The Annual Letter from the 2020 Advisory
Committee mentioned in Article #1 of this series, begins as follows:
2020 Advisory Committee
October 11, 2018
Annual Letter from the 2020 Advisory
Committee
Minneapolis Public Schools
1250 West Broadway
Minneapolis
MN 55411
Dear Superintendent Graff, Minneapolis
Public School Board, and District Chiefs:
This letter is written on behalf of the
World’s Best Workforce Advisory Committee to Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS),
under Minnesota Statutes, section 120B.11, school districts are to develop a
World’s Best Workforce (WBWF) Annual Report and report summary for each school
year. In addition, the legislation
requires that there be a district advisory committee that provides
recommendations regarding rigorous academic standards, student achievement
goals and measures, district assessments, and program evaluations. In MPS, these recommendations come in the
form of an annual letter, and the following is the letter from the 2017-2018
school year.
………………………………………………………………………….
There is given then a table of contents
that lists the topics of the various sections:
Action Steps Requested from the Committee,
with Introduction; Inclusion and Access,
with Advisory 2020 Recommendations; Literacy
and Curriculum, with Advisory 2020 Recommendations; Graduation/ Career and College Readiness,
with Advisory 2020 Recommendations; Relationships
and Social and Emotional Learning, with Advisory 2020 Recommendations; Relationships and Social and Emotional
Learning, with Advisory 2020 Recommendations.
A major problem with the letter and the
topics of coverage is that the categories of the action steps are derived from
Superintendent Graff’s own program, informed also by the now functionally
defunct Acceleration 2020 with its
ambitious academic goals (devoid of an plan for attaining those goals) of 1)
Improved Student Outcomes; 2) Equity; 3)
Family and Community Partnership;
4) Effective Teachers, School Leaders, and Staff; 5) Stewardship; and 6) Resources for Students and Schools.
If the program of note were of high
quality, with the capability of improving student acquisition of key knowledge
and skill sets, as would be the case if proposed by a professional staff of
academicians, then the fact that Graff’s program drives the letter would be
appropriate. This would be the case, for
example, if a medical team or a law firm were to ask for community responses to
services offered.
But almost all decision-makers in the
public schools have been produced by the wretched teacher training programs of
departments, schools, and colleges of education, which is to say they are
academic lightweights with little respect for the knowledge and skills that are
the reason for any legitimate system of K-12 education.
Thus, public school central office types go
hunting for approval behind a façade of asking for input, at the same time
driving the discussion with their errantly identified priorities.
Consider the first main section of the body
of the letter, interspersed with my comments:
Action Steps
Requested from the Committee
1.
Inclusion and Access
a. The
district structures their communications, school pathway opportunities,
curriculum choices, staff hiring practices, and marketing to maximize the
message to the greater community the value-added impact of a diverse community
of learners can have on the social, emotional, and academic learning for all of
our students and their families.
My
Comments
Wow,
that’s quite a sentence. Everybody got
all of that?
And,
if you do, do you agree?
Do we
really want to structure all that is done at the Minneapolis Public Schools
with focus on what we are selling in the way of inclusion, access, and
diversity?
Or
should we actually be devising the best possible academic program with
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum that is necessarily inclusive of
the great international streams of knowledge productive of the human cultural
inheritance?
This
sentence (a) should in fact be rendered as follows:
At
the Minneapolis Pubic Schools, we insist on the best possible academic program
with knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum that is necessarily
inclusive of the great international streams of knowledge productive of the
human cultural inheritance.
Next in the letter comes the following:
b.
The school board decisions and school district policies be reviewed and
structured to ensure that our learning communities from schools to classrooms
to after school clubs be inclusive and accessible to all; and that the board’s decision-making be
consistent and aligned to existing district-wide MPS mission, vison, and
values, as successfully shifting the behaviors or initiatives of such a large
district can take years. There needs to be inclusion for students with
both seen and unseen disabilities.
My
Comments
This
sentence (b) should just be a substantive extension of my (a) above, so that it
reads as follows:
All
decisions of the MPS Board of Education and Davis Center staff should be
determined so as to further the aims of
the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete, culturally inclusive curriculum that
informs all of our programming during and after the regular school day.
Next in the letter comes the following:
c.
Report back as to how the comprehensive plan aligns with legislative
goals of WBWF.
d. Review programs not only in terms of budget
and academics, but for how well they advance the district goals of equity and
inclusion for all.
e.
sites should be held accountable for ensuring that the rich diversity of
the students is also reflected in the school, classroom, curriculum, and staff.
f.
Access to early education and High 5 should be increased to add
locations, delivery models, and availability.
My
Comments
The
last sentence in the section under (1) Inclusion and Access should
incorporate all of this verbiage, to read as follows
The
MPS district-wide assessment and all hiring practices should fulfill the
diversity, inclusion, and equity goals of WBWF laws and monitored for alignment
with those goals. Equitable access to early childhood education and High 5
should prevail, with necessary attention to locations, delivery models, and
availability.
The
next category under Action Steps Requested from the Committee is as
follows, with my comments:
2. Literacy
and Curriculum
a. Improve
reading for students. Strategies to do
this include: Increase teachers’ ability
to teach reading to students; provide a
comprehensive pedagogical professional development reading strategy for all
Pre-K through 3 teachers; use a
curriculum with reading foundations that include phonics; increase focus on early childhood reading
skills.
b. Work
more closely with community partners to promote math and literacy connections
in their programs to better align out of school time and in school time for
students.
c.
We are requesting the data report broken down by school, race, ELL,
Special Ed, and HHM regarding the students who are identical as not meeting
criteria under the Reading Well by Third Grade Law and the interventions that
are provided.
d. Audit
curriculum to ensure we are providing high quality, effective, and culturally
relevant curriculum to students.
My
Comments
The
section should be condensed by combining all of its separate categories as
follows:
Improve
reading for students by thoroughly training teachers to implement a curriculum
that explicitly teaches phonics and phonemic awareness and provides high quality
subject area literature for the development of vocabulary, comprehension, and
fluency. We request that you train educational support staff and volunteers to
assist teachers in rendering reading instruction; that you disaggregate the data by school,
race/ethnicity, special education, and homeless/ highly mobile status; and that you audit curriculum for consistency
with the Reading Well by Third Grade Law and appropriate aggressive remedial
instruction as necessary.
The
next category under Action Steps Requested from the Committee is as
follows, with my comments:
3.
Graduation/ Career and College Readiness
a.
Add ethnic studies as a requirement for all students, starting in high
school and then continuing to expand down into lower grade levels.
b.
Add Career and Technical Education (CTE) or Career Readiness
requirements for graduation.
c.
Develop comprehensive post-graduation programs and clarify to students
what their options are for graduation.
d.
The district should offer courses that provide students with life skills
to prepare them for their adult lives and life experiences outside the
classroom.
My
Comments
Ideas
expressed under this category need serious rethinking. The committee seems to accept the “let’s do
it all in high school" approach of the system as it is. My presentation under this category would be
as follows:
We request
that district decision-makers overhaul curriculum for knowledge intensity, for
delivery in grade by grade sequence throughout the PreK-12 years. Curriculum for the Pre K-5 years should focus
on mathematics, literature and reading, history, government, economics, natural
science (biology, chemistry, physics), and the fine arts (visual and musical);
should
continue this focus in middle school (grades 6-8), with expanding opportunities
for studying world languages; and by
high school (grades 9-12) should prepare all students (with the exception of those
students with significantly unusual intellectual challenges) to take Advanced
Placement (AP) courses in calculus, biology, chemistry, physics, world history,
United States history, and English; and
during those high school years afford students ample courses for the pursuit of
driving personal academic interests and interests in the fine, technological,
and vocational arts.
The
next category under Action Steps Requested from the Committee is as
follows, with my comments:
4.
Relationships and Social Emotional Learning
a.
Increase efforts around Social and Emotional Learning
b.
Increase educators’ voice in program decisions.
c.
The school board honor the Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment (EDIA)
process when making district-wide resource decisions and especially when the
decision is related to significant resource allocations and/or impact on MPS
services to students across the district.
d.
Improve the environmental quality of the student learning space.
My
Comments
I
would word the recommendations under this category as follows:
Acknowledging
the values expressed in the Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment (EDIA)
process and in Superintendent Ed Graff’s focus on Social and Emotional Learning
(SEL), we are of the conviction that these values should be assumed as vital to
the delivery of knowledge-intensive education by knowledgeable, pedagogically skilled,
and culturally sensitive teachers.
Recruitment, training, and retention processes should result in teachers
and other staff who demonstrate in their actions the values of equity and
emotional responsiveness by imparting a knowledge-intensive education of
excellence to students of all demographic descriptors.
…………………………………………………………………
My next article in this series will focus
on the introduction to the greater part of the
Annual Letter from the 2020 Advisory
Committee and the detailed recommendations under each of the main categories.
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