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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