Interlude >>>>> The Hopelessness of the Minneapolis Public Schools Under Current Leadership

The Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) constitutes a locally centralized school district in disarray.  

Superintendent Ed Graff has never had a viable plan for providing a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete academic program, nor for meeting the needs of those demographic groups---  students on Free/Reduced Price Lunch and those of African American, Latina/Latino, American Indian, and Hmong ethnicity--- who have been even more ill-served than the general student population.  

To provide knowledge-intensive education, a scholarly superintendent would dismantle the Department of Teaching and Learning and its 27 members, then she or he would commission university-based or independent scholars in major academic disciplines to design logically sequenced knowledge-intensive curriculum for grade-by-grade implementation throughout grades preK through twelve.  

Subject area emphasis at preK-5 would be on mathematics;  biology, chemistry, and physics;  history, government, geography, and economics;  Western classic, world, and ethnic-specific literature;  music and the visual arts;  and health and physical education.

This emphasis would continue at grades 6-8, with increasing student access to courses in world languages and in the vocational and technological arts.  

At grades 9-12, all but those students with grave learning challenges would be prepared to take Advanced Placement courses in all major subjects and  otherwise to select courses according to driving interest and life vision.  All high school students would produce a minimum 10-page research paper based on multiple sources and with proper citations.

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To implement these changes, Ed Graff would be released as superintendent;  the Department of Teaching and Learning and the Office of Black Sudent Achievement would be dismantled;  the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education would be overhauled for staffing with subject area expertise; and tbe position of associate superintendent would be terminated. 

Replacing ineffective central office bureaucrats would be a new Department of Resource Provision and Referral, led by current Office of Black Student Achievement director Michael Walker and staffed with people comfortable on the streets and in the homes of families facing elevated challenges of finances and functionality.

Teachers at all levels would have to be retrained in order to impart the new knowledge-intensive curriculum.

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As matters currently stand, Graff's four-point program of social and emotional learning, multi-tiered system of support, literacy, and equity is a predictably massive failure.  Neither this program nor the academic portion of the MPS Comprehensive District Design (CDD) has academic heft.

The academic portion of the CDD is full of jargon emanating from education professors at such institutions as the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development (CEHD).  Overwhelmingly, academic decision-makers, principals, and teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools have been trained in such programs and share the anti-knowledge ideology that has academically abused public schools students for at least four decades. 

That Graff and staff would therefore turn to the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development to improve academic results at the Minneapolis Public Schools demonstrates complete failure to grasp the source of the district's failures and the nature of the needed overhaul.