In the first three articles of this series I offered my readers strictly objective information from Ed Graff’s record as to credentials; tenure in several capacities for the Anchorage, Alaska, schools; and performance in the course of the two years and seven months that Graff has served as superintendent for the Minneapolis Public Schools. I challenged my readers to consider why I would examine the record provided and recommend strongly against reappointment.
………………………………………………………………………………
At the 12 March meeting of the Minneapolis
Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education, board members will be voting on a new
contract that has already been negotiated and drafted by district
officials.
Graff does not deserve a new contract.
Graff came to MPS from the Anchorage,
Alaska, public schools, where he had served for many years as an elementary
school teacher and administrator in several capacities, including building
principal, academic officer, and superintendent. At the end of Graff’s three-year term
(running from autumn 2013-spring 2016) as Anchorage superintendent, the school
board for that district voted not to offer Graff another contract. MPS board members Jenny Arneson and Rebecca
Gagnon (the latter no longer on the MPS board, having lost in the November 2018
election) visited Anchorage in early 2016;
they could not determine why the Anchorage board did not renew Graff’s
contract but found vague reasons to report favorably on his performance.
In my observations and interactions with
Graff upon his arrival, I found numerous warning signs that he would not be an
effective leader of the academic program of the Minneapolis Public
Schools. In addition to my regular
attendance at board and other meetings of the district, I attended four of the
five community meetings that Graff held, finding him evasive as to his
educational philosophy and vision for the district:
He told me to just watch what he did to
find out about these matters.
I have watched, and I do not like what I
have witnessed.
From what can be gleaned from documents
pertinent to the Graff program, priorities for MPS focus on social and
emotional learning (SEL), a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS), literacy,
and equity:
Social and emotional learning is touted
most prominently by the organization CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social,
and Emotional Learning and focuses on five chief goals for the social and
emotional development of students and school personnel: self-awareness, self-management,
decision-making, social awareness, and human relationship skills. The MTSS program seeks to identify student
academic and life challenges and to address these with targeted academic
assistance, psychological evaluation, and counseling. Literacy concerns the development of reading
skills via the new Benchmark reading curriculum. Equity follows provisions in the district’s
Equity and Diversity and Impact Assessment (EDIA) and another document, the
Educational Equity Framework, both of which convey a vow to provide equitable
treatment to all students and district personnel.
The striking observation about SEL,
literacy, and equity is that they should be assumed. We should be able to assume that students are
guided by caring adults in their social and emotional development. Reading is clearly one of two skills, along
with math, that is determinative of academic success. In the year 2019, equity in any moral and
rational universe should be an intrinsic value.
These three aspects of the Graff program certainly should be present and
observed throughout the district, but these are so clearly to be expected that
they should not be offered as major planks in a program for transformation of
the magnitude needed at the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The MTSS program would be promising but has
not been implemented, and there has been no thorough preparation of teachers
and administrators across the district to identify and provide the targeted
assistance to students fundamental to the promulgated program. Nor do officials in many quarters of the
Davis Center (MPS central offices) with whom I have talked have any faith that
the level of training for implementing the program can be provided in the near
future.
Student performance during the Graff years
has been flat or, for key demographic student categories, declining. This is stunningly consistent with the
performance of Anchorage district students during the Graff years as
superintendent in that location. During
Graff’s three years as superintendent in Anchorage, over 70 percent of African
American, Latino/Latina, and Native Alaskan/American Indian students did not
meet standards of proficiency in both reading and mathematics. In the Minneapolis Public Schools,
mathematics proficiency rates for African American and American Indian students
have declined from 19 percent for the academic year ending in 2016 to 17
percent in the academic year ending in 2018 and have declined also (to under
30%) for Latino/Latina students and for those on free/reduced price lunch. Similarly, despite a two percentage point
rise in overall reading proficiency, 25 percent or fewer MPS African American,
Latino/Latina, and American Indian students are proficient in reading as of
spring 2018.
Other than the four key goals (SEL, MTSS,
literacy, and equity), the other place to consider for indication of the Graff
program is in the MPS Comprehensive District Design, a draft for which
indicates a program for the provision of a well-rounded education to all
students, to be phased in until full implementation is achieved by academic
year 2021-2022. My examination of this
program, though, gives me little hope that any new strategic plan to be forged
from the Design and the four goals is likely to be any more successful than the
ill-fated Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan that is now effectively moribund.
Ed Graff has been very successful in paring
the Davis Center bureaucracy from approximately 650 to 450 staff members and in
making astute personnel evaluations and hires in the areas of finance,
information technology, operations, and human resources. But the MPS academic division is
extraordinarily weak. Nothing in the
Graff record at Anchorage or Minneapolis indicates that he can be the leader
with a vision and attainable goals for student academic achievement that is the
fundamental responsibility for the locally centralized school district.
Upon his urging, I have observed closely
what Ed Graff has done as MPS superintendent since July 2016:
That observation, yielding the presentation
given above, argues powerfully against the new contract on which board members
will vote at the Tuesday, 12 March meeting.
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