Jul 1, 2020

Article #4 >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota >>>>> Volume VI, Number 1


Article #4

 

Why Ibrahima Diop, Karen Devet, Fadi Fadhil (and now Justin Hennes), Rochelle Cox, and Maggie Sullivan are So Much Better at What They Do Than Are Ed Graff, Aimee Fearing, and the Entire Staff of the MPS Department of Teaching and Learning

 

Ibrahima Diop is a superlatively trained MPS Finance Chief, with undergraduate and graduate degrees economics and public finance.  Karen Devet holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in fields related to operations, with particular expertise in food service.  Fadi Fadhil and Jason Hennes are technology experts of the highest order, with graduate academic training germane to that expertise.  Maggie Sullivan is a graduate of the elite St. Paul Academy and well-regard William and Clark College and obtained a graduate degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon.  Rochelle Cox earned her academic degrees in early childhood education and then pursued on-the-job training in special education for many years at MPS before becoming head of the division.

 

These are people of the highest caliber.

 

Ed Graff, Aimee Fearing, and the entire department of MPS Teaching and learning trained under intellectually corrupt college presences dubbed education “professors.”

 

Those who care about young people and the creation of a knowledgeable citizenry must understand these differences in training as we overhaul curriculum and teaching and proceed with the preK-12 Revolution. 

 

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Ed Graff and the Abiding Dilemma of the Ineffective Superintendent

 

Superintendent Ed Graff is an academic mediocrity and in that regard he is typical of his profession.

 

Soon after Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson resigned (effective January 2015), I told the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education that they should not conduct a nationwide search because finding a superior candidate with conventional training is a near impossibility.  Although Michael Goar had been brought in (Johnson says at her own behest) to serve strangely as Chief Executive Officer (that title [unusual in the locally centralized school district] would signal similar duties to a superintendent, and he did quickly become a leading candidate for the post), I was myself thinking at the time of Michael Thomas, then Chief of Schools with administrative oversight of the associate superintendents. 

 

“Go in-house,” I told members of the board in one of my messages during Public Comments at a meeting in spring 2015 as preparations for the search began.  “You’re not going to find anyone more qualified than some of our own administrators (I was not yet openly touting Thomas, thinking that Eric Moore and others were also viable vehicles of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education);  superintendent candidates with the typical certifications have all been trained in the same way, and thus all have been intellectually ruined by education professors.”

 

The board went ahead with the search, botched that search in multiple ways, opted ultimately for Graff, who indeed has a conventional profile, and who has been just as academically ineffective in Minneapolis as he was in Anchorage.  

 

At this and several points in this analysis of the dilemma of the ineffective superintendent, readers should refer back to the factual presentation of Graff’s credentials and experience in Part One, Facts.

 

Graff has proven himself to be an able administrator, paring the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) from approximately 650 to 450 staff members and giving scope for brilliant Chief of Finance Ibrahima Diop to work the district out of a financial tangle and devise a structurally balanced budget.  But Graff has no idea of how to design a preK-12 curriculum toward the impartation of broad and deep knowledge to students.

 

In perusing my presentation of Graff’s training and experience in Part One, Facts, note that Graff has a degree in elementary education from the University of Alaska, Anchorage;  and an online master’s degree in educational administration from the University of Southern Mississippi.  Elementary education, while constituting the requisite training for one of the nation’s most important jobs, features the weakest academic training on any college or university campus.  The online degree from a lower-tier university is suspect and in any case whatever of value is learned in the pertinent courses is not focused on any subject area (mathematics, natural science, history, government, or English) that should be at the core of any preK-12 curriculum.

 

Accordingly, three and a half years into Graff’s tenure at the Minneapolis Public Schools (his contract was renewed in spring 2019), student academic performance (see the pertinent presentation in Part One) is essentially flat and for some key demographic groups has gone down.  As I have repeatedly told Graff and members of the board, for academic performance to advance for all demographic groups, 1) curriculum is going to have to be overhauled to deliver carefully sequenced knowledge and skill sets throughout the preK-12 years;  2) teachers must be thoroughly retrained;  3)  a Department of Resource Provision and Referral must be created and staffed with people comfortable connecting with students and families living at the urban core, right where they live;  4)  highly intentional academic development experiences must be provided to all students, focused on basic skills or enrichment opportunities as necessary and appropriate;  and 5) the bureaucracy must be pared.  Only the last of the five-point program has been in some measure realized. 

 

We must transform locally centralized school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools so as to impart to our young people a knowledge-intensive curriculum, delivered by teachers who are themselves bearers of knowledge.

 

To do that, citizens, including those who claim an interest in the public schools, must become much more discerning in their understanding of the system that fails so many of our precious young people.

 

Ed Graff’s assumption of a second  three-year term (should he defy the odds and actually stay the full three-year [academic years 2019-2020, 2020-2021, and 2021-2022] term of the current contract, totaling six years for a tenure that began with his first contract on 1 July 2016) came at the behest of the members of the MPS Board of Education, who voted 8-0 (KerryJo Felder was absent) on 14 March 2019 to offer the second contract.

Graff is a salient example of the academically mediocre superintendent inflicted on our young people by departments, schools, and colleges of education;  and an example of the mediocrity witnessed generally among academic decision-makers and teachers in our locally centralized school systems.

In opting for a lightweight master’s degree, from an institution of meager quality, while serving as an administrator in the Anchorage School District, Graff exercised the option typical of the locally centralized school district administrator, who seeks not knowledge but rather enhanced professional remuneration in ascending the bureaucratic ladder.

Graff spent ten years as a teacher in the Anchorage School District (ASD) and then sixteen years as an administrator.  As an administrator, these positions included the following

Professional Background

Anchorage School District, 2000-2016

Superintendent, 2013-2016

Chief Academic Officer, 2009-2013

Executive Director, Elementary Education, 2008-2009   

Readers should notice that Graff spent five years in positions that very directly gave him the opportunity to implement an effective academic program;  and another three years (for a total of eight) as superintendent, whose driving goal should be to design an organization that delivers knowledge-intensive curriculum, imparted by knowledgeable teachers.

But now recall that after all of those years, by the academic year ending in 2015, achievement of students in the Anchorage School District was very low (again peruse the data in Part One).

Elsewhere on Graff’s resume one finds evidence of success in bureaucratic streamlining and fiscal management.  Those are the areas in which Graff has acted most adroitly as MPS superintendent.  But all of this will go for naught if student academic proficiency levels continue to languish.

Graff has become an effective manager of the school district bureaucracy as to finances, including the elimination of the most unnecessary staff positions.  He has, though, been a failure as leader of the academic program, which is all that ultimately matters, that which all other administrative maneuvers must serve.

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Ed Graff’s program at the Minneapolis Public Schools has focused on 1)  Social and Emotional Learning;  2)  Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS);  3)  literacy;  and 4) equity.

Of these four key programmatic areas under Graff, literacy is a very basic skill that under previous administrations nevertheless was not addressed in any coherent fashion.  Graff and staff tout the new Benchmark curriculum as addressing this fundamental skill, but objective results (see Part One) have not been forthcoming.  And equity can only be achieved if teachers impart a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to students of all demographic descriptors.

In advancing Multi-Tiered System of Support, the Graff administration seeks to address the needs of students by identifying academic, psychological, and social needs of students and addressing those needs with the appropriate professional assistance.  This would be a promising initiative if adroitly conceived and then implemented district-wide.  Such conception and implementation have not occurred.

This leaves Social and Emotional Learning as defined by the organization CASEL, with which Graff was affiliated as a failed administrator in Anchorage.

CASEL (Cooperative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), based in Chicago, was founded in 1994.  Both CASEL and the term “social and emotional learning” were created at a meeting in 1994 hosted by the Fetzer Institute.   The meeting was meant to address a perceived need for greater coherence in an array of programs pertinent to drugs, violence, sex education, and civic and moral responsibility.  Social and Emotional Learning is meant to bring coherence.

In 1997 CASEL and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) brought together writers and researchers to produce Promoting Social and Emotional Learning:  Guidelines for Educators.  The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning claims to have made great advances in serving the multiple needs of youth over the course of the last twenty and more years, but the abiding ill-addressed academic, psychological, and social need of students in urban school districts across the nation (including that of Anchorage and of the Minneapolis Public Schools during the Ed Graff tenure) belies those claims. 

Social and Emotional Learning focuses on five designated competencies:  1)  self-awareness;  2)  self- management;  3)  responsible decision-making;  4)  social awareness;  and 5)  relationship building skills.  This is the kind of facile thinking frequently witnessed in the utterances of education professors and pop psychologists, the kind of goals that should be assumed but not touted for any transformative power.

For when all of these admirable competencies have been achieved, there will still be the matter of academic curriculum that should be at the core of any public school system.

Ed Graff is not capable of devising such a program, nor is anyone on staff at the Davis Center or elsewhere in the school district capable of creating such a program.  My analysis of the Minneapolis Public Schools Comprehensive Design will make this incapability abundantly clear.

Ed Graff is the typically ineffective superintendent of the locally centralized school district.

The locally centralized school district should be the best conduit of an excellent education to students of all demographic descriptors.  To realize the potential of the locally centralized school district, Ed Graff and all academic decision-makers must be replaced by true academicians, scholars whose credentials feature advanced training in rigorous academic disciplines, not in lightweight education programs.

Accordingly, we must sweep the halls of the Davis Center clean of Ed Graff and academic decision-makers currently on staff and replace them with those who have respect for knowledge and are themselves knowledgeable.  As the succeeding chapters will detail, in addition to Ed Graff, those who must be swept away are, Aimee Fearing, Michael Walker and the staff of the Office of Black Male Achievement, Jennifer Simon and staff of the Department of Indian Education, and Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno.  In earlier drafts of this book I made these recommendations for terminated positions, Deputy of Academics, Leadership, and Learning Cecilia Saddler and Associate Carla Steinbach-Huther were decidedly on my list;  as of autumn 2020, these two were indeed not longer employed by the Minneapolis Public Schools.

The Intellectually Corrupt Academic Program of the Minneapolis Public Schools 

 

Soon after I began my investigation of the Minneapolis Public Schools in late summer 2014, Susanne Griffin was hired by then Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson to be Chief of Academics, Leadership,  and Learning.  Griffin was told that she was not in her position, which paid $151,000, to make any major changes, that Johnson had her own program (including Focused Instruction, High Priority Schools, Shift, and Community Partnership Schools), and that Griffin’s job was to implement that program.  Griffin in any case was an administrator whose programmatic inclinations followed the knowledge-light formulations of education professors, which would not have produced a rigorous academic program for students of all demographic descriptors.  Griffin had been a teacher, principal, and administrator in the Rochester Public Schools and had taken time to follow an interest in inner city youth by going to Atlanta to gain intensive experience with students living in challenging urban environments.  Griffin is a good person but too ruined by education professors to be an academic leader.  She was not truly supportive of Focused Instruction, which had the potential to incorporate a Core Knowledge curriculum.  I ultimately advocated for Griffin’s dismissal;  she was demoted and then made her exit during Ed Graff’s first year as superintendent.

 

Chief of Schools Michael Thomas replaced Griffin as Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning but was locked into Graff’s program.  Graff was jealous of Thomas’s popularity within the district and in the community.  Thomas aggressively pursued positions elsewhere and is now serving as superintendent in a district of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

 

In the aftermath of Thomas’s departure, the position of Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning has been mostly vacant.  Chief of Research, Evaluation, Assessment, and Accountability Eric Moore briefly (November 2018-January 2019) held the position.  There was opposition within the Department of Teaching and Learning to Moore’s appointment, so that from January through June 2019 his title was scaled back to interim status.  A job posting was issued for a permanent replacement, then Ed Graff decided that for now anyway he would personally take the lead as academics leader.

 

For a stretch of time with the academic leadership position in flux, Cecilia Saddler remained at the position of Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning.  She was passed over for the top position, first in the immediate aftermath of Michael Thomas’s departure and then  

when the job was posted from spring into summer 2019.  During academic year 2018-2019 she was effectively the head of the Department of Teaching and Learning, which had been led for many years by an executive director but left vacant upon the departure of Macarre Traynham after the latter’s short tenure in academic year 2015-2016. 

 

Thus, while she was largely scuttled aside from mainline academic decision-making, Cecilia Saddler was the highest titular academic leader at the Minneapolis Public Schools as academic year 2019-2020 began.  Saddler has been with the Minneapolis Public Schools for a decade and a half as an English teacher, principal of South High School, an associate superintendent, and then the current deputy chief position.

 

Recall from part One, Facts, that

 

the Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership and Learning

manages operational connections to support associate

superintendents, principals and teaching staff in accelerating

student achievement and overall school improvement that is

aligned to the core values and academic goals of Acceleration 2020

 

and that Saddler’s academic credentials were as follows:

 

Cecilia Saddler  (Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning)

 

Degrees Earned                                Institution at Which Degree Was Earned

 

M. A., Teaching                                                University of Iowa

                                        

B.A., English                                       University of Iowa

Saddler is currently working on a doctorate in educational administration, which in combination with her master’s degree in teaching would give her no advanced training in her field of English.  As in the case of Graff and all other academic decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools she is not a scholar of an academic discipline (mathematics, natural science, history, government, English) that should be at the core of curriculum of any public school system. 

Predictably, Saddler has been ruined as an academic decision-maker by education professors.  A quotation that accompanied her identifiers included with her emails was from William Butler Yeats and opines that the goal of education is

 

“not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” 

 

We certainly want to light those fires, but we better fill that pail with lots of informational fuel. 

 

Saddler does not grasp the importance of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.  She did not superintend rising academic achievement levels as principal at South High School.  As associate superintendent, she did not mentor site principals to be effective academic leaders.  Cecilia Saddler was essentially a nonentity as Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning.  She made little contribution to drafts for the Minneapolis Public Schools Comprehensive District Design, although the script for the jargon-infested academic portion of the Design is of the sort that Saddler muttered when she appeared before the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.

 

According to the best information available to me, Cecilia Saddler was a good English teacher.  She should have gotten an advanced degree in that field and stayed in the classroom.  Instead, she climbed a bureaucratic ladder littered in the familiar way with meaningless education degrees but at the top of which lies a larger pot of money.

 

As of the early to middle reaches of first semester, academic year 2019-2020, Cec ilia Saddler ceased to be Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership and Learning Cecilia Saddler.

 

She became, then, just one of many among the host of academic decision-makers who have been swept away but, at least as important, part of a general bureaucratic cleaning at the Minneapolis Public Schools that must continue, with replacement by scholars who value knowledge and can accordingly design curriculum for implementation in logical sequence tyhrought the preK-12 years. 

 

Aimee Fearing has recently been tapped by Superintendent Ed Graff to occupy an Interim Chief of Academics position.  The interim should be short.  Graff must appoint an academic chief who is the scholar that he is not---  or find his own way out the Davis Center door.

 

Aimee Fearing >>>>>  Another Inept Head of Academics and Executive Director of the Department of Teaching and Learning

 

Over summer 2019, the position of Executive Director of the Department of Teaching and Learning was bestowed upon Aimee Fearing.  This was another affront to Cecilia Saddler, who had assumed leadership of that department as Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and learning after being passed over for Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning with Michael Thomas’s departure for Colorado Springs, Colorado.

 

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, government, English) 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.  She should not be making decisions pertinent to academics.  And yet she leads a department that has the official responsibility for the academic program of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

The position of Executive Director of Teaching and Learning was most ably filled by Mike Lynch.  Lynch served under Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and was fully behind her program of Focused Instruction, which had the potential for imparting a Core Knowledge curriculum that Lynch also embraced.  But Lynch encountered a great amount of opposition for his support of knowledge-intensive curriculum from staff members of the Department of Teaching Learning.  Although he and his immediate superior, Chief of Academics Susanne Griffin, seemed to have a good relationship, Griffin herself made few initiatives and leaned more to the prevailing anti-knowledge, education professor-espoused view of her Department of Teaching and Learning staff.  Lynch departed for graduate study in Boston in 2015.

 

Griffin brought in Macarre Traynham, whose main expertise was in Culturally Relevant Curriculum.  I met with Traynham and did not find her to have much enthusiasm for knowledge-intensive curriculum or what by then was a Focused Instruction plank of the Bernadeia Johnson program that was being sabotaged by Teaching and Learning staff members.  A mid-level Teaching and Learning official by the name of Tina Platt had responsibility for Focused Instruction, without possessing impressive credentials or the requisite knowledge base to oversee knowledge-intensive curriculum.  I advocated for the dismissal of Traynham and Platt;  Traynham lasted just a few months and Platt also departed the district.

 

There was no Executive Director of Teaching and Learning during academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019.  Mercifully, this bloated department was slimmed down from 53 staff members to a current 30.  But the department is still overstaffed and full of incompetent occupants of sinecures.  The department should be cleared of present occupants, all of whom are trained in education rather than academic programs, at the graduate level and for most even at the undergraduate level. 

 

Again, we have the phenomenon of non-academicians bearing the responsibility for the academic program of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

If teachers were properly trained in their subject areas, there would be little need for a Department of Teaching and Learning.  No such department exists on college and university campuses to train professors, who are experts in the subjects they teach.  Such a department would be ludicrous.

 

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Ibrahima Diop, Karen Devet, Fadi Fadhil, Jason Hennes, Maggie Sullivan, and Rochelle Cox are professionals of the highest caliber.

 

Ed Graff, Aimee Fearing, and the entire department of MPS Teaching are inept, by the intellectually corrupt nature of their training.

 

Those specialists of excellence at the Minneapolis Public Schools must acknowledge and confront the incompetence their colleagues in the MPS academic division and commit themselves with all due speed to the imperatives of the preK-12 Revolution. 

 

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