Dec 12, 2019

Ibrahima Diop. Karen Devet, Rochelle Cox, and Sara Etzel Have Done Their Jobs--- Now Aimee Fearing and the Department of Teaching and Learning Must Get Help to Compensate for the Manifest Deficiencies of Academic Decision-Makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools

Ibrahima Diop is one of the two or three best school district chief financial officers in the United States.

 

Karren Devet is a supremely intelligent person who is working hard to capture needed resources via redesign of the irrational transportation system and other operational matters that she inherited at the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Rochelle Cox is a clear thinker and compassionate person who has superintended one of the best parts of the emerging Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Comprehensive Design.

 

Sara Etzel is a powerful speaker and forceful advocate for Career and Technical Education (CTE) and---  critically important---  she understands that students who pursue CTE options should have a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education that MPS should be offering to students of all demographic descriptors and vocational aspirations.

 

Ibrahima Diop, Karen Devet, Rochelle Cox, and Sara Etzel are major human assets of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

This cannot be said for Aimee Fearing and her fellow academic lightweights in the Department of Teaching and Learning that she leads.

 

The inadequacy of academic decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools is the reality that will have Achilles nursing his heel as he rises symbolically over the developing Comprehensive Design.

 

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The academic strategies put forth in the emerging versions of the MPS District Design last spring were similar and inevitably incoherent.

 

Exactly who put together this mishmash is not clear, even to an apt research detective such as I.

 

Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning Cecilia Saddler knew that her days at MPS were numbered;  whatever input she put into the hodgepodge that she presented to the MPS Board of Education was predictable for her predilection toward the debased jargon that she had imbibed from her education professors.

 

The Department of Teaching and Learning staff was in flux and never up to the task of designing knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.

 

This remains the case as applicable to Aimee Fearing and staff now assembled, with a number of holdovers and a few additions at the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning that Fearing now leads as executive director.

 

Fearing attended the low-ranked University of Northwestern (not to be confused with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois [Chicago area]) in St. Paul as an undergraduate, majoring in English as a Second Language.  She holds meaningless masters and doctoral degrees in education programs that added not one whit to her limited academic knowledge base.

 

Many staff members in the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning hold even undergraduate degrees in education and any graduate degrees held come overwhelmingly from departments, colleges, or schools of education, rather than in academic departments for serious students of mathematics, the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics), English usage and literature, the social sciences and humanities (government, geography, economics, history) or the fine arts (visual and musical).

 

Superintendent Ed Graff, who is effectively now acting as his own chief academic officer, has proven to be a masterful administrator in nonacademic matters---   but he, too, is an intellectual lightweight who holds no degree in an academic subject.

 

Thus, as is the case under the academically lightweight education professors under whom they have so inadequately trained, neither Aimee Fearing nor her staff have any chance of designing a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete academic program that first of all follows the law by teaching Minnesota State Academic Standards that are not now being taught;  but goes far beyond these to articulate an academic program that witnesses grade 5 students who have excellent initial knowledge bases in those key subject areas given above, continues to develop that knowledge base in middle school, and sends students into high school prepared to take Advanced Placement courses and to exercise preferences according to those educational and vocational goals that they envision for themselves in their post-secondary lives.

 

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Ibrahima Diop, Karen Devet, Rochelle Cox, and Sara Etzel constitute major human assets for the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

This is not true for Aimee Fearing and staff at the Department of Teaching and Learning.

 

They must get assistance from professors of legitimate academic fields for the design of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum to draw upon when articulating the key academic principles of the MPS Comprehensive Design.

 

In 1937, MPs had over 80,00 students;  as late as the year 2000 the district had 50,000 and even in 2005 had 40,000 students.  The loss of students in recent years has been precipitous, so that the total is now 33,380.

 

Parents and students opt for lousy charter and alternative schools---   and in some cases do a little better at Ascension, Harvest Prep, and KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program ) Academy---   trying desperately to find a safe, hospitable learning environment.

 

If academic decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools want to get the students of Minneapolis back into public schools that should be designed for their academic development,  they must exercise that courage that they claim as inspirational in words appropriated from paragons of bold action, Martin Luther King and Sitting Bull. 

 

Courage in this case will involve recognizing their own intellectual inadequacies, turning to academicians who can design knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum and thoroughly train teachers capable of imparting that curriculum;  they must then bring on staff people who are comfortable on the streets and in the homes of students facing the greatest life challenges.

 

Failure to follow this course will diminish any benefit from the MPS Comprehensive Design and result very probably in a student population base of 25,000 and the collapse of our vital Minneapolis manifestation of the locally centralized school district by 2025.    

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