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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