Soon after I began my
investigation of the Minneapolis Public Schools in late summer 2014, Susanne
Griffin was hired by then Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson to be Chief of Academics,
Leadership, and Learning. Griffin was told that she was not in her
position, which paid $151,000, to make any major changes, that Johnson had her
own program (including Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, Shift, and
Community Partnership Schools), and that Griffin’s job was to implement that
program. Griffin in any case was an
administrator whose programmatic inclinations followed the knowledge-light
formulations of education professors, which would not have produced a rigorous
academic program for students of all demographic descriptors. Griffin had been a teacher, principal, and
administrator in the Rochester Public Schools and had taken time to follow an
interest in inner city youth by going to Atlanta to gain intensive experience
with students living in challenging urban environments. Griffin is a good person but too ruined by
education professors to be an academic leader.
She was not truly supportive of Focused Instruction, which had the
potential to incorporate a Core Knowledge curriculum. I ultimately advocated for Griffin’s
dismissal; she was demoted and then made
her exit during Ed Graff’s first year as superintendent.
Chief of Schools Michael Thomas
replaced Griffin as Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning but was locked
into Graff’s program. Graff was jealous
of Thomas’s popularity within the district and in the community. Thomas aggressively pursued positions
elsewhere and is now serving as superintendent in a district of Colorado
Springs, Colorado.
In the aftermath of Thomas’s
departure, the position of Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning has
been mostly vacant. Chief of Research,
Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability Eric Moore briefly (November 2018-January
2019) held the position. There was
opposition within the Department of Teaching and Learning to Moore’s
appointment, so that from January through June 2019 his title was scaled back
to interim status. A job posting was
issued for a permanent replacement, then Ed Graff decided that for now anyway
he would personally take the lead as academics leader.
Throughout this stretch of time
with the academic leadership position in flux, Cecilia Saddle has remained at
the position of Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning. She was passed over for the top position,
first in the immediate aftermath of Michael Thomas’s departure and then when the job was posted from
spring into summer 2019. During academic
year 2018-2019 she was effectively the head of the Department of Teaching and
Learning, which had been led for many years by an executive director but left
vacant upon the departure of Macarre Traynham after the latter’s short tenure in
academic year 2015-2016.
Thus, while she has largely been
scuttled aside from mainline academic decision-making, Cecilia Saddler is the
highest titular academic leader at the Minneapolis Public Schools. Saddler has been with the Minneapolis Public
Schools for a decade and a half as an English teacher, principal of South High
School, an associate superintendent, and then the current deputy chief
position.
Recall from part One, Facts,
that
the Deputy Chief of
Academics, Leadership and Learning
manages operational
connections to support associate
superintendents,
principals and teaching staff in accelerating
student achievement and
overall school improvement that is
aligned to the core values
and academic goals of Acceleration 2020
and that Saddler’s
academic credentials are as follows:
Cecilia Saddler (Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and
Learning)
Degrees Earned Institution at
Which Degree Was Earned
M. A., Teaching University of Iowa
B.A., English University
of Iowa
Saddler is currently working on a
doctorate in educational administration, which in combination with her master’s
degree in teaching would give her no advanced training in her field of English. As in the case of Graff and all other academic
decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools she is not a scholar of an
academic discipline (mathematics, natural science, history, government, English)
that should be at the core of curriculum of any public school system.
Predictably,
Saddler has been ruined as an academic decision-maker by education
professors. A quotation that accompanies
her identifiers included with her emails is from William Butler Yeats and opines
that the goal of education is
“not the filling
of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”
We certainly want
to light those fires, but we better fill that pail with lots of informational
fuel.
Saddler does not
grasp the importance of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education. She did not superintend rising academic achievement
levels as principal at South High School.
As associate superintendent, she did not mentor site principals to be
effective academic leaders. Cecilia
Saddler has been essentially a nonentity as Deputy Chief of Academics,
Leadership, and Learning. She made
little contribution to drafts for the Minneapolis Public Schools Comprehensive
District Design, although the script for the jargon-infested academic portion
of the Design is of the sort that Saddler mutters when she appears before the
Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
According to the
best information available to me, Cecilia Saddler was a good English
teacher. She should have gotten an advanced
degree in that field and stayed in the classroom. Instead, she climbed a bureaucratic ladder littered
in the familiar way with meaningless education degrees but at the top of which
lies a larger pot of money.
Deputy Chief of
Academics, Leadership and Learning Cecilia Saddler is among the host of
academic decision-makers who should be swept away in a general bureaucratic
cleaning at the Minneapolis Public Schools.
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