Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Superintendent
Ed Graff and senior staff at the school district are currently soliciting
applications for the position, if current nomenclature is maintained, of Chief
of Academics, Leadership, and Learning.
As the selection is made, the position title would be best simplified as
“Chief Academic Officer.” There is a
high degree of redundancy in the use of both “Academics” and “Learning.” Reasoning
for including “Leadership” in the title lies in the position’s supervisory
function over building principals, but this function can be maintained without
reference in the title. Simplification to
“Chief Academic Officer” would focus on the most important responsibility of
the occupant of the position and the prime focus for the school district as a
whole: academics.
This positon was vacant until October 2018,
following Michael Thomas’s departure to take the superintendent position in a
Colorado Springs, Colorado, district in summer 2018. In October 2018, Chief of Research,
Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability (REAA) Eric Moore was tapped for the
Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning position, while maintaining REAA
leadership. Opposition to Moore’s
occupancy of the position at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West
Broadway), especially within the Department of Teaching and Learning, induced
Graff within a month to start labeling Moore an interim chief for the position
and to begin a search for a permanent head of academics.
In a school district with one of the best
finance departments in the nation and high quality leadership for information
technology, operations, and human resources, the academic division is the district’s
weakness. This is both lamentable and
understandable. The brutal reality is
that academic administrators, building principals, and teachers are all trained
in departments, schools, and colleges of education. Education professors who preside over classes
in teacher training departments operate with a degraded ideology that devalues acquisition
of a set body of knowledge in favor of curriculum driven by teacher and student
interest of the moment.
Such an approach works to the detriment of
high achievement in mathematics and the development of a broad and deep vocabulary
across a panoply of subjects that should include biology, chemistry, physics,
history, economics, psychology, world religions, world history, American history,
specific ethnic histories, literature, English usage, and the fine (visual and
musical) arts. Even those students at
the Minneapolis Public Schools who manage to graduate walk across the stage to
claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only. They are neither college nor career ready, as
the district’s slogan falsely proclaims that they are.
The school district of the Minneapolis
Public Schools needs a chief academic officer who has not been ruined by education
professors and the lightweight courses offered at both the undergraduate and
graduate level for academic administrators and teachers. The chief academic officer should be a scholar
of a major discipline (e. g., mathematics, chemistry, history, literature,
economics) who values knowledge and is capable of designing an entirely new
curriculum, carefully sequenced grade by grade, so that by the end of grade 5
students have already acquired a bevy of knowledge sets in the natural
sciences, mathematics, history, government, economics, literature, English
usage, and the fine arts. These subjects
should drive the curriculum throughout the preK-12 years; beginning in middle school and with expansive
force at the high school level, there should be generous offerings also in foreign
languages and the technical and vocational arts.
Excellent education is a matter of excellent
teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum in the
liberal, technological, and vocational arts throughout the preK-12 years. An excellent teacher is a professional of
deep and broad knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge
to students of all demographic descriptors.
A locally centralized school district such as the Minneapolis Public
Schools must be designed to deliver knowledge-intensive education to students
of all demographic descriptors.
A chief academic officer needs to overhaul
the academic program in five ways:
1) Curriculum
must be redesigned for knowledge intensity and careful grade by grade sequence.
2) Teachers must be retrained to become pedagogically
adept as bearers of knowledge at all levels;
a rigorous new Masters of Liberal Arts degree should be designed especially
for preK-5 teachers, and only discipline-specific masters degrees should be accepted
for middle school and high school teachers.
3)
An hour a day in K-5 classes should be set aside for enrichment
opportunities; these should encompass
remedial instruction in mathematics and reading as necessary, and for those who
are functioning at grade level should offer opportunities for academic exploration
according to driving personal interest.
4)
The new Chief Academic Officer should work closely with a well-staffed new
Department of Resource Provision and Referral with a bevy of new personnel comfortable
in direct interaction with struggling families right where they live.
5)
This new head of academics should also in cabinet meetings argue
forcefully for continued slimming and rationalization of the central bureaucracy
so as to capture resources for the above four purposes.
Academics is the prime reason for the
existence of the locally centralized school district. For reasons expressed and implied above, the
selection of a new Chief Academic Officer is the most important matter for the
attention of Superintendent Ed Graff and his staff at the Minneapolis Public
Schools.
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