Mar 22, 2021

Article #6 of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

The Grave Dilemma Posed by Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff’s Academic Incompetence

 

Given the ineptitude of federal and state officials and the futility of achieving the needed overhaul of preK-12 education in the United States at the national and state levels, the insubstantial professional training of Ed Graff and similarly academically lightweight superintendents across the nation constitutes an enormous dilemma that we must confront candidly in waging the revolution in public education.    

 

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. 

 

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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.

 

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. 

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