Article #5
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.
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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