Selection of a True Scholar as Chief Academic Officer is Vital to the Development of Knowledge-Intensive Education at the Minneapolis Public Schools

When former Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning Michael Thomas departed to become superintendent in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at the end of academic year 2017-2018, MPS Superintendent Ed Graff opted not to fill that position immediately.  Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning Cecilia Saddler continued as head of the Department of Teaching and Learning (which has responsibility for MPS academic programming) and was listed as one of the major leaders at the district on the MPS website, but she retained the title of Deputy that she had held under Thomas.

 

In October 2018, Graff tapped MPS Chief of Research, Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability (REAA) Eric Moore to take on the role of Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning while keeping his Chief of REAA position.  But within a month, intra-Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) pressures induced Graff to move toward designation of Moore as merely interim chief of academics, so that there is now as we approach April and May 2019 a search for a permanent head of academics.   

 

Eric Moore is one of the most able leaders at the Davis Center, heading a staff that meticulously records all manner of data for the school district, including disaggregated data of student academic proficiency.  Moore also understands many of the impediments facing the district in articulating and implementing an academic program to bring knowledge-intensive, carefully sequenced instruction to long-waiting MPS students.  But inasmuch as those intra-central office pressures undermined his ability to stay in the position, the selection of a new chief academic officer becomes the paramount initiative in an organization whose whole reason for being is to impart high-quality education to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

Incoherent, knowledge-deficient curriculum and low teacher quality are the key problems vexing the Minneapolis Public Schools.  The Department of Teaching and Learning is comprised of 30 current staff members whose master’s degrees have all been granted by departments, schools, and colleges of education, rather than by college or university departments in major academic fields (e. g., mathematics, physics, English literature, history, political science, economics, psychology, fine arts).  Superintendent Graff himself has a degree in elementary education (having the least rigorous course of study on any college or university campus) and an online education administration degree from the University of Southern Mississippi, obtained while he was an administrator in the school district of Anchorage, Alaska.  Thus it is that none of the current key decision-makers for the academic program of the Minneapolis Public Schools are academicians imbued with knowledge of that quality that any school district has the responsibility to impart to students.

 

The district of the Minneapolis Public Schools is a subset of urban school districts across the nation that share the same challenges.  Administrators and teachers across the United States all receive inadequate and even harmful training that produces putative educators who have none of the respect for knowledge that typifies college and university professors and other field specialists.  Graff, who has done excellent work in slimming the central bureaucracy and in assembling a very fine staff in finance, information, technology, operations, human resources, and research/evaluation, must now rise above his own deficiencies as an academician to select a chief academic officer who is a genuine scholar with depth of and respect for knowledge.

 

Before assessing the applications that have come in at this point, Graff should contact Linda Bevilacqua at the Core Knowledge Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, whose executive director, E. D. Hirsch, is the nation’s foremost leader in the development of knowledge-intensive curriculum and schools capable of imparting rigorous academic instruction to students of all demographic descriptors.  The search must be on at the Minneapolis Public Schools for an academic leader who is a scholar in a major academic discipline and who understands how to overhaul curriculum, raise teacher quality, reorganize the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning, and utilize associate superintendents so as to raise proficiency levels of MPS students in mathematics, reading, and in all major subject areas.

 

Consulting Ms. Bevilacqua and E.D. Hirsch himself is the first step that Graff and staff leading the search for a new chief academic officer should take.  The new chief of academics will need to be a scholar who understands the education establishment as it is but brings a very different view of curriculum and teaching.  With the needed chief of academics, the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools could be a model for locally centralized school districts across a nation whose citizens have a penchant for local control.  

 

A scholarly chief of academics possessing those skills necessary to overhaul curriculum and teacher quality and to implement knowledge-intensive education to students of all demographic descriptors would make our own public school system in Minneapolis a model for others and bring this nation closer to the democracy that we perceive ourselves to be.