Chapter Fifty-Seven >>>>> World’s Best Workforce (WBWF) Programs Are a Sham and Should Be Understood As Such

The Ed Graff administration submitted as its response to Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) World’s Best Workforce (WBWF) regulations the following programs for academic year 2017-2018, with number of students served given in parentheses:

 

WBWF Program

 

(to prepare children to enter school, third graders to read, students of all ethnicities and at all economic levels to meet grade level standards, all students for career and college, and all students to graduate from high school)

 

                                                                    Number of participating Students

 

AVID (Advancement Via Individual

Determination)                                                                                1,921

Check and Connect                                                            616

Ethnic Studies & Social Justice Fellows                    544

Fast Track Scholars                                                             189

GEMS & GiSE                                                                     4,221

(Girls in Engineering, Mathematics,

and Science;

Guys in Science and Engineering)

Grow Your Own Teacher Residency                        3,394

Jobs for America’s Graduates                                       167

MTSS/ Multicultural Materials                                  6,984

LearningWorks at Blake                                                      91

Office of Black Male Achievement                              348

Project SUCCESS                                                           15,229

RIS (Racially Identifiable Schools)                         10,537

Direct Support                              

Spring and Winter Academy                                      5,220

Urban Debate League                                                        394

 

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Total Number of Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools:   36,961

 

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These programs come with significant outlays in the MPS budget but are also heavily subsidized by the provider organizations, making the programs appealing.  But despite the appealing appellations, most of these programs serve only a scant fraction of students enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools and not one of them is capable of raising achievement levels across the K-12 years.  Most of these programs have been around for many years;  fewer than 25% of African American, American Indian (Native American), Hispanic, Hmong, and Somali students are meeting grade level standards in reading and math.

 

Thus, these seductively labeled and heavily subsidized programs offer an attractive screen for presentation to the MDE for working to promote academic achievement, but there is nothing behind that screen that offers hope for raising achievement rates.

 

Beyond these programs, the Ed Graff administration offers Social and Emotional Learning and a new PK-5 reading curriculum, the former of which can never be more than an adjunct to explicitly academic initiatives, the latter of which is limited to reading.  That new Benchmark Literacy Program

is sound in approach but prospects for success will be constricted by the mediocrity of K-5 teachers and the weakness of literature and English language usage programming in grades 6-12.

 

Programs funded by external sources and bearing appealing names are conveniently offered to meet MDE requirements, but for officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools to advance a program of academic excellence, highly intentional curriculum overhaul, teacher retraining, resource provision and referral, and time set aside for skill mastery and extension must occur for the impartation of excellent education to the students of the Minneapolis Public Schools. 

 

World Best Workforce Programs are a sham and should be understood as such.

 

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World’s Best Workforce (WBWF)/ 2020 Advisory Committee

Saliently Demonstrates Parent and Community Ineffectiveness

 

I have become fascinated by the World’s Best Workforce (WBWF) committee of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) and the motivations of constituent members.  The Davis Center connection for the World’s Best Workforce committee is the staff of Chief Eric Moore in the MPS Department of Research, Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability.  This is an ironic association, given that Moore’s department is one of the few bright lights of this struggling school district:  The membership of the committee is not as impressive as Moore and his staff.

The WBWF committee is chaired by Victoria Balko, whose children attend schools in the Robbinsdale district:  In a conversation that I had with her back at a winter meeting of the committee, Balko indicated to me that her motivation for serving on this committee was to address the flaws at the Minneapolis Public Schools that induced her to send her own children elsewhere.

But Balko is a mediocrity, overseeing a committee membership of like quality. This committee has potential to be the academic committee that is a puzzling omission among those that abide at the Minneapolis Public Schools, given that academics constitutes the core mission of any locally centralized school district.  With the tentative exception of Co-Chair David Weingartner, though, I am not impressed with the committee.  But the potential for academic advocacy abides in the World’s Best Workforce Committee if a membership upgrade could replace the meager preparation and analytical ability of current World's Best Workforce participants.

 

During the 2017-2018 Academic Year, the composition of the WBWF/2020 Advisory Committee  was as follows:

 

The 2017-2018 MPS WBWF Advisory Committee

 

Co-Chairs:

 

Victoria Balko

David Weingartner

 

Members:

 

Sheri Beck

Elizabeth Campbell

Kimberly Caprini

Peggy Calrk

Erin Clotfelter

Lynne Crockett

Kenneth Eban

Sara Etzell

Graham Hartley

Tara Kennedy

Greg King

Margaret Richardson

Collin Robinson

Julie Sabo

Elizabeth Short

Heather Walker

Deacon Walker

 

Liaisons:

 

Kim Ellison ---  Board Liaison

Jennie Zumbusch ---  Staff Liaison

 

In Part One:  Facts, I included a complete copy of a letter that this group sent to Superintendent Ed Graff as an annual report that focused on the draft then available of the MPS Comprehensive Design.  The letter and the report are rambling, philosophically inconsistent, and maladroit in making substantive recommendations for improving the academic program at the Minneapolis Pubic Schools.

 

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At a meeting of this committee on 24 April 2019, teachers Stephanie Bales, Tara Ferguson, Hillary Klick, Paul Klym, Nahfeesah Muhammad, and Sharon Rush manifested deep compassion and refreshing candor, despite the minimal competence of chair Victoria Balko and other members.   The meeting was ill-run by Balko but was ultimately surprisingly good due to the participation of these teachers who are clearly dedicated and refreshingly candid concerning the deficiencies of academic leadership at the Minneapolis Public Schools that leaves classroom teachers of reading, literacy, and English needing to make things up as they go along.

Participants included the following:

Stephanie Bales (Kindergarten Developmental Dual Language Teacher, Andersen Elementary)  

Tara Ferguson (English 10 and International Baccalaureate Teacher, Edison High School)

Kathy Gretsch (Literacy Specialist, Andersen Elementary)

Hillary Klick (Reading Teacher, Northeast Middle School)

Paul Klym (Career Development Coordinator, Career and Technical Education)

Nahfeesah Muhammad (English Teacher, North High School)

Sharon Rush (English/Reading Teacher, South High School)

Gretsch gave appearance of Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) connections that have obscured her ability to bear witness to the deep academic failures of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Her comments were murky and full of jargon.

But Bales, Ferguson, Klick, Klym, Muhammad, and Rush manifested deep compassion for their students and spoke with refreshing candor concerning the deficiencies of academic leadership at the Minneapolis Public Schools that leaves classroom teachers of reading, literacy, and English needing to make things up as they go along.

This dedicated group of teachers triumphed over Balko’s minimal competence:   They presented a vision of what the Minneapolis Public Schools could be if curriculum were to be overhauled for knowledge intensity and teachers were trained to deliver such a curriculum.  Increasing reading ability of students is a matter of giving students grounding in phonics and phonemic awareness at preK through first grade, then imparting a broad liberal arts curriculum emphasizing history, government, economics, psychology, mathematics, literature, English composition, and the fine arts throughout the preK-12 years (with abundant career and technical options introduced during middle school and high school).

Despite the questionable constituency of the MPS World’s Best Workforce Committee and the failures of academic leadership at the Davis Center, the elevated intellectual and moral quality of teachers Stephanie Bales, Tara Ferguson, Hillary Klick, Paul Klym, Nahfeesah Muhammad, and Sharon Rush provides evidence of a core of teachers ready and able to make the improvements needed to bring knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum to students at the Minneapolis Public Schools.

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The World’s Best Workforce Committee saliently symbolizes the low quality of public participation in matters pertinent to preK-12 education.  Citizens have the same lack of historical and philosophical grounding as is the case with members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.  They are susceptible to the frequently feel-good, pseudo-culturally-sensitive jargon fed to them by administrators and teachers who themselves have not thought very deeply into educational philosophy and have poor historical grounding---  but can at length and with great frequency spout the verbiage imbibed from education professors.

 

Citizen participation in processes pertinent to preK-12 education tends to be episodic:  People show up when a reading curriculum is found to have certain elements that can be construed as racist;  when cops in the schools become an issue;  or when some shift in transportation, grade alignment, or location of programming affects the school of the person’s own child.  There is very little concern for the Minneapolis Public Schools as a whole, for children beyond one’s own.  When citizens do commit to participate in some longer term or ongoing endeavor, such as those on the World’s Best Workforce Committee, views expressed are ill-researched and tend to parrot rhetoric currently in the conversational ether or, ironically, the jargon of the very education establishment that is in grave need of overhaul.

 

Inasmuch as the overhaul needed at the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized school districts cannot be led by those of the education establishment comprised of education professors and those they have ruined, citizens are going to have to become better informed.