May 9, 2021

Fifth Open Letter to Minneapolis Public School Board Members Adriana Cerrillo and Sharon El-Amin

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Note to Readers  >>>>>    I am off to Tucson, Arizona, for two weeks to visit my son, Ryan Davison-Reed.  Please use the time to review the 1700- plus articles on this blog, with particular attention to the 25 articles entered thus far detailing the intellectual corruption that pervades public education in the United States.

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Adriana and Sharon---

 

The two of you have now been members of the Minneapolis Public Schools MPS Board of Education for five months and thus should be settling in and accumulating observational details on the reality that I have conveyed in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, editions of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis Minnesota, opinion pieces for the Star Tribune, Public Comments, and over 1,700 articles on my blog, including my most recent multi-article series detailing the degradation that is public education in the United States, from the national to the state to the local level, saliently  in the latter case as found in the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

You must grasp the brutal realities regarding public education in the United States and take action at the most important level of the locally centralized school district  >>>>>

 

>>>>>      You must understand that the dilemmas of public education are traceable to a corrupt ideology that developed at Teachers College, Columbia University, during the 1920s and became a fixture in public education from the late 1960s forward.

 

>>>>>      All academic decision-makers and teachers in the public education establishment are intellectually corrupted by the anti-knowledge creed of education professors. 

 

>>>>>      At the national level this intellectual corruption and academic insubstantiality includes United States Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona;  at the state level it includes Minnesota Commissioner of Education Heather Mueller:  Both are academic lightweights with no substantive academic training.

 

>>>>>      Those intellectually corrupted at the Minneapolis Public Schools include Superintendent Ed Graff;  Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing;  Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brain Zambreno;  the entire 27-member Department of Teaching and Learning;  the leadership of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and all rank and file teachers except those very few who via their own reading, research, and self-training have overcome the myriad obstacles that produce such wretched teaching at the median.

 

>>>>>      Along with the Department of Teaching and Learning, the Office of Black Student Achievement and the Department of Indian Education are enormous bureaucratic burdens;  the former two should be disbanded and the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education staff should be overhauled to become a serious engine of academic advancement for the academically abused Native student population.

 

>>>>>      Senior Finance Officer Ibrahima Diop, Senior Operations Officer Karen Devet, Senior Information Technology Officer Justen Hennes, and special education leader Rochelle Cox are superb in their areas of expertise, and General Counsel Amy Moore and Communications/Marketing Executive Director Julie Schultz Brown are also solid in their roles.

 

>>>>>      But occupying an intermediate position between the abominable academic decision-makers and the superb staff given immediately above are three positions that should be examine and monitored for effectiveness and areas of expertise     >>>>>

 

>>>>>      Senior Research, Equity, and Accountability Officer Eric Moore is an excellent analyst of student data but should not be making overall academic decisions;            

 

>>>>>      Suzanne Kelly has comprehension of insufficiency of MPS curriculum and teacher quality but needs to study harder and act more forcefully to accomplish the necessary overhaul;

 

>>>>>      Maggie Sullivan also comprehends the worst dilemmas vexing the district but has not mustered the courage or secured the assistance from university-based and independent scholars she needs to implement the necessary thorough retraining of the teachers.

 

>>>>>      The Comprehensive District Design contains no provisions for the necessary overhaul to design and implement a logically sequenced, knowledge-intensive, skill replete curriculum or to provide for the mandatory teacher training necessary to impart such a curriculum; nor does Graff’s four-point emphasis on Social & Emotional Learning, Multi-Tiered System of Support, Literacy, and  Equity  offer any hope in the absence of the curriculum overhaul and teacher training that could give reality to those programmatic features that are at present mere bromides.

 

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The MPS Board of Education membership other than yourselves consists of political hacks who are bought and paid for by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.  The strength of the two of you lies in recognition of many of the system’s woes and the fact that you are not corrupted by the MFT/DFL cohort.

 

But you two have a lot of reading, research, and fact-gathering that you must do.  You must be diligent in attaining full comprehension of the most acute dilemmas vexing the Minneapolis Public Schools, then you must act with courage and energy.

 

Otherwise, Adriana and Sharon, you will serve out your term or terms without making any difference in the lives of the long-suffering students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Take stock over the summer.

 

Take vigorous action as classes resume for the 2021-2022 academic year.

 

Or know that you will fail as have all previous members of the MPS Board of Education have failed,

 

and that you should feel that as a heavy moral burden that you cannot ethically bear.

 

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