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Introduction

 

Staff at the MPS Davis Center by Position and Salary

 

Over the course of the years of 2014-2022, I have meticulously tracked salary expenditures at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) for central office staff at the Davis Center.  Toward the beginning of that period there was a particularly heavy central office burden, with staff members totaling upward toward 700 in number.  When Michael Goar took over as Interim Superintendent when Bernadeia Johnson stepped down in January 2015, he reduced staff at the Davis Center dramatically but did so in an unsophisticated manner, leaving, for example, the ineffective Office of Black Male (now Student) Achievement intact and keeping too many staff members in the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education.  And most irresponsibly, the chronically ineffective Department of Teaching and Learning (now the Department of Academic Core and Instruction) was still bloated with members who did little but sit in their sinecures with no understanding whatsoever as to how to improve student proficiency rates that languished below 50% and for many demographic groups did not rise above the 25% level.

 

During the tenure of Ed Graff, those proficiency rates remained stagnant and unconscionable in his failed administration, but Graff did reduce the bureaucratic bloat.  Upon assuming the position of interim superintendent on 1 July 2022, the extraordinarily talented Rochelle Cox continued the trend of reducing staff at the Davis Center and energetically overhauling personnel for the delivery of knowledge-intensive curriculum and hastening skill acquisition for those in demographic categories who have been academically abused by the district for many decades.  As of this edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, staff at the Davis Center stands numerically at 509, with an overhauled Academic Division and with personnel placed with elevated intentionality for the delivery of academically substantive curriculum.

 

The articles below give salaries at the Davis Center in categorical ranges including the $100,000 level and above (with 92 staff members in this category);  $90,000-$100,000 (59 staff members);  $80,000-$90,000 (86 staff members);  $70,000-$80,000 (76 staff members);  and under $70,000 (broken down in several subcategories totaling 196 staff members).

 

Staff members at the Davis Center now total in all 509;  there is still room for further alignment and reduction in many departments, but that total represents a great improvement.  The Finance Division is actually understaffed, with many highly talented professionals having left in disgust during and in the immediate aftermath of negotiations with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) in spring 2022. 

 

Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox continues to give serious thought to a realignment that will address those needs of the Finance Division while making additional reduction and repositioning of staff members for the maximally effective improvement in basic skill proficiency rates and the delivery of knowledge-intensive curriculum and the training of teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum.