The extreme
incompetence of this iteration of the MPS Board of Education was on full
display in an initial meeting of like purpose, held just a day over two weeks
ago on Tuesday, 28 August. Only District
#1 member Jenny Arneson was prepared;
Rebecca Gagnon and Nelson Inz, the erstwhile and current board chair
respectively were inarticulate as to matter of the rubric to measure
Superintendent Ed Graff’s performance.
Arneson and
Graff did their best to try to nudge Gagnon, Inz, and the other members of
the Superintendent Evaluation Committee
toward some minimal level of cogency.
Graff
reminded those assembled of his four goals in leading the district: Social and Emotional Learning, literacy, the
Multi-Tier System of Support, and equity.
If the
establishment of these goals and the likelihood of fulfilling them were
actually to guide the superintendent evaluation process, then Graff’s contract
should be terminated at the end of the current three-year contract, which would
be 30 June 2019 (essentially the end of the current academic year of 2018-2019).
Consider the
inadequacy of the four goals as germane to the dilemmas facing the Minneapolis
Public Schools:
1) Social and Emotional Learning
Social and
Emotional Learning is an approach to education advocated by the Collaborative
for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), based in Chicago. Graff won a CASEL award during his failed
tenure (2013-2016) as superintendent in Anchorage, Alaska, a school district at
which student performance was at about the same abysmal level as is the case in
the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Be reminded
of these salient facts as pertaining to academic performance of students in the
Minneapolis Public Schools, with the 2017-2018 results having just been
announced by officials at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) two weeks
ago:
Proficiency in Reading and Math
for Minneapolis Public School (MPS) Students
2016-2017 2017-2018
Reading 43% 45%
Math 42% 42%
Thus, fewer than 46% of MPS
students are proficient in math or reading.
During Graff’s tenure, there has been very slight improvement in
reading, while math proficiency has remained flat. Overall, academic performance is as abysmally
low as for students in Anchorage during Graff’s tenure. Over the course of the last four academic
years, fewer than twenty-percent (20%) of African American and Native males
have recorded proficient achievement levels.
Social and
Emotional Learning promotes the development of five competencies for students
(and, by extension, school district staff):
1) self-awareness; 2)
self-management; 3) responsible
decision-making; 4) relationship skills;
and 5) social awareness.
These should
be assumed as goals for impartation by staff and inculcation by students and
staff in any organization wherein young people are the focus. They did not demonstrably advance student
learning in Anchorage, and they will not be the primary drivers of student
achievement in the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The development of social and emotional competencies such as those
advocated by CASEL is preparatory to academic achievement; development of these competencies cannot
drive an academic program.
2) Literacy
Under Graff,
staff in the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning have introduced the
reading curriculum known as Benchmark.
This curriculum is no better or worse than others that have been tried
at the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Improvement over time will come with improvement of the skill of
teachers in imparting reading instruction to MPS students, for which the
Teaching and Learning staff is responsible.
This, then,
segues into the next goal:
3) Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS)
The
Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) shares with Social and Emotional Learning
(SEL) the implied inclination of the education establishment, branching from
those low-lifers known as education professors, to attach grand-sounding names
to what should be straightforward endeavors, any success in which will always
be limited by the capacity of teachers and administrators trained under
education professors.
The
Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS), like CASEL, involves initiatives that
should be assumed as part of any approach to student learning--- but should not be presented as capable of
driving student achievement, in the absence of teachers capable of doing
so. The Multi-Tiered System of Support
involves the use of individual student data to monitor academic progress for
each student, so as to focus on skills for remediation and acquisition.
The questions
would then be:
Why have the
promotion of social and emotional learning, literacy, and the monitoring of
student academic progress not been done before?
Are these
supposed to be grand initiatives advanced as the keys to improvement in student
achievement under a Graff administration?
Actually,
they are no-brainers, sound-good appellations now serving as the wrapping paper
for a box inside of which is curricular incoherence and teacher quality that
I’ll generously call mediocre.
4) Equity
Equity will
be achieved when students of all demographic descriptors receive a
knowledge-intensive curriculum, imparted by knowledgeable teachers who are
capable of delivering such a curriculum to all students.
The goals of
SEL, literacy, and MTSS are insufficient to achieve this equitably excellent
education.
Thus, Graff
should not logically be granted an extension of his contract based on the
current record of student achievement or the likelihood that SEL, Benchmark
reading, and MTSS are going to lead the way toward equity of excellence in education.
I would,
though recommend the extension of Graff’s contract on the basis of the
following factors and with the specified conditions:
……………………………………………………………………
Delivery of
an excellent education to students of the Minneapolis Public Schools will gain
realization when
1) curriculum is overhauled for the impartation
of knowledge and skill sets in logical grade by grade sequence to students of
all demographic descriptors;
2) the wretched training that prospective
teachers receive in departments, colleges, and schools of education is
acknowledged with a vow to retrain teachers in the knowledge and skill sets
that they must impart to their students;
3) lagging student performance is addressed
aggressively with highly focused and skilled tutoring;
4) a program of resource provision and referral
for families struggling with dilemmas of poverty and dysfunction is implemented
with great vigor, upon the energies of an expanded staff of people capable of
meeting families on the streets and in the homes where they live; and
5) the central school district bureaucracy is
trimmed so as to capture resources for application to the above four initiatives.
Thus far, Ed
Graff has succeeded only in the fifth category of paring the MPS central office
bureaucracy at the Davis Center. In this
he has performed magnificently, jettisoning much dead weight on the way to reducing
the central office staffing burden from 655 to 427.
In doing
this, Graff has rationalized the administration and readied the district for a
stage at which the first four of my programmatic tenets can viably be advanced.
The questions
would then be,
Are Deputy
Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning Cecilia Saddler and staff at
Teaching and Learning; Associate
Superintendents Ron Wagner, Carla Steinbach (-Huther), and Brian Zambreno; and the principals and teachers of the
Minneapolis Public Schools capable of overhauling curriculum for knowledge
intensity?
Will teachers
be retrained so as gain capability in delivering such a curriculum?
And will
skill remediation and family outreach proceed so as to ensure that students of
all demographic descriptors succeed?
………………………………………………………………….
On the
strength of the administrative talent Ed Graff has demonstrated thus far, he
deserves the security of a new contract;
he must then aggressively pursue the program that I identify above.
We then need
to organize to oust or isolate school board members Rebecca Gagnon, Bob Walser,
Nelson Inz, and Kim Ellison, monitoring the others for their enthusiastic support
of the five-point program.
Cecilia
Saddler, Ron Wagner, Brian Zambreno, Carla Steinbach (-Huther), and staff in
the Department of Teaching and Learning, Office of Black Male Achievement, and
Department of Indian Education must with great intentionality advance the
five-point program for academic excellence.
Graff must
oversee the implementation of the five-point program for the impartation of a
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.
For now,
Graff deserves his chance via a new contract.
Over time,
anyone who does not deliver an academic program of excellence to students who
have been waiting a very long time must be induced to depart the Minneapolis Public
Schools, to be replaced by people who can recognize the constituent elements of
an excellent education and deliver the requisite program.
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