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.
………………………………………………………………………………..
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.
Ed
Graff (Superintendent)
Degrees Earned Institution
at Which Degree Was Earned
M. A., Education Administration University of Southern Mississippi
(online degree)
B. A., Elementary Education University of Alaska, Anchorage
Other Credentials
Professional Licensures
District Professional Administrator, District Superintendent
District Professional Administrator, Principal K-12
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