Given the academic inadequacy of the
Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Comprehensive District Design, numerous
decisions must now be made to bring knowledge-intensive, skill-replete
education of excellence to the students of the district. The Design contains many admirable features
(rationalized transportation, reevaluated and relocated magnet schools, and induced
attendance at community schools, but the academic portion is a vast intellectual
wasteland.
If the most generous view is taken of the
academic section of the Design, one might say that although there is no hope as
expressed on the terrain of academic planning, the plan in the academic portion
of the Design is so intellectually vacuous that it “first does no harm.”
But the harm not done resides in leaving so
much programmatically unspecified that there is much room for
interpretation; the sin of the Design is
in omission rather than in commission.
But sins of omission are just as grave if commitment to positive action
is not made.
MPS Superintendent Ed Graff must have an
epiphany as to the nature of excellent education and come to a realization that
his own academic training is insufficient, what training that he has had at the
behest of education professors is errant, and that he must act upon his
epiphany by accessing the external academic talent that neither he nor anyone
in the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) possesses.
No one at the Davis Center is a scholar in a
major academic discipline. This
situation is revealed in greatest absurdity in the staff of the Department of
Teaching and Learning, now apparently led by Jennifer Rose, who reports
to Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing. Rose is more academically serious in her
dedication to the natural sciences than most in the Department of Teaching and
Learning are committed to the fields that they purport to represent, but her
advanced degree, like the generally inept staff members of the department she
leads, is in education rather than a legitimate academic discipline.
Rose should be dismissed as executive
director of the Department of Teaching and Learning, that position should be
eliminated, the department as a whole gutted, and a first-rate scientist with a
masters or doctorate in biology, chemistry, or physics should be hired for the
position formally held by Rose as a designer and implementer of science
programming for the Minneapolis Public Schools.
………………………………………………………………………………
More critical yet is the replacement of Aimee
Fearing with a genuine academician.
Sometimes on the name-plaque
identifying her at the community meetings convened to consider models for the
MPS Comprehensive District Design, Fearing would laughably be given the
appellation, “Dr.”
To those who do not know any
better, which is to say almost everyone at these gatherings, the “Dr.” title
might be impressive. But while a Ph.D.
(as opposed to an Ed. D.) does confer the status demanded of today’s professors
in the key academic disciplines and is generally expected of college and
university presidents, no one who has obtained an Ed. D., as did Fearing, would
be considered for president at reputable colleges and universities. The degree is typically borne by education
professors, who are as much a campus joke as are the flimsy doctorates
conferred upon them.
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, social science, literature, fine arts) 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.
Her dissertation focused on insubstantial
drivel that pertains typically to the Ed. D. that never signals academic
seriousness; in this case she
interviewed and analyzed recipients of education doctorates as to what use they
made of their training once in public school administrative positions. Fearing’s subject of dissertation focus is
from one vantage point laughable given its academic irrelevance and embedded
satiric cluelessness, but from another deadly serious, given the harm that the
administrators of the type she interviewed inflict on students in Minnesota and
across the United States.
Aimee Fearing should not be
making decisions pertinent to academics.
She should be dismissed from her
interim position and returned to work in her undergraduate field of English
language learning, rather than to a position of building principal, a post at which (at the Wellstone Academy) she
also did not provide acceptable academic leadership.
Acting upon an epiphany, Superintendent
Graff should bring to the position of chief academic officer a scholar with
training in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, political
science, economics, world and ethnic literature, music, or the visual arts; who vows to assess staffing also for the design
of programming in the technological and vocational arts (for which there is
better current talent in the Davis Center than for the liberal arts).
The first move for indicating seriousness
to overhaul curriculum for student acquisition of logically sequenced knowledge
sets across the preK-12 years must come in the hiring of a scholar, not an
education professor acolyte, to head the academic division of the Minneapolis
Public Schools.
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