The Intellectually Corrupt Academic Program of the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> The Sordid Spectacle of Intellectual Lightweights Making Curricular Decisions at 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; Ed Graff in the meantime
personally took 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,
Cecilia 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 for over a year now served as Superintendent Ed Graff’s Interim
Chief of Academics position.
She is yet another academic lightweight making decisions that ruin the lives of our precious young people.
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