An Account of the Current Situation at the Minneapolis Public Schools, Contextualized with Reference to National and State Circumstances as Pertinent to K-12 Education

As I reach my conclusions in the run-up to the November 2018 publication of my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, the following account of the current situation in the Minneapolis Public Schools as I tap this article out on Friday, 5 October 2018, will provide the reader with important themes that are emerging in the book.  Note first contextualization by circumstances at the national and state level.

 

National and state K-12 education policies in the United States have little effect except to provide funding and programs, the latter of which are really just titled shells of unreality that promise much, deliver nothing worthwhile, and often serve as distractions that produce deleterious effects.  Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, student performance on the Minnesota Basic Skills Test demonstrated that staff at the schools of Minnesota could not even provide a middle school level of education to prospective high school graduates.  With the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs), student performance languished during the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era (2001-2015) of damning disaggregated data.  When political forces on both the left and right responded to those embarrassing results by gutting NCLB, we got an intervening period of Race to the Top during which Mark Dayton and Brenda Cassellius did the bidding of the teachers union Education Minnesota by ending the MCAs as graduation requirements, applying for a waiver, devising the murky Multiple Measurement Rating System, then generating another hoax, the even murkier North Star Accountability System as a merely legally required response to the also thematically nebulous federal Every Student Succeeds Act (2015).

 

In a context in which federal and state policies are variously ineffective or actually damaging to the delivery of an excellent education, local school districts have none of the nationwide continuity of excellence that is the case in the centralized educational systems of East Asia and those of Germany, Canada, Poland, and Australia whose students perform with such mathematics and reading mastery on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).

 

In the United States, our mania for local control means that despite all of the national and state distractions and prevarications, no effective K-12 policies or programs emanate from those levels of governance.  Locally centralized school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) are on their own.

 

At MPS, Superintendent Ed Graff and staff have generated a program focusing on the four goals of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) for skill acquisition, literacy, and equity.  A Comprehensive Assessment Design admits that student performance will continue to lag during this academic year of 2018-2019 but promises to provide a well-rounded education of excellence that will begin to demonstrate improvement of student academic proficiency rates during 2019-2020 and be at full effectiveness by 2022.

 

The four goals and the promises of the Comprehensive Assessment Design are insufficient to attain academic excellence.  At best, students will in order of the goals be better emotionally centered, get logically targeted assistance for acquisition of basic skills, read better, and get all of these things regardless of their demographic descriptors.

 

In addition to overseeing the development of a coherent but insufficient educational design, Graff has proved himself highly adroit as a slimmer of the central bureaucratic burden and as a judge of talent, tapped in the personages of Human Resources Chief Maggie Sullivan, Operations Chief Karen DeVet, Information Technology Chief Fadi Fahil, Finance Chief Ibrahima Diop, Chief of Staff Suzanne Kelly, and Research and Accountability Chief Eric Moore.  The latter has now been designated for the additional, most important, role at the head of the academic division, with an opportunity at long last to put the details into a prevailing plan that will bring academic excellence to the students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

In this effort, Moore is ably assisted by the very experienced educator Cecilia Saddler, who serves in rank just under Moore as the Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning.  These two must now energize the talents of Associate Superintendents Ron Wagner, Carla Steinbach, and Brian Zambreno and Special Education Executive Director Rochelle Cox (Cox is an especially perceptive and astute educator);  and evaluate the job performance of the fifteen or so key people in the Department of Teaching and Learning who are supposed to implement successful programs for elementary and secondary students.

 

To provide substance for fulfilling the four goals and attaining the best aims of the Comprehensive Assessment Design, Moore and Saddler must now focus relentlessly on curricular overhaul, instituting a knowledge-intensive curriculum of the Core Knowledge type, for delivery in logical grade by grade sequence throughout the K-12 years;  and they must go far beyond conventional Professional Development to implement a program for thorough retraining of teachers capable of imparting a knowledge-intensive curriculum.

 

With his adroit personnel decisions, bureaucratic slimming, and coherent district deign,  Superintendent Graff has given the students of the Minneapolis Public Schools their best possibility for receiving an excellent education in many decades.

 

But all will founder in the absence of that relentless focus on knowledge-intensive curriculum and the development of a knowledgeable teaching staff.

 

Inasmuch as they are in the top positions for devising an academic program of excellence at the level of the locally centralized school district, at which action is most important in the United States, Graff, Moore, and Saddler are in a position to achieve greatness via the manifestation of a model of educational excellence.

 

Collossal failure or magnificent success both loom when people are given opportunity for doing something seminally important.

 

The lives of the 36,000 young people whom they serve demands that Graff, Moore, and Saddler design and implement a knowledge-intensive academic program through which “successful” becomes the elegantly clear adjectival descriptor of their efforts.