Tag Archives: John J-H Kim

The Road to Rigor for Minneapolis’ Multilingual Department

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November 5, 2015

Background: The Minneapolis Public Schools’ Multilingual Department is unraveling and becoming part of a new Global Education Department. On Monday, November 2, I wrote a blog post exploring this unfolding situation. I will get to what some MPS teachers are saying about now-departed Multilingual Department director, Jana Hilleren. But before I do, a little more context….

This much we know for sure: Jana Hilleren is gone, and so is the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Multilingual Department.

Starting in 2010, and ending very recently, Hilleren was the Executive Director of MPS’s Multilingual Department, which housed both a World Languages division for foreign language programming, and the district’s ELL staff and services.

Multilingual is now the Global Education Department, and all staff will now be answering to Elia Bruggeman, a former rural school principal and state education official. Bruggeman was hired by MPS in 2014 to manage a sudden budgetary allocation of $5 million that was destined for MPS’s EL programming, but not for the EL staff.

Instead, Bruggeman was charged with spending the one-time $5 million windfall. The money arose after a strongly worded letter was sent to then-MPS Superintendent, Bernadeia Johnson, in late May, 2014. The letter was signed by a group of Latino political and civic leaders, including legislators Patricia Torres Ray, Carlos Mariani, and Melisa Franzen, and outlined a list of new and longstanding concerns regarding how MPS allocates its state ELL dollars, and how it treats ELL students, staff, and families.

The letter cites “consistently poor test results and low graduation rates” for MPS’s ELL students, and questions where the money these students generate–from the state’s education budget–goes. It states that MPS allocates $2, 000, 000 to the Multilingual Department, to be spent on ELL programming, and calls this amount “grossly inadequate.” 

The letter pushes for an “urgent meeting”–before the 2014-2015 budget was to be finalized–with Johnson, then-CEO Michael Goar, and Chief Academic Officer Suzanne Griffin-Ziebart.

Enter the $5 million budget drop, and Elia Bruggeman, who is said to be an associate of Torres Ray.

Bruggeman became a “Deputy Education Officer” within MPS, and was given a six figure salary, along with seemingly sole authority over the new EL funds. In fact, sources within MPS say that Hilleren and the rest of the EL staff were shut out of any discussions for how the money should be spent. 

Instead, a separate EL Task Force was set up beside the Multilingual department, and a narrative of crisis, failure, and the need for drastic change seems to have taken root.

By the summer of 2015, Bruggeman and Torres Ray were off on a $25, 000 MPS-funded (except for Torres Ray, whose trip was paid for by AchieveMPLS) trip to Boston, along with Goar, MPS administrator Steve Flisk, and a handful of Multilingual staffers, including Hilleren.

Their destination was the Public Education Leadership Program, or PELP–put on every summer through Harvard. The MPS contingent was there to get schooled in business-like strategies for the district’s ELL department, per PELP’s “business-driven” model of school reform.

Pause: PELP is co-chaired by John J-H Kim. Kim is also CEO of Boston-based District Management Council (DMC), a for-profit education reform consultants group that has its hands in MPS’s cookie jar, in the form of special ed and budget department audits.

Kim is, or was, also part of a group calling itself “Leaders for Education,” which promoted the usual grab bag of top down, market-based reforms, including: more “rigor,” more charter schools, more use of standardized test scores, targets, timetables, metrics, “differentiated compensation” for teachers, etc.

While at the PELP summer excursion, a framework for Minneapolis’ ELL department was crafted:

Problem of Practice. The EL Blueprint addresses a significant MPS “problem of practice.” The problem is summarized in the English Learner Blueprint as follows:

Minneapolis is increasingly rich with diverse students, however:

  1. EL students feel invisible, with few exceptions
  2. EL students’ language and cultural experiences are not viewed and developed as assets, with few exceptions
  3. EL students are not being challenged and engaged with high expectations, again with few exceptions.

At the PELP Summer Institute, a six-prong plan was developed to address the problem and to work towards a system in which English Learners are recognized and see themselves as powerful contributors to the MPS learning environment who bring powerful cognitive and cultural assets to the educational environment.

Six Strategies of the EL Blueprint

1.        Human Capital

2.       Improve Customer Service

3.       Develop Tomorrow’s Global Leaders

 

 4.      Mind Shift to a Growth Mindset

5.       Flip the Script to an Assets-Based Narrative

6.      Rigor & Relevance

This plan was referenced at a contentious September 25, 2015 meeting of Bruggeman’s EL Advisory Task Force. The meeting was convened so that task force members–including Torres Ray–could hear an update from Bruggeman regarding how the $5 million was being spent.

Bruggeman began the meeting on a hopeful note, outlining an upcoming trip to Harvard and Boston for some MPS ELL students that she was co-hosting with Project Success, a Minneapolis non-profit focused on helping students get to college.

But very quickly, Torres Ray expressed frustration with the meeting, and instead insisted on hearing an update on the academic progress of MPS’ ELL students.

Bruggeman could not give her one, and she eventually had to admit that she had not asked Hilleren to prepare one. 

Hilleren was not at the meeting, and could not be reached for input. Bruggeman instead sent a staffer to go look for Goar, who eventually made an appearance at the meeting, looking equal parts exasperated and resigned.

This is where, it seems, Hilleren’s fate was sealed.

As Goar defended MPS and recalled his own beginning as an ELL student, Torres Ray and others continued to express frustration with the outcomes and progress of MPS’s ELL department. At one point, Torres Ray made the following demand:

We want to know who is in charge and what is going to happen when those individuals that are in charge of increasing academic outcomes for…children don’t do it.

On October 7, Torres Ray sent a follow up email to Goar.  Members of the EL Task Force and the Minneapolis school board were copied on the message, which continues to seek clarification on where the Multilingual Department is headed:

Dear Superintendent Goar,

Thank you again for your time during the ELL Taskforce meeting last Friday. I wanted to follow up on the possibility for a meeting to review the outcomes for ELL students that go beyond the 5 million plan. This is an important conversation that we need to have in order to discuss the future of the Multilingual Department and most importantly the future of our ELL Children. Please let us know when you would like to meet so that we can prepare the community and submit questions prior to the meeting.

Thank you in advance and I look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Patricia

Senator Patricia Torres Ray

State & Local Government Committee

Capitol Building

A few weeks later, on October 26, it was announced to Multilingual Department staff that Hilleren was gone, to be replaced by Bruggeman.

Stay tuned: Testimony from teachers and others familiar with how the EL Department has operated under Hilleren

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Transformation or Takeover? Minneapolis’ Multilingual Department Goes Down

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November 2, 2015

At a Monday, October 26 Davis Center meeting–announced at noon and held at 2 p.m.–Minneapolis Public Schools’ Multilingual department staff (district level, not classroom teachers) finally got the unsettling news they had been expecting for months:

  1. Their department has been reorganized, and shuffled into a new “Global Education” department.
  2. Their Executive Director of the last five or six years, Jana Hilleren, has been removed not only from her position, but from the district.
  3. All Multilingual staff will now be reporting to Elia Bruggeman. 

The Multilingual department has housed both the World Languages department, overseeing foreign language teachers, and the English Language Learners (EL) department. The EL department’s mission has been to provide English language services–including literacy and academic English instruction–for students whose first language is not English.

The EL department, however, has been targeted for a restructuring since at least May of 2014, when a handful of high-profile Latino leaders sent a letter to then Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson, outlining their concerns about how MPS was handling the needs of “Latino/Hispanic ELL” students.

The letter, signed by such people as Edina legislator Melisa Franzen, simultaneously points out that the Multilingual department’s budget is “grossly inadequate,” and then details a list of failings and shortcomings within the department. (The state determines how much money Minneapolis gets for its EL students; by most estimates, that amount is inadequate, and $240 must be taken from every district student’s general education fund just to cover the cost of providing EL services).

The letter indicates that members of the Latino, Hmong, and Somali communities–which represent the three largest portions of MPS’s EL population–had previously met (in 2011) with MPS staff to try to impact the direction of the district’s EL department. The frustration is evident.

The letter also makes these allegations:

  • There is no transparent information about how ELL dollars are being utilized by the District to properly serve the needs of these students.
  • There is no senior leadership at MPS that is Latino, Somali or Hmong. MPS has made minimal or no effort to empower Latino, Hmong or Somali staff, and to ensure that our communities have equitable representation at the leadership level.

From the outside, it is impossible to adequately assess the issues listed in the letter. Also, one certainly can’t fault outside parties for wanting to influence what goes on under the hood of the unwieldy bureaucracy that is MPS.

And, the letter worked.

In June, 2014, just as MPS was sewing up the final details of its 2015-2016 budget, a sudden allocation of $5 million for EL was thrown in. But the money was not sent to the Multilingual department, which perhaps could have begun to address some of the issues listed in the letter. Instead, it was given to a new, separate EL Task Force. (The letter itself makes no direct request for additional funds, so it is not clear how or why the money was made suddenly available.) 

This is where things get murky. The new EL Task Force was set up as a shadow organization, alongside but not directly part of the district’s Multilingual department. Former state department of education official Bruggeman–said to be a close associate of Senator Patricia Torres Ray (D-Minneapolis), who signed the 2014 letter to MPS–was hired to manage the new funds. 

Bruggeman’s position, as a “Deputy Education Officer,” came with a six figure salary, and seems to have been awarded to Bruggeman, rather than posted as an open position. Unfortunately, none of this info is especially transparent, as MPS has not had a publicly available, updated org chart in months.

Where did the $5 million come from, and where did it go? This is not easy to find out either, and sources within the district say that EL staff–including administrator Jana Hilleren–were never asked for their input into how the money should be spent.

Fast forward to the summer of 2015, when Bruggeman, Torres Ray, Hilleren, and several other MPS staff went on a $25,000 junket to Boston. The purpose of the trip was a week-long stay at the Harvard-affiliated “Public Education Leadership Program,” or PELP. (Torres Ray’s trip was paid for by MPS’s “non-profit partner,” AchieveMpls.)

Context: In early August, I wrote two blog posts that explore the Multilingual/EL department trip to PELP.  It was clear then that the MPS trip-goers were at PELP to “study the district’s English Language Learner (ELL) program, under the watchful eye of John J-H Kim.”

Kim is not only the co-chair of PELP, but is also the CEO of the District Management Council (DMC). DMC is a Boston-based group of education reform consultants who have become experts at separating public school districts from their money, in the form of million dollar contracts.

Important to note: The Boston connection to MPS is thick. The push for a new “global education” department is said to come from Interim Superintendent Goar’s affiliation with the Boston Public School’s similarly-named department.

DMC has been busy in Minneapolis as well, where it has been operating since 2013–with a mission to reform the district’s special ed department, as well its overall budget processes. (I wrote an article about this, called Cashing In On Special-Needs Kids, for the Progressive magazine’s October issue.)

What PELP and DMC seem to specialize in is promoting “business-driven,” top down change for urban school districts, which is all the rage these days, of course.

And MPS is no stranger to top down reform, as Multilingual is the latest in a string of inner-district takeovers, where whole departments have been shut down, reformed, or destroyed, depending upon one’s point of view. This list includes the following (to my knowledge):

  • Department of Curriculum and Instruction (now the Teaching and Learning Department.) In 2011, then-MPS employee Emily Puetz sent this brisk email to department staff (note the impact on employees):
    From: Communications Department
    Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 1:40 PM
    To: ‘global@list.mpls.k12.mn.us‘
    Subject: Memo from the Office of Academic Affairs
     
    Dear Colleagues,
     
    The Curriculum and Instruction Department is currently undergoing a restructuring. The vision will focus roles and work on serving the schools in more direct ways.  More information will be forthcoming about these changes, but in the meantime, to accomplish this purpose, the entire C&I staff were released from their current positions. In April, we will share more details about this educational vision and post new positions with corresponding job responsibilities for interested staff to apply.
     
    Emily Puetz
    Deputy Chief Academic Officer
  • IT Department: Considered today to be a “mess” by many MPS staff–the ones who work in the schools, anyway–the district’s IT department was once a shining example of innovation and collaboration. Between 2010-2012, IT underwent a massive overhaul, culminating, perhaps, in the brief 2013-2014 tenure of Chief Information Officer Rich Valerga, who is said to have ruthlessly walked out and/or pushed out many long-time IT employees.
  • Human Resources: This department became split in two in 2013, with the addition of a very au courant “Human Capital” division. Sources say that, prior to this, some long-term HR employees left. Today, the district’s payroll division is reportedly in similar straits, with limited staff and problems executing timely payments to employees.
  • Communications Department: Since Bernadeia Johnson resigned from her Superintendent’s post in late 2014, the district’s communications department has undergone a near-complete turn over. Today, the staff is said to be almost entirely white, with little to no bilingual communications staffers on board.

So, now, as of late October, the Multilingual department has been relieved of its name and its director in favor of Bruggeman and a new Global Education department. Staff on the ground say there has been no official notice about these changes, and that they have been left to guess about what will happen next.

The very teachers who will be tasked with improving outcomes for the district’s EL students are, therefore, being kept in the dark about the reforms rolling through their department. 

Up next: Teachers share their thoughts on MPS’s EL department under Hilleren’s leadership

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Minneapolis Public Schools: Boondoggle Part 2

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Back to the boondoggle…

So, a group of Minneapolis Public Schools’ administrators, along with a school board member and a state senator, take a $25,000 trip to Boston for a PELP fest. (PELP=A Harvard sponsored Public Education Leadership Program, sort of a reform-soaked summer camp for public school districts).

But that $25,000, of course, is just a drop in the bucket, considering PELP is co-chaired by John J-H Kim, who is also the CEO of the Boston-based consulting company, District Management Council (DMC), that has contracts with the Minneapolis Public Schools worth up to $2 million.

$25,000 here, $2 million there–it has a nice way of adding up. Especially when the Minneapolis Public Schools are constantly emphasizing–or creating–the need for budget cuts and “right-sizing.”

Don’t forget–the “right-sizing” concept, along with a new scarcity-driven “student-based budget” model–has all been brought to MPS by Kim’s District Management Council. Austerity measures and layoffs for regular folk, summer trips for the rest? 

Or, as the DMC website puts it:

As school districts are faced with dwindling budgets and increasing needs–smart and strategic allocation of resources is imperative to maintaining and improving performance.

Back to the Boston junket. 

Patricia Torres Ray

Patricia Torres Ray, D-Minneapolis, is the state senator who went along on the trip. Her airfare and PELP costs were not covered by the school district, which would have of course been unethical, but instead by AchieveMpls, the non-profit “partner” (in which private corporations get to pull strings) of the Minneapolis Public Schools, run by one-time school board member Pam Costain.

Interesting.

AchieveMpls provides MPS’s superintendent–even an interim one, it seems–with a pot of discretionary funds. This fund was in the spotlight recently, when it was revealed that former school board member Dick Mammen had been paid $10,000 from the AchieveMpls fund, for “poring over contracts,” in connection to a community pool project.

On some level, no one needs to know how the hot dogs are made. But in an ever-increasing era of “accountability” and test-based ranking of teachers and schools, perhaps everyone should have a better idea of where district funds–secret or not–are going, and how policy decisions are being made.

The focus of this PELP trip to Boston was MPS’s English Language Learners (ELL) program. 

In 2014, Senator Torres Ray helped secure an extra $5 million dollars for MPS’s ELL program (how? I’d love to know). Sources close to the situation say a good friend of Torres Ray’s, Elia Bruggeman, was then hired by MPS–in a no-bid sort of way, as the job was never posted–to manage this $5 million.

Some MPS staff–who have asked to remain anonymous for fear of being right-sized on out of a job–are saying that the executive director of MPS’s English Language Learner program has been cut out of discussions about how this money should be spent.

Bruggeman makes over $140,000 per year for MPS, as a “Deputy Education Officer.” She also went along on the MPS trip to Boston, to study how to manage, in a Harvard Business School kind of way, the district’s ELL program.

Trying to find her name and place on MPS’ org chart is not easy these days:

 

MPS Org Chart

 

In an interview about the trip to PELP, Torres Ray said she was invited along to help MPS develop a “comprehensive plan” for ELL students. She said the district is seeking “heavy duty advisors, like Harvard” in order to find a “scientific approach” to serving ELL students.

Torres Ray called the PELP experience “excellent,” and said it provided a “really different lens” through a  “business-driven model.” 

Politically, she said, implementing it will be a challenge. One area of difficulty she mentioned is that “some people don’t want change.” Specifically, Torres Ray spoke of “teacher hiring, training, and evaluations” which are “out of the control of the district.”

Union policies, she said, “control” problems with teachers (as in, “What do we do with this teacher?“), not the district.

It’s not so easy, perhaps, to get rid of teachers who may not agree with a PELP-driven reform plan.

Her goal on the trip, as a community representative, was to figure out “how to support MPS through policy.”

How that will happen and what that will look like is not yet clear.

And, while MPS’s ELL numbers continue to grow, it is not yet clear who will be driving change, and who will be held accountable for it.

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Boston Boondoggle for MPS?

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By Sarah Lahm

The Minneapolis Public Schools has no money; we all know that. It’s in constant belt-tightening mode, with a side of publicly touted layoffs and “right-sizing” to make it all real. 

MPS to Staff

Remember this, from March 2015?

Central office staff at the Davis Center will be reduced by one-sixth, saving the district $11.6 million. The money will primarily go toward reducing class sizes, lowering special education caseloads and additional study time at middle and high schools, the district said.

 

“’We want schools to have the flexibility and autonomy to make decisions at the school level that are in the best interest of their specific students,’” Minneapolis Public Schools spokeswoman Rachel Hicks said.

Hicks is gone, of course, as is most of the rest of MPS’ Communications department.

Maybe that’s why someone forgot to trump up the fact that a cohort of MPS brass, along with a school board member and a state senator, recently went on a $25,000 jaunt to Boston.

Harvard Delegation
Click to enlarge

They were there to study the district’s English Language Learner (ELL) program, under the watchful eye of John J-H Kim. Kim is the faculty co-chair of Harvard’s Public Education Leadership Program (PULP–no, PELP. Sorry).

Pulp: the substance that is left after the liquid (money) has been squeezed from a fruit or vegetable or public school district

Rest easy, everyone. PELP is a joint project between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For $2,800 per person–not including airfare and other transport needs–your local school district dilletantes can drink from the Harvard fountain of knowledge for four or five days, and probably get a handsome, superintendent-worthy stamp on their resume.

I’m imagining PELP 101: How can I run my school district like a business?

It makes perfect sense that John J-H Kim would be helping run the thing. He is not only the co-chair of PELP, which brings in public school district types for an undoubtedly transformational summer camp experience, but he is also the CEO of Boston-based District Management Council (DMC).

Cha-ching.

DMC makes money–a lot of it, I’m guessing–by getting million dollar contracts with school districts around the country. And, they also have a private club for these districts, if they will shell out $25,000/year.

Minneapolis is listed as a member of DMC’s secret club, but I haven’t been able to verify yet whether this is a wish list kind of thing, or an actual list of districts that are paying to play with DMC. (In case you were wondering: membership does include discounts on DMC’s technology products).

DMC has also been quite busy in MPS of late, pushing a special education audit that has put them in the glare of parents with kids in the autism program. DMC’s audit is being used, it seems, as a reason to push abrupt change on MPS’s special ed staff and families. 

Or maybe they just need to go along on the next PELP junket, in order to see the DMC light?

Lingering questions:

  1. What big PELP-y surprises are in store for MPS’s ELL department?
  2. Why didn’t any teachers go? 
  3. AchieveMpls–“As the strategic nonprofit partner of the Minneapolis Public Schools, our shared goal is every student career and college ready. Join us!”–paid for state senator Patricia Torres Ray to go? More on that later.
  4. Budget watch! DMC is also the brains behind MPS’s awkward efforts to implement a “student-based” funding model–watch out, folks. Wonder if that came up at PELP?

I’m no John J-H Kim, but please consider throwing some funds my way. I’ll even make up a certificate for you!

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