Article #5 >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Volume VIII, Number 7, January 2022

Article #5

Minneapolis Public Schools As Saliently Sustaining Wretched Public

Education with Typically Academically Vacuous Leadership >>>>>

The Academic Hopelessness of the Ed Graff Tenure

Ed Graff was doomed to failure as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) from the beginning of his tenure on 1 July 2016.

 

Numerous duties pertain to the role of superintendent of a locally centralized school district;  among those duties, academic leadership, toward creation of knowledge-intensive curriculum and training of teachers capable of imparting such curriculum, is paramount.

 

Graff could never have been such a leader.  

 

His academic training is insubstantial.  

 

Graff's undergraduate degree (B. A, University of Alaska/Fairbanks) was in elementary education, entailing the most academically unsubstantial course of study on any university campus.  His graduate degree (M.Ed., University of Southern Mississippi) was in educational administration---  an online professional degree involving no substantial academic training.

 

Thus, despite Graff's commendable trust in superlative Senior Finance Officer Ibrahima Diop to put MPS finances in order with structurally balanced budgets, and reliance on the strengths of Senior Operations Officer Karen Devet and Senior Information Technology Officer Justin Hennes in their respective areas, Graff has not overseen the development of the academic program that is at the core of the mission of any locally centralized school district.

 

The Unfortunate Decision to Install Aimee Fearing as Senior Academic Officer

 

No one with the proper qualifications has occupied the post at the top of the academic division during the tenure of Ed Graff.  His early decision to oust the incapable Susanne Griffin was correct, but Graff soon installed Eric Moore in the position.  

 

Opposition to that move by inept staff in the wasteland known as the Department of Teaching and Learning could be construed as a compliment, but for entirely different reasons Moore was not the person for the role.  Moore's gifts, still utilized as Senior Accountability, Research, and Equity Officer, is in data collection and analysis, not in matters of curriculum design and teacher training.

 

Graff retreated for many months to a state of affairs in which he acted as senior academic leader, then he quixotically turned to former Wellstone International High School Principal Aimee Fearing, who for many months held the title of Interim Senior Academic Officer;  just a few weeks ago, Graff removed the interim designation.

 

Fearing has no training in any key academic subject (mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, geography, literature).  Her undergraduate training is in English as a Second Language (ESL);  both her master's and doctorate were conferred by education programs.

 

 

The Academically Insubstantial Program of Ed Graff

 

The four major components of Graff's academic program have been woefully inadequate from the beginning.  

 

The components are social and emotional learning (endeavoring to ensure that students are socially and emotionally prepared to receive academic instruction), multi-tiered system of support (MTSS, seeking to remove all nonacademic impediments to student learning and focusing instruction on each student's most critical needs), literacy, and equity.

 

But social and emotional learning, even if effectively implemented (which has not been the case) is only preparatory to academic learning.   

 

Multi-tiered system of support has been hazy as to detail and ineffective as to implementation.  

 

Literacy is an embarrassing low academic bar that has even more embarrassingly not been achieved (only 46% of MPS students at grade level in reading [with only 35% at grade level in mathematics]).  

 

Equity will only come by providing knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

And while the MPS Comprehensive District Design (CDD) admirably rationalizes transportation routes, centrally locates magnet programs, and induces attendance at neighborhood schools, the academic section is full of education professor jargon and bereft of specifics as to curriculum and teacher training.

 

Ed Graff's failure is grievous and manifest.

 

He must go.

 

The Qualifications Needed in the Next Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools---  and the Imperative Overhaul of Curriculum and Teacher Quality

                                                                                          

No one who possesses a superintendent's license is on the basis of that formal requirement likely to be the needed academic leader of the district  >>>>>

 

Her or his graduate training will have emphasized educational administration, not a key academic subject area.

 

Therefore, the next superintendent must hire as senior academic officer a university-based or independent scholar to oversee 

 

>>>>>  the development of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum for logically sequenced implementation across grades preK though 12;

 

>>>>>  and the training of teachers capable of implementing such a curriculum.

 

The central office bureaucracy should be slimmed and refocused on the impartation of knowledge-intensive curriculum.  

 

The Department of Teaching and Learning should be disbanded, to be replaced by scholars selected for design of knowledge intensive curriculum in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts and for the training of teachers capable of delivering such a curriculum.  

 

Upon the basis of curriculum in history and literature that necessarily includes all cultures, the ineffective Office of Black Student Achievement should be eliminated and the legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education restaffed with academicians.

 

Included in bureaucratic slimming should be the dismissal of associate superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno, with the return of Rochelle Cox to special education leadership.  

 

The position of administrator, office of the superintendent (currently designated for annual remuneration in excess of $190,000), should be jettisoned, entailing the dismissal or reassignment of Suzanne Kelly.

 

While diminution of central office bureaucracy should proceed vigorously, a new Department of Resource Provision and Referral should be established, staffed with people comfortable on the streets and in the homes of students from families struggling with dilemmas of finances and functionality.  Current Director of the Office of Black Student Achievement Michael Walker is qualified to lead this new department.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

 

Ed Graff's tenure as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools must end.

 

A new program featuring knowledge-intensive curriculum and teacher-scholars must be implemented.

 

The recommendations that I have rendered for bringing excellent public education to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors, in the Minneapolis Public Schools, are also those that should be followed in locally centralized school districts throughout the United States.

 

We can afford wretched public education in this nation, with the resulting ignorant citizenry, no longer.

 

There are lives in the balance.

 

We must act.

 

The time is now.

Article #4 >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Volume VIII, Number 7, January 2022

 

Article #4

Recent Actions of Officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools

That Saliently Sustain Wretched Public Education  >>>>>

The Unsustainable Retention of Failed Superintendent Ed Graff

 

Ongoing actions taken by staff and school boards at locally centralized school districts throughout the nation serve to sustain the wretched quality of public education in the United States.  The public school district of the Minneapolis Public Schools provides salient examples.

 

At the Tuesday, 12 October, meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education, four of nine members voted against entering into contract extension talks with Superintendent Ed Graff, whose current contract runs through 30 June 2022.

 

Those voting against extension were District 2 Member Sharon El-Amin, District 4 Member Adriana Cerrillo, District 5 Member Siad Ali, and At-Large Member Josh Pauly.

 

Voting to enter negotiations were District 1 Member Jenny Arneson, District 5 Member Nelson Inz, District 6 Member Ira Jourdain, At-Large Member Kim Caprini, and At-Large Member Kim Ellison.

 

Inz and Ellison are particularly objectionable political hacks.  

 

Arneson, Caprini, and Jourdain also have strong ties to the education establishment, at this time complicated by the strain in the relationship between Graff and Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) President Greta Callahan.  A very remote possibility exists that one of these three (Arneson, Caprini, or Jourdain} might be persuaded to join El-Amin, Cerrillo, Ali, and Pauly to discontinue negotiations with Graff.  But not one member in the Arneson-Caprini-Jourdain contingent has any idea of the dramatic changes needed in curriculum and teacher quality. 

 

Arneson has close ties to Ellison and, though knowledgeable about MPS and the environment in which the district functions, is capable of astonishingly outlandish statements in defense of the system as it is.

 

Jourdain has little grasp of the needed change and is lamentably an opponent of objective assessment of student knowledge and skill.  

 

Caprini is intellectually and ethically scattered, not a board member inclined toward the needed overhaul of the teacher force or the implementation of knowledge-intensive curriculum.

 

Graff is a failed superintendent, an academically insubstantial figure with no ability to implement the needed change, as witnessed in his keeping the similarly academically marginal Aimee Fearing as Interim Senior Academic Officer for two years before removing the interim categorization.

 

El-Amin, Ali, Cerrillo, and Pauly deserve commendation for voting against contract extension talks with Graff.  Should another board member be persuaded to join them, the failed Graff tenure would blessedly come to an end.

 

Discontent at the Davis Center (MPS central offices) is rife.  An already widespread dissatisfaction deepened to demoralization with the 5-4 vote.  

 

Should Graff continue as superintendent, staff departures would ensue.  

Should the departures include staff at the ineffective Department of Teaching and Learning and others in the Academic Division, the departures would constitute a favorable development.  But those departures would most likely involve many talented key figures outside the Academic Division whose loss would be lamentable in the extreme.

Currently only 35% of MPS students are proficient at grade level in mathematics;  only 44% read at grade level;  fewer than 25% of students on Free/Reduced Price Lunch and in key demographic categories function at grade level in those skill areas.

Nothing in the MPS Comprehensive District Design articulates a viable plan for academic progress or for the design of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum for logically sequenced implementation throughout the pre-K through 12 grades.

Ed Graff is a failure as an academic leader;  he should---  and in all likelihood will---  do what most superintendents who receive such a slim vote of confidence have done  >>>>>

resign.

Article #16 >>>>> Origin and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Unhealthy and Cosmetized American

Health education should be a part of the preK-12 curriculum, sequenced grade by grade for focus on particular issues pertinent to developmental stages of childhood, adolescence, and prospective adulthood.

But health as a subject area of focus is weakly represented at preK through grade 5 and abominably taught at grades 6-8 and 9-12.  Many health education teachers are overweight and not given to healthy dietary habits or exercise regimens.   

Thus do Americans go forth as adults ill-educated as to matters of health, with many never acquiring or acting upon information on healthful living beyond the school years: 

Thirty-six and five-tenths percent (36.5%) of Americans are obese;  another 32.5% are overweight, for a total of 69% carrying excess body weight.  

Americans consume on average three pounds (3 lbs.) of refined sugar per week.  Seventy percent (70%) of the American diet is derived from processed foods;  fifty-five percent (55%) of calorie consumption comes from processed foods.  Fifty percent (50%) of calories in the American diet are consumed in the form of pizza, burgers, fries, chips, candy, and soda pop.  Less than one- third (33%) of calories are derived from the healthiest foods:  vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.

Fewer than 25% of Americans get at least twenty minutes of aerobic exercise per day.  As a result of unhealthy diets, lack of exercise, sedentary habits, and prolonged temporal spans sitting in ergonomically deleterious positions and chairs, at least 33% of adult women and 25% of adult males have lower back pain.  Approximately 25% of adults have had treatments for back pain in the last year.  Gastrointestinal problems plague the American population;  approximately 16% of all adults and 33% of those over sixty years of age experience chronic constipation.

.....................................................

Given the lack of good health habits and the discipline necessary to maintain proper physiological functioning, the propensity of Americans to seek artificial means of attaining popular goals pertinent to physical appearance is striking.

The United States leads the world in cosmetic surgery at 1,309 per 100,000 population.  Ninety-two percent (92%) of cosmetic surgeries are peformed on women.  Approximately 14 million women and one million men in the United States have cosmetic surgery per year.  Among women, 310,000 per year seek breast enlargement, 258,558 have liposuction, and 213,780 have their noses reshaped.

The cosmetics industry in the United States generates $511 billion annually.  The high fashion industry generates $759 billion per year.  Every year, women purchase $36,741,000,000 worth of high heels. Men buy $3,000,000,000 worth of neckties.

Thus do women with garishly painted faces go forth on little stilts that are the contemporary form of footbinding, while men even in hot climates hang nooses around buttoned up collars as they scramble into air conditioned buildings in artificially and excessively populated areas of the nation.

.................................................

And thus do people go forth from our wretched public schools ill-prepared to live as culturally enriched, civically prepared, and professionally satisfied citizens, retreating into lives of poor health, pitiful cosmetization, and irrational attire, living according to the insidious standards of a society that only dimly perceives the forces that induce the behavior of a populace controlled as marionettes by a hidden puppeteer.

Article #15 >>>>> Origin and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

Suicide and Drug Addiction as Consequences of Lives Devoid of Knowledge, Purpose, and Appreciation for the Magnificence of Nature and Human Potential

In the course of 14 years of pre-kindergarten through grade 12 education, students should be prepared to live lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction  >>>>>

Graduates should have knowledge and appreciation for the music and art of many genres and cultures. 

They should have a firm understanding of the objective facts and major trends in world and American history.  

Graduates should have read and gained firm comprehension of the United States Constitution and the political and governmental systems of the nation.  

They should be able to locate all of the world's nations on the globe and to have a firm grasp of the geographical features of the United States and the world's nations and cultures.

Graduates should be deeply read in classical English, world, and ethnic-specific literature.  

They should have grasp of the fundamentals of biology, chemistry, and physics;  the human body and health;  the formation of the universe and planet earth;  the evolution of earthly life;  and the natural world.

Graduates should have fundamental skills in the vocational and technological arts;  they should have a vision of their professional possibilities and an understanding of those technological forces that exert powerful influences on their lives.  

And graduates should have considered world belief systems and vigorously discussed the ethics that should drive human behavior and provide meaning and purpose.

...................................................

But high school graduates have neither depth and breadth of knowledge nor any energetically considered or discussed ethical principles.  Those who go on to college or university matriculation in undergraduate or graduate programs gain field-specific knowledge but little breadth.  

Most Americans are woefully ignorant and ethically bereft;  they are adrift in personal universes of delusion and illusion, desperately seeking answers pertinent to meaning and purpose, given to all manner of false information.

.......................................................

Thus does the bulk of humanity live aimlessly.

Many act with elevated stupidity.

Many are given to extreme forms of destructive behavior.

In the United States, over 45,000 people commit suicide each year.  Drug overdoses number more than 95,000.  Over 95,000 alcohol-related deaths occur annually.  Drunk driving accounts for 28% of all auto-related deaths.  More than 25% of the adult population engages in at least one episode of binge drinking per month.

..........................................................

Thus do an ignorant and morally vacuous people, devoid of knowledge and purpose, live out their one earthly sojourn never comprehending the elevated morality and exquisite beauty that should characterize the gift of Existence.

Article #14 >>>>> Origin and Consequences of Wretched Public EducationThroughout the United States

 The Degradation of Life in Year 2022

The typical person in the United States lives a degraded existence.

That person has no understanding of why she or he does what the individual does, having no grasp of the bio-environmental determinants of human behavior.  

Human behavior proceeds on the basis of biological imperatives studied and presented with clarity by Edmund O. Wilson and environmental determinants seminally examined and explained by B. F. Skinner.  

With a proper understanding that behavior is determined rather than willed freely, inhabitants of the globe could gain comprehension of those forces that impel and compel people to do what they do.  There is no reality in the perception of free will, but people do have the native intelligence to study the bio-environmental determinants of behavior so as to establish those institutions and to design those environments conducive to favorable outcomes for humanity.

But in the absence of knowledge of psychological reality, people are susceptible to false claims, superstition, and sereptitious messages.  People cling to facile notions of free will while in fact being controlled from the moment of birth by their circumstances of genetic inheritance, family, community, and parameters of life that compel their actions.  Perceiving that they make choices, people are driven from one life stage to another by multiple forces pertinent to highly particular personal experience and those of pervasive, multiiple media that coalesce with individual circumstance.

.......................................................

In the absence of knowledge of self;  knowing little of history, government, geography, economics, and world culture;  lacking appreciation for exquisite music and visual art;  uncomfortable in and alienated from nature;  insensitive to beauty of nature and human creation;  the typical person lives out this one earthly sojourn as an automaton given to base addictions.

Not until we are positioned to become people of knowledge and ethics will people gain the opportunity to live lives of meaning.

In the meantime, daily life and an abundance of contemporary dilemmas are replete with catastrophic reminders of the human degradation that now abides.

Article #13 >>>>> Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Essential Situation Circa New Year 2022

Thus, following from events and processes described in articles 1-12 in this series, do we see that the knowledgeable citizenry envisioned by Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann never developed.

The common school movement was enormously promising but even at 19th century peak impact featured schools that varied widely and wildly in quality, as did the normal school programs that trained teachers.  These schools, did, though, feature knowledge and skill based curriculum that gave many students a sense of United States history, world geography and history, English literary classics, government and civics, and foundational mathematics.

Similarly, high schools and junior high schools developed over the course of the first two decades of the 20th century so as to present knowledge-based curriculum inspired by the instruction long imparted to the privileged.

And despite the best efforts of university-based education professors to promote the vacuous curriculum touted by William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg and acolytes at Teachers College/Columbia University, most locally centralized school district leaders comtinued well into the 1960s to deliver foundational skills and subject area knowledge desired by the preponderance of families, very much including immigrant and African American populations seeking ascent on the economic ladder.

But the anti-knowledge creed advanced by education professors resonated with the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s, gaining dominance at a most unfortunate historical juncture, at which affluent African Americans chased the national dream into the suburbs, fast upon the heels of whites in flight.  

Left behind at the urban core were the poorest of the poor, now victim not only of the degradations wought by history but particulary wretched public education.  The standards movement energized in the aftermath of the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk showed promise but eventually was undermined by forces of both the political right and the political left.

Our students (those who graduate) now walk across the stage at graduation to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only, and our schools give us the ignorant population that we have in the United States today.  

We see the abundantly abominal consequences of wretched public education in the ongoing life of the nation, as presented in the articles to follow in this series.

Interlude >>>>> Nativity 2021

 

Nativity 2021

 

Three sets

of

dichotomous realities

in a

national history

struggle                                                                                                                                        

for

resolution:

 

Rationality versus Superstition,

Liberty versus Bondage,

Knowledge versus Ignorance.

 

From the

Darkness

to the

Light

run those

long

 

abused

refused

defused

 

but

 

no more:

not without

 

contention

dissension

reinvention.

 

And in that

Struggle

waged

in the Light

of the Light

for the Light

the Light

shall

Prevail.

 

 

GMD

Christmas 2021