Selection of Scholarly Advocate of Knowledge-Intensive Curriculum as Chief Academic Officer at the Minneapolis Public Schools is of Paramount Importance

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.