January
10, 2023
Directors
Minneapolis
Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education
1250
West Broadway
Minneapolis MN
55411
MPS
Board of Education Directors:
Greetings
to all of you on the cusp of your first regular business meeting as a newly
constituted Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Fifty-one
years ago this spring, when I was a sophomore at Southern Methodist University
(SMU) in Dallas, Texas, I decided to prepare to be a high school teacher of
young people living at the urban core. I
took on the role as coordinator of university student tutors for SMU Volunteer
Services; at that time, I also began a
relationship with teachers and staff at L.G. Pinkston High School near the
publicly subsidized housing projects in West Dallas, an area of similar
demographic constitution as that of North Minneapolis. I tutored students at Pinkston throughout my
years at SMU, and in autumn 1973 I became a classroom teacher of government
(civics), American history, and world history at that high school.
In
the years since, I have received masters and Ph. D. degrees in Chinese and
Taiwanese history and have taught in just about every situation of which you
could conceive: conventional high
school classrooms, alternative schools, four years by special invitation
teaching East Asian history in university settings, a year teaching a GED
curriculum in a Missouri prison, two years teaching English as a Second
Language (ESL) in Taiwan, and a year working for the Fulbright Foundation
teaching graduate students in Taiwan bound for graduate study in the United
States (delivering lectures on United States university life via the linguistic
medium of Mandarin Chinese).
Throughout
this time my main focus, though, has remained on young people living in
challenging circumstances in central cities, and for the past thirty years,
from 1993 to the present, I have served as the director of and teacher in the
New Salem Educational Initiative, in which I currently teach 45 students weekly; I teach students in all grades, from preK
through grade 12. I also continue to
provide assistance to students who have graduated and I maintain Zoom
sessions with students who move away from Minneapolis: My commitment to my students is total and
lifelong.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
I
also am an activist, working from 6:00 AM to 12:00 midnight each day, teaching,
conducting research and writing, and maintaining multiple platforms for
advocacy. For eight and a half years now
I have conducted an intensive investigation into the inner workings of the
Minneapolis Public Schools. In autumn
2021, I completed the first edition of a 562-page book, Understanding the
Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect, which I am currently in the process of updating
for a second edition. The book is
divided into three parts: Part One,
Facts (approximately 300 pages, an exhaustive compilation of factual material,
examining all MPS departments, student academic proficiency rates, profiles of
all schools at all levels and types, academic credentials of building
principals and Davis Center staff members, information on the Minneapolis
Federation of Teachers (MFT) and the MPS Board of Education (all members over
the course of the last eight years), and MPS finances; Part Two, Analysis (approximately 100 pages, in
which I analyze the objective material from Part One and also provide analysis
of the functioning of the United States Department of Education and the
Minnesota Department of Education (MDE);
Part Three, Philosophy (a concise account of the history and philosophy
of education in the United States).
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Thus,
I have nonpareil experience in teaching, scholarship, and advocacy pertinent to
preK-12 education in the United States, in Minnesota, and at the Minneapolis
Public Schools specifically.
I
write to you today with the main purpose of asking you to be very careful in
your selection of a new superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
MPS
Superintendents from the 1980s include Richard Green, Robert Herrera, Peter
Hutchinson (officially, his organization [Public Strategies Group] constituted
a collective superintendent), David Jenkins, Carol Johnson, Thandiwe Peebles,
Bill Green, Bernadeia Johnson, and Ed Graff.
They have all been failures; in
particular, none of these superintendents articulated a viable plan for
providing necessary skill acquisition for students facing grave economic and
associated challenges; but further, none
of these superintendents succeeded in providing knowledge-intensive,
skill-replete curriculum for MPS students as a whole.
The
most recent iteration of the MPS Board of Education conducted a clearly failed first
search and then an inadequate second search, with multiple miscues in the first
search and a very unsatisfactory result from the second.
The
long-waiting students of the Minneapolis Public Schools must not be failed
again.
You
will fail them, though, if you pursue the typical means of selecting a
superintendent.
Examine
the attached document, entitled, “Superintendent Search Process,” authored by
A. J. Crabill of the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS), the contents of
which he discussed with MPS Board of Education members in early October 2022. Note that while he is favorable toward hiring
a group to conduct community listening sessions (a role now exercised by
Radious Guess’s EPS group), he does not assert a necessity of hiring a search
firm. Rather, he calls for very
intentional utilization of the services of either a search firm or an external
law firm to vet candidates whom you yourselves take a very aggressive role in
recruiting. Note that in many places in
his five-page document Crabill impresses upon you your own responsibility for
seeking and evaluating the candidates.
With you as board members reaching out to prospective candidates and
taking main responsibility upon yourselves, such limited use of either a
superintendent search firm or external lar firm need not necessitate
expenditure beyond $45,000 (rather than the typical $85,000).
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
But
I would maintain that you do not need to hire a search firm at all.
Listen
respectfully to the community, then explain to that community that you already
have multiple internal candidates (at whom Crabill urges you to look first) who
fulfill the essential criteria as expressed by the community, and who are in
the process of creating and implementing an academic program of unprecedented
quality for the Minneapolis Public Schools, a program that when fully delivered
over the next several years will be a model of urban school districts
throughout the United States.
Interim Superintendent Rochelle
Cox has created a substantially new cabinet that includes an entirely new
contingent of associate superintendents who have been given a directive
carefully to monitor academic programming and results at the specific schools
for which each is responsible. There is a new math curriculum
(Bridges/Number Corner) that for the first time in recent memory will be implemented
across all grade levels at all schools. And for reading/language arts, a
similar uniformity of implementation will be guided by the primary curriculum
(Benchmark Advance), with students facing particular struggles at schools that
have confronted such challenges for years receiving highly intentional skill
development on the basis of programs known as Groves, PRESS (“Pathways to
Reading Excellence”), and LETRS (“Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading
and Spelling”). High dosage tutoring
will be provided by the firms of Carnegie and Axiom.
At the behest of Interim
Superintendent Rochelle Cox, Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing, Deputy
Senior Academic Officer Maria Rollinger, and Director of Strategic Initiatives
Sarah Hunter are leading an effort to bring subject area substance to grades
pre-K through 5, so that student verbal skills will be developed, as they
should be, in the context of logically sequenced readings in history,
government, geography, multi-cultural literature, and the fine
arts; accordingly, students will develop vocabulary across a
multiplicity of subjects that lie at the core of advanced reading
development.
Regular business and Committee
of the Whole meetings of the MPS Board of Education for the first time in my
eight and one-half year observation have a firm focus on academics,
particularly on addressing the skill acquisition of students languishing far
below proficiency in mathematics and reading.
This is an interim
superintendent and staff with a chance to provide an unprecedentedly high
quality of education for students at a locally centralized school district,
particularly those facing challenges born of a brutal history that has created
and maintained conditions of cyclical familial poverty for many decades at the
urban core.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
Please embrace your
responsibility to take the lead in hiring the next long-term superintendent of
the Minneapolis Public Schools; look
first internally, as CGCS’s A. J. Crabill has urged you to do.
Know that within the district of
the Minneapolis Public Schools, there are a number of viable candidates who
would be better than any that you will find externally.
And know that you should first reach out to Rochelle Cox, who if she should
respond affirmatively to your overture, has multiple qualities that give her a
chance to be a transformative superintendent for the Minneapolis Public School
and, by extension, a model for urban superintendents throughout the United
States.
Be careful.
Be thoughtful.
There are student lives in the
balance.
With
my very best wishes---
Gary
Gary
Marvin Davison, Ph.D.
Director,
New Salem Educational Initiative
2507
Bryant Ave North
Minneapolis MN 55411
http://www.newsalemeducation.blogspot.com
Author,
Understanding
the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Gary Condition,
Future Prospect (New Salem Educational Initiative, second edition, 2023)
Foundations
of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education (New Salem
Educational Initiative, 2022)
A
Concise History of African America (Seaburn, 2004)
The
State of African Americans in Minnesota 2004 (Minneapolis
Urban League, 2004)
The
State of African Americans in Minnesota 2008 (Minneapolis
Urban League, 2008)
A
Short History of Taiwan: The Case for Independence (Praeger,
2003)
Tales
from the Taiwanese (Libraries Unlimited,
2004)
Culture
and Customs of Taiwan ([with Barbara E. Reed]
Greenwood, 1998)
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