The Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education meeting of Friday, 1 December 2023, to select the new MPS Superintendent microcosmically represents all that Is wrong with public education.
The background to this demonstration of incompetence and intellectual corruption goes back to autumn 2022 when A. J. Crabill, invited to address that Board as a representative of the Council of Great City Schools, seemingly against expectation of key members, counseled the Board to use a search or law firm only for vetting and handling logistics: He conveyed his conviction that astute Boards are always in readiness when the need arises to select a new superintendent and should always be cultivating internal candidates. The previous Board, especially as impelled by the four key members given reference above, ignored Mr. Crabill’s advice and endeavored to put in place a suggested timetable for a very conventional process in selecting the next superintendent. The current Board, most of whom were sworn in officially in January 2023, in large measure followed the signals of the previous Board and charted a very conventional search, except that on 7 March 2023 they voted to extend the contract of Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox.
With that move the new Board members did provide hope that they could come to understand the historically unprecedented nature of the extraordinary initiatives authored by the Interim Superintendent and executed brilliantly by her staff.
With exceptional energy and acuity, Cox and staff superintended the introduction of a new math curriculum (Bridges/Number Corner) that for the first time in recent memory was followed across all grade levels at all schools; for reading/language arts, a similar uniformity of curriculum was followed in a process that will now move from Benchmark Advance to a new curriculum currently under trial. Cox and staff also moved with new vigor to ensure faithful implementation of the reading intervention programs Groves, PRESS (“Pathways to Reading Excellence”), and LETRS (“Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling”). Academic and Strategic Initiative staff introduced high dosage tutoring provided by the firms of Carnegie and Axiom, online ACT training and, most importantly, 133 three-person professional teams (one licensed teacher, two trained Education Support Professionals [ESPs]), each team responsible for addressing the academic needs of 75 students lagging below grade level and having not experienced growth in reading or mathematics skills for two successive quarters.
The work that Cox and staff have done to address with elevated intentionality the skill acquisition needs of students languishing chronically far below grade level has never been accomplished by any public school district serving students living at the urban core.
Never.
Thus, given the unprecedented alacrity with which Cox and staff proceeded to overhaul the Minneapolis Public Schools as a prospective model for urban school districts across the nation, the Board should have put aside conventional processes and asked Rochelle Cox to be the next long-term superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools. They should never have given their decision-making responsibility to an MPS Superintendent Search Task Force that included 14 (of the 17 total) members not elected by the voters in the district. At any time up until the meeting of Friday, 1 December, the Board could have declined the recommendations of the Task Force and offered the contract to Cox.
Alternatively, the Board could have added Cox’s name to the list of finalists, so that the whole Board would have the ability to assess her record compared to the other candidates. The Task Force was given the responsibility to recommend two or three candidates. While Cox has never publicly stated that she submitted an application, there is a high degree of probability that she did so and could have had her name forwarded to the Board, along with those of Sonia Stewart and Lisa Sayles-Adams. The members of the Board--- and the public--- should have had the opportunity to assess the candidacies of Stewart and Sayles-Adams along with the accomplishments of Cox.
I have observed superintendents ranging from Richard Green in the 1980s through Ed Graff during 2016-2022. Because of the terrible training that superintendents receive in education programs, and the academically lightweight nature of their background, there is little surprise that superintendents of the Minneapolis Public Schools and other districts typically fail to address the chronic substandard academic proficiency of students, particularly those facing the challenges of familial poverty at the urban core. Therefore, the fact that Rochelle Cox is a keen reader of books and has interests across the mathematic, scientific, and liberal arts is highly unusual.
Following from that keen academic interest and her intense love of children and adolescents, Cox in the months stretching from July 2022 through the present (as November turns into November 2023) relentlessly provided to the Board at each monthly business meeting, and each Committee of the Whole, presentations focused on academic programming, closely faithful to the goals of the Strategic Plan (academic achievement, student well-being, effective staff, and school climate and equity).
I sat for years observing Board members and was perpetually stunned that very little discussion of academics took place. The Board, if members had any perception of what a transformation they were witnessing, should have long ago offered Rochelle Cox the position of long-term Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Instead, the Board on that fateful evening of 1 December 2023 confined themselves to deciding from the candidacies of Sonia Stewart and Lisa Sayles-Adams.
Stewart is the typical mediocrity from superintendent candidate pools, and she had disturbing red flags in her professional history:
Stewart has written a book, All Children Are Our Children: A Pearl at the Heart of the City (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform), based on her experiences at Pearl-Cohn, which she considers the crown jewel of her accomplishments as an educator. But Pearl-Cohn guidance counselor Kelly Brown, in an article by Samantha West of the Green Bay Press Gazette, conveyed her view that Stewart and staff at Pearl-Cohn maneuvered to make standardized test scores look better than they were. A Nashville television report in 2015 revealed that Pearl-Cohn had implemented a policy prohibiting giving students a grade below a 60--- even if all the student did was “wad up the test and throw it back at the teacher.” A district spokesperson at the time defended Stewart by saying that Metro Nashville Public Schools had implemented a controversial policy two years earlier that no student could get a grade below a 50 and that Stewart had simply misinterpreted that policy.
Brown also criticized a policy at Pearl-Cohn that automatically gave an A to any student who took an Advanced Placement exam — even if they slept through it. She also stated that under pressure from the district’s central office to improve test scores, just before students were to take end-of-course finals for which they had not done well on practice exams, Stewart prevailed upon counselor Brown to transfer students from the classes in which they had been enrolled to the Credit Recovery program.
Current figures from U. S. News and World Report record that only 3% of Pearl-Cohn students are proficient in mathematics, only 12% are proficient in reading, and that though 35% of Pearl-Cohn high school students took the Advanced Placement exam in academic year 2021-2022, not a single student recorded 3 out of 5 points regarded by college and university admissions offices as minimally necessary to gain college credit. Despite an 86.5% graduation rate, college readiness for graduating seniors at Pearl Cohn is rated as just 18.3 (eighteen and three-tenths) on a scale of 0 to 100.
As for Lisa Sayles-Adams, her record is also undistinguished.
Academic results in the Eastern Carver County Schools where Sayles-Adams has been serving as superintendent, are not very impressive, given that this district serves middle class students and only 9.2% (nine and two-tenths percent) of students are on free/reduced price lunch. The latter district serves just 9,377 students, raising doubt as to whether Sayles-Adams is actually prepared to lead the Minneapolis Public Schools, in which 48% of 29,000 students are on free/reduced price lunch and with that figure rising to 85% of students at many MPS schools.
Despite being a very middle-class district, the mathematics proficiency rate in Eastern Carver County Schools is just 64% for elementary school students, while for reading the figure is 63%; the comparable figures for middle school students are 42% and 59% and for high school students 56% and 67%. The graduation rate, at 69.5%, is not impressive for a middle-class district, and the college readiness score of 45.2 (forty-five and two-tenths) on the U. S. News and World Report scale of 0 to 100 is quite mediocre.
And yet these were the predictably lackluster candidates of the sort regularly recommended by search firms to school boards.
The official vote tally on Friday, 1 December 2023, went 8-1, with Sayles-Adams getting the affirmative votes of Board members Kim Ellison, Faheema Feerayarre, Lori Norvell, Sharon El-Amin, Abdul Abdi, Joyner Emerick, Collin Beachy, and--- despite having spoken in behalf of Stewart in the discussion period--- Adriana Cerrillo; only Ira Jourdain voted for Stewart.
During the discussion period, Board members repeatedly stated that Stewart and Sayles-Adams were both “great” candidates.
Given the de facto mediocrity of the candidates, I ask of the Board members a question that I am ever asking of education establishment figures:
Are they
1) ignorant (abysmal information bases);
2) in denial (staring straight into the truth but rejecting facts);
or
3) outright corrupt?
This phenomenon of low school board member quality is one of the key vexations of public education.
The mediocrity of superintendent candidates is another; they share with all public school administrators and teachers a lack of solid academic credentials, possessing at most an undergraduate degree in a solid discipline, with all graduate training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.
Lack of informed public interest is another vexation of the public schools and was witnessed by the low turnout at the 1 December meeting, with just a dozen so onlookers, aside from language interpreters and journalists. In this case, the low turnout also most likely indicated dissatisfaction with the candidates under consideration: There was a spooky silence in the room, with no applause whatsoever when Lisa Sayles-Adams was announced as the next long-term Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Given this gloomy outlook for most public school districts, the accomplishments of Rochelle Cox and staff are magnified. They have articulated a nonpareil academic program and demonstrated highly elevated talent. Cox’s staff, under the strong assumption that she had applied for the long-term superintendent position, was in mourning after the decision; many were on the edge of despondency.
The pathbreaking work that this super staff has done for months is now under threat by a Board whose members variously lack intellectual wherewithal, are in a state of denial, or are outright corrupt--- and thus unable to grasp the opportunity to create the model for public education that Cox and staff have articulated and are vigorously in the process of implementing.
Ironically, Lisa Sayles-Adams does have a chance to succeed if she embraces the initiatives of Rochelle Cox and her staff. If she does not do so, she will be the typically failed superintendent that characterizes all public school districts and has plagued the Minneapolis Public Schools specifically from the tenure of Richard Green (1980s) through Ed Graff (2016-2022).
What high praise is the circumstance that Cox, despite her crude treatment at the hands of the MPS Board of Education, loves children so much and is so invested in the quality rather than the prestige of the work, that she is likely to stay on to advise Sayles-Adams; this is true, too, of most of her magnificent staff.
The fate of the long-suffering students of the Minneapolis Public Schools, then, now resides in the willingness of Lisa Sayles-Adams to continue the unprecedented work of Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox and her staff.
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