Process Must Go Forward to Extend the Contract of Interim MPS Superintendent Rochelle Cox; Brenda Cassellius Must Discontinue Her Campaign to Be Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools

Former Minnesota Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius must terminate her campaign to become superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.  

Cassellius was Minnesota Commissioner of Education from January 2011 to January 2019.  In 2018 the staff under her direction established the North Star Accountability System to meet the requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).  The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) is an intellectually corrupt institution whose slack oversight of World’s Best Workforce (WBWF), Achievement and Integration (A&I), American Indian Education (AIE) was detailed in a report issued by Minnesota Office of Legislative Auditor (OLA) in March 2022.  

These programs serve only to meet the legalistic requirements of ESSA and the state response to ESSA known as the North Star Accountability System.  Like an MDE prototype, the Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS), the North Star Accountability System shifted emphasis from objective assessments of student performance to identify struggling students and schools to an approach that merely included objective assessments---  along with graduation rates and annual progress toward goals---  to rate school performance and identify those schools to receive assistance in meeting academic targets. 

The North Star Accountability System relies heavily on putative Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs) to address academic skill deficiencies of students in Minnesota.  Most RCE staff members have been teachers certified and operating within the same system that has produced such wretched proficiency rates (just 46% in reading and 53% in mathematics for white non-Hispanic students, with achievement gaps of 37, 30 and 29 percentage points between non-Hispanic white students and their American Indian, African American and Hispanic peers, respectively).

There are only 57 total staff members at the six RCEs (located in Sartell, with 11 staff members; Mountain Iron, 10; Thief River Falls, 10; Rochester, 15; Marshall, nine; and Fergus Falls, six). The Minneapolis Public Schools and St. Paul Public Schools supposedly receive direct MDE support similar to that provided by the RCEs. There are more than 2,100 traditional and charter schools in Minnesota with a total of 843,404 students. Considering that RCE staff members total only 57, this means that there is one staff member for every 37 schools and for every 14,797 students. Given the establishment qualifications of RCE staff members and those high ratios, the notion that RCEs can address lagging student proficiency rates in Minnesota is preposterous. 

Cassellius and MDE staffer Michael Diedrich, a key figure in the rollout of the North Star Accountability System, knew from the beginning that the new system was a sham, with no hope of addressing the skill deficiencies of Minnesota students.  And they knew that they would be doing little follow-up to determine the efficacy of North Star and other MDE programs.  As the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) stated frankly in the report of 2022, MDE oversight of programs with the stated purpose of addressing student skill deficiencies so to move toward educational equity is slim;  as the OLA report conveys, the MDE does little besides receiving the reports and reporting in turn to the Legislature.  No follow-up in terms of investigating program effectiveness ever occurs.

Brenda Cassellius has been campaigning aggressively, utilizing her many connections to the Minnesota education establishment, to prevail on current members of the MPS Board of Education to set processes in motion that would lead to her becoming the next superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools. 

 

Cassellius would be a terrible selection for that position. 

 

……………………………………………………………………………

 

Rather, current MPS Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox should the board’s selection of long-term superintendent.

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.

………………………………………………………………........

Events at the 17 January 2023 Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education Superintendent Search strongly suggested that board members (now comprised of holdovers Kim Ellison [At-Large] and Ira Jordain [District 6], both of whom have been closely tied to the DFL/Minneapolis Federation of Teachers [MFT] cohort;  independent holdovers Adriana Cerrillo [District 4] and Sharon El-Amin [District 2 {North Minneapolis}];  and new members Fathia Feerayare [District 3 {DFL-endorsed}], Abdul Abdi [District 1 {DFL-endorsed}], Collin Beachy [At-Large {DFL-endorsed}], and Sonya Emerick [independent/non-endorsed]) had come to realize the superior administrative talent that they had witnessed in Rochelle Cox.   

Four superintendent search firms (J. G. Consulting, BWP Associates, Minnesota School Board Association [MSBA], and GR Recruiting) made presentations.  The Board narrowed the selection of firms to BWP and MSBA, specifying that the amount of any proffered contract would not exceed $40,000).

The board then turned attention to Chair El-Amin's amendment to resolution language concerning the tendering of a contract to BWP, now calling for contracted services to start no earlier than September 2023:

This would require another year of service from an interim superintendent, with everyone understanding that El-Amin had already been in discussions with Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox concerning a one-year contract extension.  The vote outcome was 6-3 in favor of El-Amin’s resolution.

A third vote was taken on the overall resolution to establish a contract with BWP no earlier than September 2023, at an authorized maximum $40,000 amount, as amended by Chair El-Amin's language;  the resolution passed on a 5-4 vote.

A separate vote will be needed to approve another contract for Rochelle Cox.

The MPS Board of Education should now move assertively in extending that contract to Cox. 

The official vote on offering the now-necessary additional year to an interim superintendent, will most likely come at the Tuesday, 14 February, meeting of the MPS Board of Education.

But a Special Superintendent Search meeting of the board will take place this evening (Tuesday, 7 February 2023) and will reveal any success that Cassellius has had in insinuating herself into the process.

Those interested in the future of the Minneapolis Public Schools and the need to address the stark failures of the district should be wary of any sign of Cassellius’s campaign and lend their firm support to Rochelle Cox, recognizing her superior leadership of the district and looking to the board to extend her contract.