programs that
must be at the core of an excellent education.
During these next few months, I intend to rock
the Minneapolis Public Schools to that school district’s foundations.
I always act upon my intentions.
Those who want to thrive as teachers, administrators,
and board members must understand and embrace my program of educational
excellence or get out of the way of the revolutionary gales that are about to
blow in heavily and persistently.
Individual fortunes are about to change
drastically, and those for many adults will be much the worse. But for students-- whose academic and therefore life prospects
are the chief concerns of K-12 education---
fortunes are about to shift very
favorably: And with that shift,
destinies will lie before our precious young people as culturally enriched,
civically prepared, and professionally satisfied people who will end cycles of
poverty and make of this nation the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
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