When members of the Minneapolis Public Schools
(MPS) Board of Education voted 8-0 (KerryJo Felder was not in attendance) on
Tuesday, 12 March, to extend a new contract to Superintendent Ed Graff and
expressed their reasons for trusting his academic leadership, the current
condition of the school district reached clarity:
There are no prospects for achieving academic
excellence under this superintendent and even less with this composition of the
MPS Board of Education.
There is not enough substance to the
four-point program focused on social and emotional learning, multi-tiered system
of support, literacy, and equity; or the MPS Comprehensive Design;
to promote hopes that a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education can be
imparted to students under this superintendent or this board.
The board is even worse than the superintendent
as to matters of academic import. There is no agreed upon driving
philosophy expressed by the board, and what can be gleaned from member comments
is dauntingly negative. There is an anti-assessment slant to the views of
the board; Bob Walser has been silent of late but for many weeks was the
chief opponent of assessments, among which at the Minneapolis Public Schools
are the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) and the National Assessment
of Academic Progress; now Ira Jourdain has suddenly surged to the fore
with anti-assessment comments.
But no one on the board seems interested in
academic assessments or the close questions of highly adept research and
evaluation chief Eric Moore, as was Tracine Asberry during her tenure on the MPS
Board of Education. Nor does this board seem very interested when I cite
the many examples of wretched teaching and classroom situations: an
English teacher at North High School who assigned the Autobiography of
Malcom X but seemed to know nothing about the life of the great leader
herself; a geometry class at the same school that was so out of control
that students were learning nothing about the subject; a free day for
watching movies given to all students on Friday, 8 March, at Franklin Middle
School, wherein a social studies teacher had in a major erroneous comment
placed Mayan civilization near the Amazon River.
MPS Superintendent Ed Graff holds a B.A. in
Elementary Education and an M. A. in Educational Administration. Pursuing these degrees was professionally
rational for Graff, inasmuch as he aspired to the noble position of elementary
teacher before taking the route to more lucrative remuneration
in becoming an administrator. But elementary education programs present the
least academically substantive curriculum on any college campus; and the courses in Graff’s educational
administration degree program at Southern Mississippi University were mostly
online. Nowhere in his university training
did he deeply study any major discipline (e. g., mathematics, biology, English
literature, history, economics).
Three members (KerryJo Felder, Kim Caprini,
Ira Jourdain) of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education hold no
four-year college degree, and the board is in general devoid of academic
acuity. This, taken together with
Graff’s insubstantial academic training, presents the spectacle of an
academically disinclined leadership for an institution that exists to provide academic
knowledge sets to students of all demographic descriptors.
That is a conundrum that highlights the
silliness of the MPS Board of Education vote on 12 March 2019
and argues for eventual jettisoning of Graff
as superintendent and the overhaul of the current board, beginning with the
elections of November 2020.
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