Article #4
Analyzing the Record of Minneapolis Public
Schools
Superintendent Ed Graff:
Programmatic Inadequacy
In this article I begin to analyze the Graff
record, breaking from the objective data presentation to explain why he does
not deserve a new contract.
………………………………………………………………………………
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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