Superintendent Ed Graff is an academic
mediocrity and in that regard he is typical of his profession.
Soon after Superintendent Bernadeia
Johnson resigned (effective January 2015), I told the Minneapolis Public
Schools Board of Education that they should not conduct a nationwide search
because finding a superior candidate with conventional training is a near
impossibility. Although Michael Goar had
been brought in (Johnson says at her own behest) to serve strangely as Chief
Executive Officer (that title [unusual in the locally centralized school
district] would signal similar duties to a superintendent), and he did quickly
become a leading candidate for the post, I was myself thinking at the time of
Michael Thomas, then Chief of Schools with administrative oversight of the
associate superintendents. “Go
in-house,” I told members of the board in one of my messages during Public
Comments at a meeting in spring 2015 as preparations for the search began. “You’re not going to find anyone more
qualified than some of our own administrators [I was not yet openly touting
Thomas, thinking that Eric Moore and others were also viable vehicles of
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education];
superintendent candidates with the typical certifications have all been
trained in the same way, and thus all have been intellectually ruined by
education professors.”
The board went ahead with the search,
botched that search in multiple ways, opted ultimately for Graff, who indeed
has a conventional profile, and who has been just as ineffective in Minneapolis
as he was in Anchorage.
……………………………………………………………………………
Graff has proved himself to be an able
administrator, paring the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West
Broadway) from approximately 650 to 450 staff members and giving scope for
brilliant Chief of Finance Ibrahima Diop to work the district out of a
financial tangle and devise a structurally balanced budget. But Graff has no idea of how to design a
preK-12 curriculum toward the impartation of broad and deep knowledge to
students.
In perusing my presentation of Graff’s
training and experience in Part One, Facts, note that Graff has a degree in
elementary education from the University of Alaska, Anchorage; and an online master’s degree in educational
administration from the University of Southern Mississippi. Elementary education, while constituting the
requisite training for one of the nation’s most important jobs, features the
weakest academic training on any college or university campus. The online degree from a lower tier
university is suspect and in any case whatever of value is learned in the
pertinent courses is not focused on any subject area (mathematics, natural
science, history, government, or English) that should be at the core of any
preK-12 curriculum.
Accordingly, three and a half years
into Graff’s tenure at the Minneapolis Public Schools (his contract was renewed
in spring 2019), student academic performance (see the pertinent presentation
in Part One) is essentially flat and for some key demographic groups has gone
down. As I have repeatedly told Graff
and members of the board, for academic performance to advance for all
demographic groups, 1) curriculum is going to have to be overhauled to deliver
carefully sequenced knowledge and skill sets throughout the preK-12 years; 2) teachers must be thoroughly
retrained; 3) a Department of Resource Provision and
Referral must be created and staffed with people comfortable connecting with
students and families living at the urban core, right where they live; 4)
highly intentional academic development experiences must be provided to
all students, focused on basic skills or enrichment opportunities as necessary
and appropriate; and 5) the bureaucracy
must be pared. Only the last of the
five-point program has been in some measure realized.
We must transform locally centralized
school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools so as to impart to our
young people a knowledge-intensive curriculum, delivered by teachers who are
themselves bearers of knowledge.
To do that, citizens, including those who
claim an interest in the public schools, must become much more discerning in
their understanding of the system that fails so many of our precious young
people.
Ed Graff’s assumption of a second
three-year term (should he defy the odds and actually stay the full
three-year [academic years 2019-2020, 2020-2021, and 2021-2022] term of the
current contract, totaling six years for a tenure that began with his first
contract on 1 July 2016) came at the behest of the members of the MPS Board of
Education, who voted 8-0 (KerryJo Felder was absent) on 14 March 2019 to offer
the second contract.
Graff is a salient
example of the academically mediocre superintendent inflicted on our young
people by departments, schools, and colleges of education; and an example of the mediocrity witnessed
generally among academic decision-makers and teachers in our locally
centralized school systems.
In opting for a lightweight master’s degree, from an institution of
meager quality, while serving as an administrator in the Anchorage School
District, Graff exercised the option typical of the locally centralized school
district administrator, who seeks not knowledge but rather enhanced
professional remuneration in ascending the bureaucratic ladder.
Graff’s meager academic credentials are as follows:
Academic Credentials
Ed Graff (Superintendent)
Degrees Earned Institution at Which Degree
Was Earned
M. A., Education
Administration University of Southern
Mississippi
(online degree)
B. A., Elementary Education University of Alaska, Anchorage
Other Credentials
Professional Licensures
District Professional Administrator, District Superintendent
District Professional Administrator, Principal K-12
Graff spent ten years as a teacher in the Anchorage School District
(ASD) and then sixteen years as an administrator. As an administrator, these positions included
the following:
Professional Background
Anchorage School District,
2000-2016
Superintendent, 2013-2016
Chief Academic Officer,
2009-2013
Executive Director, Elementary Education, 2008-2009
Readers should notice that Graff spent five years in positions that
very directly gave him the opportunity to implement an effective academic
program; and another three years (for a
total of eight) as superintendent, whose driving goal should be to design an
organization that delivers knowledge-intensive curriculum, imparted by
knowledgeable teachers.
But now recall that
after all of those years, by the academic year ending in 2015, achievement of
students in the Anchorage School District was very low (again peruse the data
in Part One).
Elsewhere on Graff’s resume one finds evidence of success in
bureaucratic streamlining and fiscal management. Those are the areas in which Graff has acted
most adroitly as MPS superintendent. But
all of this will go for naught if student academic proficiency levels continue
to languish.
Graff has become an effective manager of the school district
bureaucracy as to finances, including the elimination of the most unnecessary
staff positions. He has, though, been a
failure as leader of the academic program, which is that all that ultimately
matters, that which all other administrative maneuvers must serve.
………………………………………………………………………………..
Ed Graff’s program at the Minneapolis
Public Schools has focused on 1) Social
and Emotional Learning; 2) Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS); 3)
literacy; and 4) equity.
Of these four key programmatic areas
under Graff, literacy is a very basic skill that under previous administrations
nevertheless was not addressed in any coherent fashion. Graff and staff tout the new Benchmark
curriculum as addressing this fundamental skill, but objective results (see
Part One) have not been forthcoming. And
equity can only be achieved if teachers impart a knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete education to students of all demographic descriptors.
In advancing Multi-Tiered System of
Support, the Graff administration seeks to address the needs of students by
identifying academic, psychological, and social needs of students and
addressing those needs with the appropriate professional assistance. This would be a promising initiative if
adroitly conceived and then implemented district-wide. Such conception and implementation have not
occurred.
This leaves Social and Emotional
Learning as defined by the organization CASEL, with which Graff was affiliated
as a failed administrator in Anchorage.
CASEL (Cooperative for Academic,
Social, and Emotonal Learning), based in Chicago, was founded in 1994. Both CASEL and the term “social and emotional
learning” were created at a meeting in 1994 hosted by the Fetzer Institute. The meeting was meant to address a perceived
need for greater coherence in an array of programs pertinent to drugs,
violence, sex education, and civic and moral responsibility. Social and Emotional Learning is meant to
bring coherence.
In 1997 CASEL and the Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) brought together writers and researchers
to produce Promoting Social and Emotional
Learning: Guidelines for Educators. The Collaborative for Academic, Social,
and Emotional Learning claims to have made great advances in serving the
multiple needs of youth over the course of the last twenty and more years, but
the abiding ill-addressed academic, psychological, and social need of students
in urban school districts across the nation (including that of Anchorage and of
the Minneapolis Public Schools during the Ed Graff tenure) belies those
claims.
Social and Emotional Learning focuses
on five designated competencies: 1) self-awareness; 2)
self- management; 3) responsible decision-making; 4)
social awareness; and 5) relationship building skills. This is the kind of facile thinking
frequently witnessed in the utterances of education professors and pop
psychologists, the kind of goals that should be assumed but not touted for any
transformative power.
For when all of these admirable
competencies have been achieved, there will still be the matter of academic
curriculum that should be at the core of any public school system.
Ed Graff is not capable of devising
such a program, nor is anyone on staff at the Davis Center or elsewhere in the
school district capable of creating such a program. My analysis of the Minneapolis Public Schools
Comprehensive Design will make this incapability abundantly clear.
Ed Graff is the typically ineffective
superintendent of the locally centralized school district.
The locally centralized school
district should be the best conduit of an excellent education to students of
all demographic descriptors. To realize
the potential of the locally centralized school district, Ed Graff and all
academic decision-makers must be replaced by true academicians, scholars whose
credentials feature advanced training in rigorous academic disciplines, not in
lightweight education programs.
Accordingly, we must sweep the halls
of the Davis Center clean of Ed Graff and academic decision-makers currently on
staff and replace them with those who have respect for knowledge and are
themselves knowledgeable. Along with
Graff, Aimee Fearing and staff and the Deparetment of Teaching and Learning ,
Michael Walker and staff of the Office of Black Male Achievement, Jennifer
Simon and staff of the Department of Indian Education, and Associate Superintendents
Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Carla Steinbach-Huther, Ron Wagner, and Brian
Zambreno must be swept away.
................................................................................................
Over summer 2019, the
position of Executive Director of the Department of Teaching and Learning
was bestowed upon Aimee Fearing. This was another affront to Cecilia Saddler,
who had assumed leadership of that department as Deputy Chief of Academics,
Leadership, and learning after being passed over for Chief of Academics,
Leadership, and Learning with Michael Thomas’s departure for Colorado Springs,
Colorado.
Fearing’s credentials are as
follows.
Academic
Credentials for Aimee Fearing
Minneapolis
Public Schools
Executive
Director, Teaching and Learning
Degrees
Earned Field in
Which
Institution at
Which
Degree Was Earned
Degree Was Earned
Bachelors
Degree ESL Education
University of Northwestern
13 May 2000
Masters
Degree Education
Hamline University
23 May 2003
Doctorate
Degree Education
Hamline University
30 April 2015
Other Credentials
Professional
Licensures
K-12 Principal
Licensure
Expiration, 30
June 2023
K-12 ESL
Licensure
Expiration, 30
June 2023
5-12
Communication Arts Licensure
Expiration, 30 June 2023
Thus, Fearing has the typical
profile for an academic decision-maker at the Minneapolis Public Schools: Her training is entirely in education rather
than in an academic discipline (mathematics, natural science, history,
government, English) that should be at the core of the curriculum of a locally
centralized school district. Fearing is
not a scholar. She is not a subject area
specialist. She should not be making
decisions pertinent to academics. And
yet she leads a department that has the official responsibility for the
academic program of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
The position of Executive
Director of Teaching and Learning was most ably filled by Mike Lynch. Lynch served under Superintendent Bernadeia
Johnson and was fully behind her program of Focused Instruction, which had the
potential for imparting a Core Knowledge curriculum that Lynch also
embraced. But Lynch encountered a great
amount of opposition for his support of knowledge-intensive curriculum from
staff members of the Department of Teaching Learning. Although he and his immediate superior, Chief
of Academics Susanne Griffin, seemed to have a good relationship, Griffin
herself made few initiatives and leaned more to the prevailing anti-knowledge,
education professor-espoused view of her Department of Teaching and Learning
staff. Lynch departed for graduate study
in Boston in 2015.
Griffin brought in Macarre Traynm,
whose main expertise was in Culturally Relevant Curriculum. I met with Traynm and did not find her to
have much enthusiasm for knowledge-intensive curriculum or what by then was a
Focused Instruction plank of the Bernadeia Johnson program that was being
sabotaged by Teaching and Learning staff members. A mid-level Teaching and Learning official by
the name of Tina Platt had responsibility for Focused Instruction, without
possessing impressive credentials or the requisite knowledge base to oversee
knowledge-intensive curriculum. I
advocated for the dismissal of Traynm and Platt; Tranhym lasted just a few months and Platt
also departed the district.
There was no Executive Director
of Teaching and Learning during academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Mercifully, this bloated department was
slimmed down from 53 staff members to a current 30. But the department is still overstaffed and
full of incompetent occupants of sinecures.
The department should be cleared of present occupants, all of whom are
trained in education rather than academic programs, at the graduate level and
for most even at the undergraduate level.
Again, we have the phenomenon of
non-academicians bearing the responsibility for the academic program of the
Minneapolis Public Schools.
If teachers were properly
trained in their subject areas, there would be little need for a Department of
Teaching and Learning. No such
department exists on college and university campuses to train professors, who
are experts in the subjects they teach.
Such a department would be ludicrous.
Accordingly, the Department of
Teaching and Learning should be disbanded.
Fearing and other staff members, all of them tainted by paltry education
programs, should be dismissed. As
teachers are thoroughly retrained as subject area specialists, the Department
of Teaching and Learning should pass into much deserved oblivion.
And Ed Graff should accept kudos
for his adroit moves in matters of finance and administration, then resign for
failing to articulate a viable academic program--- or, better, admit that he is an intellectual lightweight
and seek subject area specialists among professors at universities and
four-year colleges, or among independent scholars, to devise the needed
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete academic program at the Minneapolis Public
Schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment