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.
………………………………………………………………...
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.
………………………………………………………………………………..
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.
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