Apr 26, 2021

Front Matter and Contents: >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, Volume VII, Number 10, April 2021 >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

Volume VII, No. 10                            

May 2021

 

Journal of the K-12 Revolution:

Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota        

                                                                                

A Five-Article Series         

 

A Publication of the New Salem Educational Initiative

 

Gary Marvin Davison, Editor

                               

Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

 

Part Two

 

A Five-Article Series         

 

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.

Director, New Salem Educational Initiative

 

New Salem Educational Initiative

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

 

Part Two

 

 

A Five-Article Series         

 

Copyright © 2021

Gary Marvin Davison

New Salem Educational Initiative

 

Contents

 

Introduction 

 

The Sordid Spectacle of Intellectual Lightweights Making Curricular Decisions at the Minneapolis Public Schools 

 

Article #1                                                                                                    

The Intellectually Corrupt Academic Program of the Minneapolis Public Schools  >>>>>   

 

Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff’s Academic Ineptitude Powerfully Demonstrated in His Retention of Academic Lightweight Aimee Fearing as Interim Senior Academic Officer for One and a Half Years

 

Article #2                                                                                                               

 

MPS Department of Teaching and Learning:  Expensive, Intellectual Wasteland

 

Article #3                                                                                                                                            

 

Christopher Wernimont, Erin Clarke, Jennifer Hanzak, and Marium Toure’ Are Academic Lightweights Who Have No Idea How to Generate Mathematics Curriculum or Teach Mathematics   >>>>>  Identification of Minneapolis Public Schools Davis Center Staff Responsible for Abominable Student Proficiency Rates in Mathematics

 

Article #4

 

Ineptitude of Julie Tangemann, Lisa Purcell, Meghan Gasdick, Molly Siebert, and Molly Vasich  >>>>>  Meager Academic Qualifications of MPS Department of Teaching and Learning Staff Members and Cluelessness as to Development of Reading Skill Results in Abominable Levels of Student Proficiency

 

Article #5    

 

Erin Clarke, Christen Lish, Jenn Ross, and Julie Tangemann Bear Major Responsibility for the Wretched Levels of Student Science Proficiency in the Minneapolis Public Schools   

Introduction >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, Volume VII, Number 11, May 2021 >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

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.

 

Article #1 >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, Volume VII, Number 11, May 2021 >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

The Intellectually Corrupt Academic Program of the Minneapolis Public Schools  >>>>>    

Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff’s Academic Ineptitude Powerfully Demonstrated in His Retention of Academic Lightweight Aimee Fearing as Interim Senior Academic Officer for One and a Half Years

Aimee Fearing and the Entire Staff of MPS Teaching and Learning Should Be Dismissed

 

Over summer 2019, the position of Executive Director of the Department of Teaching and Learning was bestowed upon Aimee Fearing.  This was another affront to Cecilia Saddler, who had assumed leadership of that department as Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and learning after being passed over for Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning with Michael Thomas’s departure for Colorado Springs, Colorado.

 

Fearing’s credentials are as follows.

 

Academic Credentials for Aimee Fearing

Minneapolis Public Schools

 

Executive Director, Teaching and Learning

 

Degree Conferred           

 

Bachelor’s Degree

 

Field in Which Degree

Was Conferred 

 

ESL Education               

 

Institution at Which Degree Was Conferred

 

University of Northwestern

 

13 May 2000

 

Degree Conferred           

Master’s Degree         

 

Education                       

 

Institution at Which Degree Was Conferred

 

Hamline University

 

23 May 2003

 

Degree Conferred           

 

Doctorate       

 

Education                       

 

Institution at Which Degree Was Conferred

 

Hamline University

 

30 April 2015

 

Other Credentials

 

Professional Licensures

 

K-12 Principal Licensure

 

Expiration, 30 June 2023

 

K-12 ESL Licensure

 

Expiration, 30 June 2023

 

5-12 Communication Arts Licensure

 

Expiration, 30 June 2023

 

Thus, Fearing has the typical profile for an academic decision-maker at the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Her training is entirely in education rather than in an academic discipline (mathematics, natural science, history, government, English) that should be at the core of the curriculum of a locally centralized school district.  Fearing is not a scholar.  She is not a subject area specialist.  She should not be making decisions pertinent to academics.  And yet she leads a department that has the official responsibility for the academic program of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

The position of Executive Director of Teaching and Learning was most ably filled by Mike Lynch.  Lynch served under Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and was fully behind her program of Focused Instruction, which had the potential for imparting a Core Knowledge curriculum that Lynch also embraced.  But Lynch encountered a great amount of opposition for his support of knowledge-intensive curriculum from staff members of the Department of Teaching Learning.  Although he and his immediate superior, Chief of Academics Susanne Griffin, seemed to have a good relationship, Griffin herself made few initiatives and leaned more to the prevailing anti-knowledge, education professor-espoused view of her Department of Teaching and Learning staff.  Lynch departed for graduate study in Boston in 2015.

 

Griffin brought in Macarre Traynham, whose main expertise was in Culturally Relevant Curriculum.  I met with Traynham and did not find her to have much enthusiasm for knowledge-intensive curriculum or what by then was a Focused Instruction plank of the Bernadeia Johnson program that was being sabotaged by Teaching and Learning staff members.  A mid-level Teaching and Learning official by the name of Tina Platt had responsibility for Focused Instruction, without possessing impressive credentials or the requisite knowledge base to oversee knowledge-intensive curriculum.  I advocated for the dismissal of Traynham and Platt;  Traynham lasted just a few months and Platt also departed the district.

 

There was no Executive Director of Teaching and Learning during academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019.  Mercifully, this bloated department was slimmed down from 53 staff members to a current 30.  But the department is still overstaffed and full of incompetent occupants of sinecures.  The department should be cleared of present occupants, all of whom are trained in education rather than academic programs, at the graduate level and for most even at the undergraduate level. 

 

Again, we have the phenomenon of non-academicians bearing the responsibility for the academic program of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

If teachers were properly trained in their subject areas, there would be little need for a Department of Teaching and Learning.  No such department exists on college and university campuses to train professors, who are experts in the subjects they teach.  Such a department would be ludicrous.

 

The MPS Department of Teaching and Learning should be disbanded.  Interim Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning should be reassigned to a position in her English Language Learner specialty.  My program for teacher training would produce subject area specialists, so that the Department of Teaching and Learning would pass into much deserved oblivion.

 

Article #2 >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota<, Volume VII, Number 11, May 2021 >>>>> Origins and Maintenance of a Corrupt System of Public Education in the United States

MPS Department of Teaching and Learning:  Expensive, Intellectual Wasteland

 

Microcosmically representing the most vexing dilemmas at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) is the staff at the district’s Department of Teaching and Learning.

                                                                    

This intellectual wasteland costs the district over $2,000,000 in salary, an enormous misuse of funds in a budget projected to become ever more challenging as the Minneapolis Public Schools lose an ascending number of students for the next half-decade.

 

Understand that no degree in education is an academically substantive degree, that an Education Specialist degree is obtained to avoid writing a dissertation while rising in the administrative hierarchy, but that this is just as well since any doctorate in education is so meaningless.

 

The Department of Teaching in Learning is farcical in its existence:  This inept staff should be jettisoned as teachers are retrained to become masters of knowledge-intensive curriculum, so that they will as in the case of college and university professors carry curriculum in their brains, with little patience for the pretensions and the ineptitude of Department of Teaching and Learning staff.

 

This inept staff is culpable for the following dismal results  >>>>>

 

Math 

 

MPS Academic Proficiency Rates for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019

 (as indicated by Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment [MCA] results for spring of the given years)

 

Math                    

 

African                  

American

 

2014       2015       2016      2017      2018         2019

 

22%       23%          21%        18%       18%          18%

 

American             

Indian

 

23%        19%           19%       17%        17%         18%

 

Hispanic              

 

31%         32%          31%       29%        26%         25%

 

Asian                    

 

48%         50%          50%       47%        50%        47%

 

White                  

 

77%         78%          78%       77%        77%         75%

 

Free/ Reduced                   

 

26%         26%          25%       24%        22%        20%

 

All                         

 

44%         44%           44%     42%        42%          42%

 

Reading

 

2014       2015       2016      2017      2018       2019

 

African  American               

 

22%       21%         21%      21%       22%           23%

 

American  Indian           

 

21%        20%         21%      23%        24%         25%

 

Hispanic              

 

23%         25%          26%       26%        27%      29%

 

Asian                    

 

41%         40%          45%       41%        48%      50%

 

White                  

 

78%         77%          77%       78%        80%       78%

 

Free/ Reduced                    

 

23%         23%          23%       25%        25%      25%

 

All                         

 

42%         42%           43%     43%        45%       47%

 

Science

 

2014       2015       2016      2017      2018        2019

 

African  American               

 

11%       15%         13%        12%       11%         14%

 

American Indian             

 

14%        16%        13%      17%       14%           17%

 

Hispanic              

 

17%         18%        21%      19%       17%          16%

 

Asian                    

 

31%         35%       42%       38%       37%          40%

 

White                  

 

71%         75%        71%       70%       71%         70%

 

Free/ Reduced                   

 

14%         15%        17%       16%      15%          14%

 

All                         

33%        36%        35%        34%      34%          36%

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

Keep these abysmal results firmly in view as you read the articles to come, detailing the inept staff members responsible for these low student proficiency proficiency rates in mathematics, reading, and science in the Minneapois Public Schools.