Officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools Most
Responsible for Low Academic Quality
The Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) constitute a district in disarray, reeling from declining student populations in the course of the last decade and with grim prospects for maintaining the current enrollment of less than 29,000 students. Many Northside African American parents have given up on the district, perceiving the schools of their public district to be disorderly, dangerous, and academically inadequate.
During her eighteen month (July 2022-December 2023), visionary Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox oversaw innovative programming: online ACT tutoring, online high-dosage tutoring, in-person and Basic Skill Intervention Triads. Cox also presented information on demographic realities and underused buildings that argued for closing or repurposing several schools.
At this point the district was on the throes of a declared ”Transformation” that would continue to implement promising academic initiatives while rationally utilizing building space.
But on 1 December 2023, after a corrupt task force maneuvered to put forth two external candidates members of consideration of members of the MPS Board of Education, those members made the disastrous decision, in an 8-1 vote, to appoint Lisa Sayles-Adams, then the undistinguished superintendent of East Carver County Schools, as superintendent.
The mean-spirited, jealous Sayles-Adams dismissed Rochelle Cox and Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing, the duo most responsible for the litany of innovative academic programs; oversaw sham “Listening Sessions”; failed to push forward Transformation in either academic or building usage components; and misled the public by claiming that under the exigencies of gaping budget deficit she had reduced Davis Center (central office) staff by some figure between 11.74% and 14.22%; but upon my investigation, the figure of 13.8% to which the administration seemed to have settled as Fiscal Year 2026 Budget was finalized was based not on actual staff reductions, but upon reduction in potential FTE (Full-Time Equivalencies) assigned (not actually occupied by staff members, but maximum number allowed central office hires to a lower FTE figure of potential hires.
As this fiscal deceit was being perpetrated, Sayles-Adams’s dissertation was made public in November 2023 after having been under the unusual “embargoed” status for one and one-half years. I downloaded and analyzed this this miniscule (123 pages of textual content), wretchedly written doctoral thesis, which became so embarrassing for this unfortunate selection of a superintendent that she took the even more unusual step of removing her dissertation from public access.
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But as inept and deceitful as Sayles-Adams is, she is not the only guilty central office administrator that is the morass known as the Minneapolis Public Schools.
This edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota examines the staff members most culpable for the disastrous academic performance of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Article #1 focuses upon the members of the MPS Board of Education; Article #2 on the superintendent; Article #3 on the cabinet of senior leaders; Article #4 on the Core Academics and Instruction Department; and Article #5 on the Office of Black Student Achievement, Office of Latine Achievement, and the Department of Indian Education.
All of these central office bureaucrats with responsibility for the academic program are deeply culpable for a level of academic failure that sends students across the stage at graduation to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only, and many of those young people on to mean streets where academically abused community members die early or live out their one earthly sojourn locked behind bars in one our institutions of incarceration.
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