Part Two of a Two-Article Series >>>>> Affluent African Americans at MPS Davis Center Must Stop Puttin’ on Ol’ Masta Graff

This communication is for those African Americans at the Davis Center (Minneapolis Public Schools central offices, 1250 West Broadway) making the following salaries:

 

>>>>>    $185,403

 

>>>>>    $154,630

 

>>>>>    $150,630

 

>>>>>    $150,630

 

>>>>>    $141,142

 

>>>>>    $133,137

 

>>>>>    $120,233

 

>>>>>    $104,007

 

All of you are African American staff members at the Minneapolis Public Schools or staff members of recent African origin.

 

You dwell in a racist system in which you have nevertheless attained great monetary remuneration and perceptible heights of professional status.

 

Inasmuch as the locally centralized school district that pays you so well has the power to send more powerful brains to prison---  or to overhaul processes that allows those brains to contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos, the determinants of human behavior, the intricacies of advanced calculus, the wonders of musical composition, or the current relevance of historical processes---  consideration of those latter processes becomes of special importance and a matter of supreme responsibility to you.

 

You must accordingly stop puttin’ on ol’ Masta Graff.

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During the period of slavery stretching from 1619 to 1865, many a brilliant brain was made to suffer great indignity.  The conditions of rendered free labor constituted the greatest of the indignities, followed by circumstances of life in the labor camp (plantation) environment.  Among the most insidious was relenting to stereotypes of personality, manifested in an exaggerated drawl, a feigned deference to the master and other whites living on and traversing the camp, and a pretention to simplicity of intellect, even in the many cases in which the intelligence quotient of the slave far exceeded the master and other benefactors of sycophancy.

 

Although legal slavery ended as of 1866 with passage of the 13^th Amendment to the United States Constitution, indignities just as great lay ahead.  In the aftermath of Reconstruction, following  Republican treachery in acceding to the Compromise of 1877, the violent police state of the American South induced a Great Northern Migration that demonstrated that a little better (conditions in the urban North) by no means meant full citizenship, which awaited in legal terms the legislation of the 1960s (Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, fair housing and equal employment opportunity legislation of late 1960s and early 1970s).

 

By 1970, the way ahead was clear for African Americans who had the wherewithal to reach for the American Dream.  Among the exercises of liberty was the option of living in those areas that had been proscribed by restricted housing covenants:  Many middle class African Americans accompanied comparably affluent whites in flight to the suburbs.  Left behind in areas at the urban core, such as North Minneapolis and those areas of the South Side close to East Lake Street, was a population now much economically poorer, soon to be joined by migrants from South Side Chicago;  Gary, Indiana; Kankakee, Illinois;  Detroit;  and East St. Louis.

 

In 1973 there was only one white teacher in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS);  teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools in 2019 remain overwhelmingly white.  From 1973 until the present time, MPS leadership and staff have been both overwhelmed and irresponsible.  Faced with serving impoverished  African American students whom they did not understand, made no effort to understand, and sought no help in understanding, leadership and staff continued to collect their checks, scramble on home as soon as possible, and variously take severance pay or retirement funds with all due speed.

 

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Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980, gang violence increased, neighborhood conditions worsened, and MPS staff became ever more overwhelmed.  Coalescing with the multitude of pernicious trends was an approach to education with roots to the 1920s, whereby education professors promoted an anti-knowledge creed that works the greatest hardship on those young people whose families have the least formal education.

 

This is the creed taught to Superintendent Ed Graff and Department of Teaching and Learning Executive Director Aimee Fearing, staff in the Department of Teaching and Learning, and all administrators, including Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno;  and building principals.

 

None of these people are academicians.

 

They have no capability of designing a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum that should lie at the core of the new MPS Comprehensive District Design.

 

Without a viable acadmic program, the favorable parts of the Design (transportation rerouting, focus on community schools, dignified treatment of special education students, a commitment to responsible structurally balanced budgets) will be undermined by continued academic failure.

 

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Ed Graff plays the part of the white-nice Minnesotan exceedingly well.

 

Do not be fooled.

 

Graff is an able administrator in matters of staffing rationalization and finances, but he is a disaster in terms of education philosophy.

 

Graff could get help but he does not. 

 

So he smiles, speaks with a gentle voice, and plays out his nice-guy routine while academic proficiency rates continue just as terrible in the Minneapolis Public Schools as they were in Anchorage, where
Graff previously served in multiple roles, including as superintendent for three years (at the end of which the Anchorage board did not renew his contract).

 

Affluent African Americans at the Minneapolis Public Schools must first do their homework:

 

Read The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (E. D. Hirsch, 1996), Left Back:  A Hundred Years of School Reform (Diane Ravitch, 2000), and  The Smartest Kinds in the World---  and How They Got That Way (Amanda Ripley, 2013).

 

Read the many articles on this blog.

 

To get a sense of the harmful education professor’s creed, read books by Alfie Kohn, Deborah Myer, and Theodore (Ted) Sizer---  or listen to the nonsense spouted by MPS Board of Education Member Bob Walser.

 

Then go to Ed Graff and demand a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education for the African American and general student population of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Give him his props for the administrative good works that he has done.

 

But tell him that he is an academic incompetent and must get help form college and university professors in designing a new college preparatory academic and vocational curriculum.

 

Affluent African Americans at MPS have reached your “I’m gonna get mines” goal.

 

Now you must ensure that African American youth get theirs.

 

Or you must face the fact that you’re just puttin’ on ol’ Masta Graff.