Article #2 in A Series of Highlights from My Book, >Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect<, Concerning Staff Overhaul at the Davis Center That Will Occur Due to My Revelations >>>>> The Intellectually Corrupt Academic Program of the Minneapolis Public Schools

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.

 

For a stretch of time with the academic leadership position in flux, Cecilia Saddler 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 was largely scuttled aside from mainline academic decision-making, Cecilia Saddler was the highest titular academic leader at the Minneapolis Public Schools as academic year 2019-2020 began.  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 were 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 accompanied her identifiers included with her emails was 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 was 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 muttered when she appeared 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.

 

As of the early to middle reaches of first semester, academic year 2019-2020, Cec ilia Saddler ceased to be Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership and Learning Cecilia Saddler.

 

She became, then, just one of many among the host of academic decision-makers who have been swept away but, at least as important, part of a general bureaucratic cleaning at the Minneapolis Public Schools that must continue, with replacement by scholars who value knowledge and can accordingly design curriculum for implementation in logical sequence tyhrought the preK-12 years.  

 

Aimee Fearing has recently been tapped by Superintendent Ed Graff to occupy an Interim Chief of Academics position. 

 

The interim should be short. 

 

Graff must appoint an academic chief who is the scholar that he is not---  or find his own way out the Davis Center door.