Fallacy and immorality are the defining
characteristics in the saga of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS)
Comprehensive District Design.
The cowardly format followed in the
community discussions of January, February, and early March 2020 is typical of
the administration of MPS superintendent Ed Graff:
Ever since I spooked the superintendent
with my appearance at four of the five community gatherings that he staged
within two months of his occupancy of his role in 1 July 2016, Graff has acted
the coward when faced with the truth about his own slim qualifications and
accomplishments.
Graff and erstwhile board member Rebecca
Gagnon rewrote the protocol for Public Comment
when I factually cited the incompetence of Graff and many MPS
administrators; now he is entirely
satisfied with a reworking of the order in which Public Comments are made, with
current board chair Kim Ellison continuing to follow the conniving of former
chair Nelson Inz (a political hack and tool of the Minneapolis Federation of
Teachers [MFT]), who unprecedentedly rescheduled the order of speakers so that
the first to sign up does not now speak first.
For five and a half years I had been the first to sign up and the first
to speak.
And in that cowardly spirit, things of the
past are events such as former MPS Superintendent (2010-2014) Bernadeia
Johnson’s “Supe with the Soup” gatherings featuring open-mike questions:
Graff
is so afraid of my questions that he holds no such meetings.
He would prefer not to hold community
meeting of any sort but felt politically obligated to convene community
gatherings as (often motivationally errant) public furor arose over the MPS
Comprehensive District Design.
Thus, in cowardly Graff fashion questions
from the audience had to be submitted on paper then vetted by staff members
working under Executive Director of Engagement and Community Relations Celina
Martina.
Graff had steeled himself for questions
from the community concerning elimination of
K-8 configurations, the jettisoning of some magnet programs in favor or
new centralized magnet locations, the specific change of location for some
Spanish dual immersion programs, and
redrawing of district boundaries so that
racist parents from Southwest Minneapolis protested (whether they admitted this
in their professed reasoning or not) that their babies were going to have to go
to schools in perceptibly dangerous neighborhoods with African American
students for whose safety these hypocrites had never hereto fore expressed
concern.
Graff did not want to but he could handle
these questions in his white-Minnesota-nice manner by calmly appealing to
everyone’s respect for the good of the whole.
But he could not abide questions such as
this one:
“After via the MPS Comprehensive District
Design you commendably induce attendance at community schools, revaluate and
centralize magnet programming, and rationalize transportation, how do you plan
to redesign curriculum for knowledge intensity and retrain MPS teachers to
raise their current level of mediocrity so that they can impart such a
curriculum?”
Graff wanted no such questions that go to
the core of the actual vexing dilemmas at the Minneapolis Public Schools.
I had shamed Celina Martina, emcee of these
meetings, to pose that query to the panel but my questions were never asked
again at these gatherings, typically featuring Martina as moderator for a panel
that included Graff, Chief of Accountability, Research, and Equity Eric
Moore; Chief of Operations Karen Devet; Associate Superintendent for Special Programming
(mostly special education) Rochelle Cox, and Interim Senior Academic Officer
Aimee Fearing.
Celina Martin is paid $115,737 in a nation
for which the median income for a family of four is $65,000. Graff and the other four panelists cited earn
a total of $858,000, so that including
Martina the total for the panel membership, highly variable as to talent
and sincerity (I’ll be covering the distinctions from one member to another in
forthcoming articles In this series), comes to just under $1,000,000 (precisely
$973,775).
That’s a lot of money for the prevarication
and the promotion of fallacy and immorality that was on display from Martina,
Graff, Moore, and Fearing at those meetings.
But then salaries of $115,737; $230,000;
$154 ,000; and $155,657 tend to
dull the moral pain that might be expected for staging such a morally corrupt
event and daring to advance a comprehensive design that has no chance of
advancing the academic prospects for the long-waiting students of the
Minneapolis Public Schools.
For willingly serving as Graff’s sycophant
in an event purportedly held to gather public opinion and to explain the MPS
Comprehensive Design,
Celina Martina should issue a public
apology---
or resign.
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