Introductory Comments >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota< >>>>> Volume IX, No. 9, March 2023

Introductory Comments

 

At the “Cabinet Team” portal of the website for the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), description of responsibilities for the position of associate superintendent is given as follows:

 

The associate superintendent is responsible for providing ongoing support and oversight to school building leaders. The associate superintendent works with school communities to improve overall school performance as defined in the strategic plan.

 

In the future, the associate superintendent position should be evaluated for likely elimination.  These central office administrators (Michael Walker, $175,000;  Yusuf Abdullah, $171,000;  Laura Cavender, $161,000;  Eric Thomas, $160.000) are among the top-paid staff members at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway), occupying a position that should be considered superfluous.  In a phenomenon typical in bureaucracies, the position was created in response to professional incompetence witnessed at another administrative level, that of school principal. 

 

Neither school principals nor the teachers whom they oversee emerge from administrator/teacher training programs prepared for the jobs that they are hired to perform, so that the creation of the associate superintendent position was meant to provide principals and teachers with compensatory training.  The irony, though, is that associate superintendents have typically themselves previously been teachers and principals in careers for which those positions define most of their job experience;  otherwise, associate superintendents have received their degrees and other credentials in programs that are as academically insubstantial as those from which teachers and principals have emerged.

 

Hence, the locally centralized school districts of which MPS is a salient example are rife with teacher and administrator incompetence.  The position of associate superintendent should be eliminated, in the aftermath of thorough teacher and administrator retraining for the delivery of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum.

 

This edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota gives student academic proficiency rates at schools overseen by particular superintendents:

 

In articles #1, #2, #3, and #4, figures given are for academic years ending in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022 (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments [MCAs] were not given in the Covid-interrupted academic year ending in 2020).  Inasmuch as the current four associate superintendents are new to their positions as of the current academic year of 2022-2023, article #5 focuses on student proficiency rates for the single academic year of 2021-2022, most relevant for determining success of the associate superintendents in raising achievement rates when the results of the MCAs administered at the end of this academic year 2022-2023 are reported.