As you scroll on down this blog, you’ll
come next to the full text of the Annual Letter of the 2020 Advisory Committee,
the citizen group that evaluates the academic program of the Minneapolis Public
Schools as to the delivery of an education of equity.
In this article, I begin an analysis of
that letter, along with consideration of the fitness of Superintendent Ed Graff
to be the leader of the academic program of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
I attended the meeting of the 2020 Advisory
Committee on Thursday, 8 November, and one prior to it, a monthly meeting of
the MPS Finance Committee. Up until the
day on which those two meetings occurred, I had harbored severe doubts as to
the capacity of MPS Superintendent Ed Graff to be the leader of academic
programming that is at the core of a locally centralized school district’s
reason for being. But I had maintained
some hope, that in listening to his best advisers and in coming to understand
my own counsel (conveyed in Public Comments at regular meetings of the MPS
Board of Education and in multiple platforms of communication, saliently on
this blog), Ed Graff might find his way toward defining a program of academic
excellence.
That hope is now nil.
In the Finance Committee meeting, Ed Graff
was asked how the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools was going to stop
the flow of students out of MPS to other districts and to charter schools. Graff ticked off a list of music, art, and
other programs that MPS has that other districts do not, vowing to change the narrative
on the Minneapolis Public Schools by better publicizing the opportunities
provided by these programs.
Most of these programs have existed for a
long time, and none of these speak to key concerns of parents of MPS-exiting
students. Families are most often
seeking school sites that offer fewer behavioral distractions and opportunities
for much greater academic advancement;
proportionately many fewer families are seeking specialized programs not
focused on key academic subjects.
Contrast my own reply to this question,
were I to have fielded the same question:
We
are going to become a school district that offers the best knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete academic program in the nation.
We are going to establish a logically sequenced grade by grade
curriculum, focused at K-5 on mathematics, reading and literature, natural
science, history, government, economics, and the fine arts. We’ll continue this focus in middle school
(grades 6-8), with expanding opportunities to learn world languages. By the time they enter high school, all
students except those having significantly unusual intellectual challenges will
be prepared to take Advanced Placement courses in calculus, biology, chemistry,
world history, United States history,
and English; and to pursue in
addition to their core classes opportunities to take courses of personal
driving academic interests and in the fine, technological, and vocational arts.
Bring
your children into the Minneapolis Public Schools and we will give them the
very finest education in the nation. If
at any point in your child’s experience with us you think that the provision of
this education of excellence is not a reality, come to me and I will
immediately make any needed correction so as to fulfill my promise to you.
Knowing that the message conveyed above is
what would truly bring students back into or keep them in the Minneapolis
Public Schools, but that Ed Graff was incapable of responding with such an answer,
I ascended from the Assembly Room, where the Finance Committee meeting was held,
to the fifth floor of the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West
Broadway) for the meeting of the 2020 Advisory Committee.
………………………………………………………………………………..
The 2020 Advisory meeting maintained focus
of the October letter on World’s Best Workforce (WBWF) regulations
mandated by the Minnesota Legislature for providing an equitable education to
the diversity of the state’s students.
At one juncture, committee vice-chair David
Weingarten asked Graff if this committee should logically serve in significant
measure the function of the Teaching and Learning Committee, which ceased to
exist several years ago. Graff gave a
wandering answer that gave a meek affirmative to Weingarten’s query but conveyed
no genuine desire to have any public group looking into the functioning and
effectiveness of the key MPS Department of Teaching and Learning.
In the course of the meeting, Graff and
other members of his staff acknowledged that implementing the new Benchmark
reading curriculum was hampered by the poor training that teachers get in their
college or university programs. One of
the committee members asked Graff what, given that poor level of training, could
be done to assure that teachers acquired the ability to implement the Benchmark
curriculum.
Graff’s response was largely to restate the
problem while admitting that he himself had not been properly trained as an
aspiring elementary teacher, having had professors who asserted the efficacy the
Whole Language approach, which advocates letting the child learn the mechanics
of reading by engagement with lively stories.
Graff said that he and his fellow elementary teacher aspirants were told
that phonics do not matter but that he himself had said silently, “Well, yeah,
they do.”
That was as incisive as Graff got on the
matter of addressing poor teacher training, except to say that teachers would
be given professional development in how to implement the Benchmark
curriculum. He never gave any assurance
that this professional development (“PD,” in education establishment parlance)
would be thorough or extensive enough to assure that even most teachers would
have the requisite skill. And what he
either would not admit, cannot bring himself to confront, or simply cannot
comprehend, is that there is broader problem of teacher quality, beyond the
matter of just teaching reading, that will never be addressed by traditional
professional development.
A few minutes later, after Graff and MPS
staff members tried furiously to absorb time and keep me from speaking, knowing
that I had asked chairperson Victoria Balko to make a comment, the latter said
to me, “You wanted to make a comment?”
“Yes,” I said, noting that I am near
completion of a book on the Minneapolis Public Schools that includes information
compiled on teacher training programs and MPS curriculum, then continuing, “David
and Steve asked good questions but they did not get their questions answered:
“First, curriculum at the Minneapolis
Public Schools is abominably weak, especially at K-5. Students do not know, by way of example, that
the 1800s are in the 19th century; that the 13th, 14th, and
15th Amendments extended constitutional freedom and equality to those
who had been enslaved; or any broad or
deep knowledge sets in history, science, literature, or the fine arts. Middle school curriculum is not much better,
so by the time students get to high school, there is a mad scramble to teach
everything, now including ethnic-specific courses, when that basic information
should have already been imparted, so that students could take more specialized
courses.
[Graff had decided as I was speaking that he
needed to deposit something in a trash receptacle, the first time he had moved
from his seat at the meeting.]
“Second, teacher training is wretched generally,
and aspiring elementary school teachers in particular learn nothing of history,
government, natural science, quality literature, or the fine arts; many are math phobic. They matriculate in the weakest program on
any college or university campus.
“The situation is much worse than you
think, much worse than you probably want to admit. But until you address the grave problems as
to curriculum and teacher quality, all of this is just talk. It’s just talk.”
Neither Graff nor anyone on his staff
replied in contravention of my comments.
They could not, because they knew that I
would bring the truth back to them, and the truths that I speak are those that
are widely known but neglectfully avoided, going right to the core of our K-12
dilemma.
In the next article of the series, I will
begin an analysis of the Letter of the 2020 Advisory Committee, which conveys
as much confusion concerning K-12 education as do the vacillating and
incoherent utterances of the academically inept Graff.
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