Mar 30, 2022

Ed Graff Never Should Have Been Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools: The Time is Now for Him to Submit His Resignation

Ed Graff should never have been hired as superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.


He should submit his resignation immediately.

 

At last evening’s (Tuesday, 29 March 2022) special business meeting of the Minneapolis Public (MPS) Board of Education, Superintendent Ed Graff responded to the profanity used by students protesting the two-week lengthening of the academic year and addition of 42 minutes to each school day to compensate for time lost during the recent strike by leaving the room.  When the students called out to Graff in opposition to his departure, the superintendent returned briefly to his microphone to say that he did not want to be a part of any organization that would allow profanity at its meetings.

 

Graff was right in objecting to the profane invective.  Officially, such cursing is prohibited at MPS Board of Education meetings.  The students were also wrong as to the reason for their protest, inasmuch as not meeting Minnesota minimum requirements for in-school time would, as explained by MPS General Counsel Amy Moore, bring consequences in terms of funding reduction and possible criminal prosecution.

 

But the student anger was real, even if they do not understand that their disgruntlement is rooted in having now to endure 42 additional minutes per day and two additional school weeks of abysmal teaching that makes heavy use of, as one equally frustrated audience member correctly conveyed, videos and worksheets.

 

We should take Graff at this word as “not wanting to a part of” the organization known as the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

Graff must go.

 

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Superintendent Ed Graff is an academic mediocrity and in that regard he is typical of his profession.

 

Note that 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.

 

Ed Graff              (Superintendent)

 

Degrees Earned                             Institution at Which Degree Was Conferred

 

M. A., Education Administration    University of Southern Mississippi

             (online degree)

B. A., Elementary Education            University of Alaska, Anchorage

Other Credentials

Professional Licensures

District Professional Administrator, District Superinten

District Professional Administratodentr, Principal K-12

Professional Background

Anchorage School District, 2000-present [2016]

Superintendent                             2013-present [2016]

Chief Academic Officer                2009-2013

Executive Director,                       2008-2009

Elementary Education  

Principal, Rogers Park                  2005-2008         

 Elementary School

                  and K-6 Highly Gifted Program

Principal, Mountain View            2007

                             Elementary School/

                             Summer School

Principal,                                         2005-2006

William L. Bowman Open---

Optional Elementary School/Summer School                                                

 

 

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.  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.

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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.

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This is a district that between autumn 2020 and autumn 2021 lost 2,909 students (declining from 31,598 to 28,689), a district that for many years has featured academic proficiency rates for African American, American Indian, and Hispanic students below 25 percent, a district in which those rates for all students have been essentially flat, falling between 40 and 45 percent for both reading and mathematics during academic years ending in 2014 through 2021.

Students at the preK-5 level master no rigorous, systematically imparted knowledge sets pertinent to natural science, history, government, geography, quality literature, or the fine arts. Middle school features more courses in those areas but those courses are knowledge-deficient.  At the high school level, only Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses have the potential for academic substance but are often taught by teachers who do not possess the requisite knowledge base.

Not a single administrator and very few teachers are positioned to articulate or implement changes that would improve the knowledge-deficient, skill-deplete educational program at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  Although they are on opposite sides of contractual issues pertinent to the current strike, key academic decision-makers at the Davis Center (central administration) and principals and teachers at school sites have all been trained in abominable departments, schools, and colleges of education. 

Academic decision-makers and teachers have all matriculated in classrooms presided over by education professors who oppose established knowledge and skill sets in favor of ad hoc curriculum formulated according to teacher and student whim at any given moment.  Both administrators and teachers have moved through the step and lane system toward higher remuneration by acquiring graduate degrees in such education programs, rather than in key subject areas:  There are very few scholarly academicians operating either in the Davis Center or at school sites.

Graff has been superintendent in the Minneapolis district since 1 July 2016, so that his administration is responsible for the following results in the years ending in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021--- and for the failure to improve at any acceptable standard, even in literacy, one of the avowed emphases in his four-point programmatic focus (literacy, equity, social and emotional learning, and multi-tiered system of support).

As is the case with most superintendents throughout the nation, Graff is a creature of the ironically anti-knowledge education establishment that assures production of an ignorant populace and cyclical poverty at the urban core.

Perpend  >>>>>

Academic Proficiency Rates as Indicated by Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA)

Academic Years Ending in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021

(Note  >>>>>      The MCAs were not administered for the academic year ending in 2020.)

Reading                  

2014               42%                                             

2015               42%                                        

2016               43%                                            

2017               43%                                            

2018               45%                                             

2019               47%                                             

2021               46%                

Mathematics                                          

2014               44%                                         

2015               44%                                         

2016               44%                                         

2017               42%                                         

2018               42%                                         

2019               42%                                          

2021               35%                                          

Science

2014               33% 

2015               36%

2016               35%

2017               34%

2018               34%

2019               36%

2021               36%

 

Academic Proficiency as Indicated Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs)

 

Academic Years Ending in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021

 

(Note  >>>>>      The MCAs were not administered for the academic year ending in 2020.)

Reading

African American            

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021

22%     21%    21%    21%    22%    23%   19%

American Indian

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021

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

Asian/Pacific Islander    

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021          

41%     40%   45%    41%     48%    50%   54%

Hispanic        

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021

23%     25%   26%    26%     27%    27%   20%

White                

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021

78%      77%   77%    78%    80%   78%    74%

All Students      

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021

42%      42%     43%      43%      45%      47%    46% 

Mathematics

(Note  >>>>>      The MCAs were not administered for the academic year ending in 2020.)

African American             

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021

22%     23%    21%   18%    18%    18%     9%

 American Indian         

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

23%     19%    19%   17%     17%    18%    9%

Asian/Islander                

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

48%     50%   50%    47%    50%    47%    46%

Hispanic            

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

31%     32%    31%   29%     26%    25%   12%

White                

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

71%     75%    71%   70%     71%    70%   61%

All Students      

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

44%     44%   44%    42%    42%     42%   35%

Science

(Note  >>>>>      The MCAs were not administered for the academic year ending in 2020.)

African American

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

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

American Indian          

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

14%     16%   13%    17%     14%    17%     9%

Asian/Pacific Islander                

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

31%     35%    42%    35%    37%   40%    43%

Hispanic            

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

17%     18%    21%   19%    17%     16%   10%

White                

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

71%     75%    71%    70%   71%    70%    61% 

All Students      

2014    2015   2016    2017    2018    2019    2021 

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

 

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One audience member at last evening’s meeting was holding a sign urging Graff to resign after over five years as superintendent for not improving literacy rates.

 

Another audience member held a sign that read simply, “Ed Graff, Resign.”

 

Ed Graff should make good on his own vow that he does not want to be a part of the Minneapolis Public Schools organization and the injunctions of the frustrated members of the audience on the evening of Tuesday, 29 March 2022:

 

Long overdue, Graff should submit his resignation as superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

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