May 15, 2020

Article #1 >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota< >>>>> Volume VI, Number 11, May 2020 >>>>> Dismissals and Overhaul That Must Ensue in the Central Offices (Davis Center) of the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> Aimee Fearing Must Be Dismissed and the Chief Academic Officer Position Must Be Reconceptualized


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 Simon, who reports to Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing.  Simon 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.
 
Simon 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 Simon as a designer and implementer of science programming for the Minneapolis Public Schools.
  
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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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