The role of the associate
superintendent is superfluous and those who have occupied this position have
been ineffective.
Remember from Part One, Facts, that
the official description of the associate superintendent position is as
follows:
The associate superintendent is responsible for
creating and
modeling a culture of high expectations and providing
ongoing
support and oversight to school building leaders. The
associate
superintendent works with school communities to create
the
necessary conditions that result in dramatic and
accelerated
student achievement, closing the achievement gap and
improving
overall school performance.
With reference to that description,
everything that is asserted about the associate superintendent role is
false. The associate superintendents do
not create a culture of high expectations.
They provide very little oversight.
Any support provided is of a protectionist nature, shielding building
principals from examination of their failures as leaders. And clearly the associate superintendents do
not work with school communities to create the necessary conditions that result
in dramatic and accelerated student achievement: No achievement gap has been closed and few
schools have improved overall performance.
More than the claims for any other
position in the Minneapolis Public Schools, those asserted for the associate
superintendent position are starkly absurd.
They do nothing that they are supposed to do; furthermore, there is deep irony in the
existence of the position at all.
The fundamental role of the
associate superintendent is to supervise site principals. The existence of the associate superintendent
position is a frank admission that principals have not been
properly trained. If school principals had been properly
trained there would be no need for associate superintendents: Building leaders would be academicians highly
adept at getting the best performances out of the teachers in their
schools. But the brutal reality is that
neither teaching staffs nor the principals who are to supervise teachers are
subject area specialists with any driving commitment to the delivery of
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.
They have all been damaged by education professors in weak teacher
training programs.
he absurdity on top of absurdity in
the scenario is that training for the associate superintendents is just as weak. Of the current five associate
superintendents, Shawn Harris-Berry has a bachelor’s degree in business
education and graduate degrees in education.
LaShawn Ray has a bachelor’s degree in the social sciences (implying
lack of any specialty in economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, or the
like), and a graduate degree in education.
The kindest comment concerning those who pursue that degree is that they
realized that getting a doctorate in education is a waste of time and money,
and thereby opted for a degree that can gain access to the same remunerative
positions as does the education doctorate.
Ron Wagner has only education degrees, both undergraduate and graduate,
and the just mentioned lightweight education specialist degree. Brian Zambreno tops out at the education
specialist degree, with a master’s degree in education and a bachelor’s degree
in the liberal arts, recalling the lack of specific training implicit in the
social sciences degree of LaShawn Ray. Carla Steinbach-Huther, who exited the
Minneapolis Public Schools during autumn 2019 has a bachelor’s degree in
sociology, a master’s in education, and a lightweight degree known as
“education specialist.”
There
is not one scholar among the associate superintendents. Not a single associate superintendent has even
an undergraduate degree in a core academic subject (mathematics, natural science,
history, government, or English). All
have imbibed the harmful doctrine of education professors. None of the associate superintendents are
committed to knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education. Each receives
$150,896 in annual salary (up from $144,330 in academic year 2018-2019), for a
total for all the associate superintendents of $754,480.
When
my investigation into the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools
began in 2014, there were eight associate superintendents, plus a chief of
schools who had supervisory responsibility for the associate
superintendents; further, to add more
absurdity to this bureaucratic overload, there was actually an assistant chief
of schools knocking down over $100,000 per year. This ludicrous situation meant that the chief of
schools and his assistant managed an incompetent group of eight associate
superintendents, who oversaw maladroit principals, who supervised weak teaching
staffs.
Elimination
of the chief of schools position and reduction in the number of associate
superintendents can be construed as an improvement during the tenure of
Superintendent Ed Graff. But the number
of associate superintendents has risen from three in academic year 2018-2019 to
four in 2019-2020. And the appointment
of Shawn Harris-Berry comes in the aftermath of her serving a disastrous term
as principal at North High, where classes were frequently out of order,
learning in those and other classes was minimal, student academic proficiency
rates were low (see the pertinent section in Part One, Facts), teacher mastery
of subject area material was flimsy, and staff turnover was high.
Ironies
abound in the existence of the position of associate superintendent.
The
position should be eliminated.
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