Toward An Assessment of Academic Year 2017-2018 at the Minneapolis Public Schools

Academic year 2017-2018 was the second in the tenure of Superintendent Ed Graff, whose employment with the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) began on 1 July 2016.  During two years as superintendent, Graff has done a superlative job in reducing the tremendous bureaucratic burden that previous administrations have inflicted upon Minneapolis students, teachers, and community members.  When Graff assumed office, there had been a faux reduction of the bureaucracy at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) under Interim Superintendent Michael Goar;  under budgetary exigencies, Goar had wielded an unsophisticated budgetary hatchet in paring Davis Center staff from well over 600 Davis Center staff members to five hundred fifty-five (555).

               

In the first months of the Graff tenure, figures that I accumulated indicated that the bureaucratic bloat had recurred:  The number of Davis Center staff members grew back like insidious weeds in a garden, to six hundred fifty-one (651).  But from that point on, Graff began a persistent regimen of eliminating extraneous positions and unproductive staff members, so that at the present time, on the cusp of academic year 2018-2019, staff composition at the Davis Center is just four hundred twenty-seven (427), a remarkable 34% reduction.

 

This is an extraordinary accomplishment. 

 

When I commented to an MPS equipment and building maintenance employee that I was impressed at the time of the Goar reductions, his reply was that yeah, but others have tried and ultimately failed:  Special interests reassert themselves and the bloat always resumes.  And, indeed, for a while that seemed to be the case in the early Graff tenure;  but when he got serious about Davis Center staff reductions, his commitment was genuine and fervid.  Many people know of this accomplishment and have expressed their admiration, so that Graff has received a bevy of positive  reinforcement for this major achievement, especially in a budget that had produced a $33 million deficit, in an administration that is going to voters with dual referenda issues in November 2018.

 

But student achievement levels have been essentially flat.  For key demographic groups, particularly African American and American Indian males, academic performance has declined.

 

Thus, Ed Graff;  Teaching and Learning Department head Cecilia Saddler;  Associate Superintendents Ron Wagner, Brian Zambreno, and Carla Steinbach;  and elementary and secondary school leaders at the Davis Center and school sites must now show how they are going to articulate a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum, delivered in logical grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors.  They must detail how they are going to retrain teachers capable of delivering such as curriculum.  They will have to explain how they are going to design and implement a program of skill remediation (tutoring) for struggling learners.  They have the responsibility to present a comprehensive plan for reaching out to the families of students struggling with challenges of poverty and functionality.  And Graff must continue to pare and rationalize the central staff bureaucracy so as to capture some of the resources necessary to implement the other four programmatic features for the overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

In the articles to appear on this blog, you will read and examine sequentially the information and data pertinent to the lamentable MPS student academic achievement record;  the wretched performance of the Office of Black Male Achievement and Department of Indian Education;  the paring of positions at the Department of Teaching and Learning, and thus the implied pressure that staff members in that Department should be feeling to design a viable academic program;  and the terrible achievement levels of students at schools for which the associate superintendents have responsibility.  You will be able to read a full review of my five-point program for overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools, so that MPS becomes a model for other locally centralized school districts;  and you will be given information for examination of prospects for moving toward that model in academic year 2018-2019.

 

We are approaching important temporal junctures in the K-12 Revolution.


Read all of my articles with great care.


The time is now.


The revolution is in motion and shall proceed relentlessly.