The Office of Black Male
Student Achievement has failed to accomplish the mission inherent in the office’s
name and must be abolished.
Staff members of this office
have talents that can be utilized by the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) in roles that are critical to preparing young
people living at the urban core to receive knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum
and should be shifted to jobs that allow them to utilize and maximize those
talents.
Michael Walker is
director of the Office of Black Male Student Achievement. He never should have been assigned to this
role. Walker has no subject area
expertise in a field central to academic curriculum. His undergraduate degree is in physical education
; he has a master’s degree in counseling. From 1998 to 2006 Walker worked as community
outreach, program and youth development director at the YMCA of Minneapolis and
Greater St. Paul and served as coordinator for the Black Achievers program. He worked as a career and college center
coordinator for AchieveMpls at Roosevelt High School (2006-2009) and then
served as that school’s dean of students from 2009 to 2011 and as assistant
principal from 2011 to 2014. Walker is personable
and has a dynamic personality that made him effective in those roles. As the Office of Black Male Student
Achievement is dismantled, he should be tapped to head a new MPS Department of
Resource Provision and Referral with supervisory responsibility for staff
comfortable and effective in meeting families of students facing severe
problems of economy and functionality right where they live.
Family and Community
Inclusion Specialist Andria Daniel has a master’s degree in family education; she would likely be very effective working
with Walker as one of those reaching out to families facing grave life
challenges.
Office Specialist (Senior)
Cierra Burnaugh has talent far beyond those of an administrative assistant. She is a native of north Minneapolis and a
graduate of North High School who has taught in the district and runs a highly
successful dance program. She has a
bright and engaging personality at the same time she has a firm grip on the
problems of families living at the urban core;
she, too would a very effective worker in a new Department of Resource
Provision and Referral.
Educational Equity
coordinator Corey Yeager is a licensed marriage and family
therapist. Yeager is currently the
educational equity coordinator for Minneapolis Public Schools; he is working on a Ph. D. in family social
science; with a focus on family therapy;
Yeager has extensive experience working on the ground organizing and
addressing the needs and maximizing the opportunities of African American
families living in the central city; he
is another excellent staffing prospect for a Department of Resource Provision
and Referral.
This is true, too, of Community
Expert Classroom Coach Jamil Jackson, who is also executive director of
C.E.O. (Change Equals Opportunity), a life skills mentoring program for males
of color ages 12-25; and the executive
director of Run and Shoot E & L (Elite Basketball League). This is another staff member with favorable
prospects for making an important contribution to a new department that would engage
with families facing the severest life challenges.
The Office of Black Male
Student Achievement has just two teachers and, six years after the office’s
founding in 2014, still runs only pilot programs that serve fewer than 600 of
the 7,000 African American males in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Marjaan Sirdar and Richard Magembe
are both social studies teachers. Sidar
grew up in a low income, single parent home in east Bloomington and for seven
years worked with homeless youth; he is
certified to teach social studies but his master’s degree is in urban
education, rather than a key academic area.
Magembe has worked for MPS since 2012, formerly serving as a school
support program assistant at Stadium View School. These two should be evaluated for subject
area knowledge and classroom effecdtivenes;
if skills as teachers are found wanting, they become candidates for on
the ground roles in a new Department of Resource Provision and Referral.
………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Readers should be aware of
the wretched academic performance of MPS African American students over the course
of the years since the establishment of the Office of Black Male Student
Achievement:
MPS Proficiency Rates for
Academic Years ending in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019
(Results of Minnesota
Comprehensive Assessments [MCAs], administered each spring of those years)
Math 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
African 23%
19% 19% 16%
17% 18%
American
Reading
African 22%
21% 21% 21%
21% 23%
American
Science 11%
15% 13% 11%
10% 11%
African
American
When Michael Walker accepted the
position of Director of the Office of Black Male Achievement in August 2014, he
vowed to work himself out of a job. His
job security has to date been firm, because African American males are not as a
rule succeeding academically in the Minneapolis Public Schools, and success for
that demographic would be the job-releasing goal identified by Walker at the inception
of his role and the office created at the behest of then Superintendent
Bernadeia Johnson.
Walker’s salary has risen from $114,000 in
academic year 2014-2015 to $128,000 by 2018-2019 and now stands at $133,137. Corey
Yeager receives a salary of $89,685, so that the total for these
two is $222,822. The five other staff members in the Office of Black Male Achievement receive
annual salaries averaging $65,000 each, for another $325,000, in all equaling
$547,822 for salaries alone expended on the MPS Office of Black Male Student
Achievement.
Perhaps an additional $9,000 per annum eases
any pain that Walker might feel for not creating conditions of success for
black males at the Minneapolis Public Schools, according to which he would have
worked himself out of a job.
…………………………………………………………………………………..
MPS Superintendent
Ed Graff should hire an adept Chief Academic Officer who is a scholar with a
Ph. D. in an
academic subject (mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, political
science, or English literature) to oversee curricular overhaul and to train
teachers capable of imparting knowledge-intensive curriculum to students of all
demographic descriptors.
Then the Office of
Black Male of Achievement should be disbanded.
Michael Walker could
then be tapped to head a new Department of Resource Provision and Referral,
with much of his current staff making the move with him, so their deficiency as
academicians no longer burders the district and their talents are used to
positive effect.
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