Tag Archives: Ed Graff

Minneapolis Finds Itself Between a Referendum and a Hard Place

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August 16, 2016

Tonight’s Minneapolis school board meeting promises to be a lively one. Friends and supporters of Washburn High School staff member, Elisabeth Geschiere, have promised to show up in force, to protest what they say is unfair disciplinary action against Geschiere.

Other school communities are planning to show up, too. Geschiere’s story–documented here–offers a rare, public window into what many Minneapolis teachers and support staff say is a district-wide climate of hostile management practices. At the most empowered schools–like Washburn or Barton–teachers and support staff who feel targeted can often spill their stories to parents and community supporters, who can help advocate for them.

In the least empowered schools, bullying administrators seem to run roughshod over a revolving door of teachers and staff–without consequence from the district. One northside elementary school, serving a very marginalized population of kids and families, has reportedly lost 40 percent of its teachers this year, due to what sources say are dysfunctional and harmful administrator-staff relationships. 

Staff and teachers of color often don’t feel safe speaking publicly about this, or asking supporters to rally with them at school board meetings. A comment on the Facebook event page for tonight’s school board rally makes this clear:

This story is not unique and we need to have a presence at tomorrow’s meeting to show support for all the teachers of color and advocates for teachers/students of color who have been targeted and silenced. We need to stand up for racial justice and fight against the status quo of power and intimidation that is present within the district.

This is the hard place Minneapolis finds itself in, with many behind-the-scenes hopes being pinned on new superintendent Ed Graff–who charmed the board and community members with his reputation for prioritizing “social-emotional” learning, and for being a breath of fresh air, imported from the Anchorage schools. 

Meanwhile, the district needs more operating money from Minneapolis voters. At tonight’s board meeting, which promises to start with another airing of the district’s dirty laundry, board members will vote on a resolution to put a referendum on the November ballot.

Documents available online indicate that the board is planning to ask voters for nothing more than a maintenance of the current referendum amount, which first passed in 2008 (some board members wanted to ask for an increase, but that hope has apparently died). The request for money often comes with promises of lower class sizes or new technology, but for Minneapolis and most districts around the state, referendum funds are actually needed for general operating costs, to make up for a long decline in state financial support (this trend has deeply impacted funding for public higher ed in Minnesota, too).

A 2008 report from the Minnesota Budget Project, called the “Lost Decade,” put it this way:

From FY 2003 to FY 2009: • Per pupil state aid to school districts fell by 14 percent. • School property taxes per pupil rose by 48 percent.

So, which comes first? The defunding or the dysfunction? As state revenue for public education has dropped, the number of children living in poverty has increased. The needs are greater, the resources are fewer, and the district seems to be going through an existential crisis. Since at least 2007–right around the time public aid for education, housing and child care was dropping–the Minneapolis Public Schools has embraced (or been pressured to embrace) a thriving international trend: the privatization of public education.

This trend, driven locally by a handful of wealthy power brokers, has fixed the blame for much of what isn’t working in the Minneapolis schools at the feet of teachers and school staff. To oversimplify, the narrative goes something like this: Test scores aren’t rising fast enough, so obviously teachers aren’t doing all they could to close the ever-present “achievement gap.” (Yet staff like Elisabeth Geschiere say they face retaliation for working closely with marginalized students who try to advocate for themselves.)

The district seems to have ground itself into a culture of fear and intimidation, coupled with the ongoing destruction of many departments–such as IT–that once drew praise for their resourcefulness and innovation. The only hope may be public demonstrations, like the one scheduled for tonight’s board meeting, where people from schools across the district come together to protest hostile employee relations.

Or, in the words of Brazilian teacher Eduardo Moraes, who participated in a five month strike that ended just before the Rio Olympics started, and recently spoke to a reporter about what teachers in the U.S. could do to improve their own working conditions,

 “I would say that only struggle changes lives,” said Eduardo. “The only way for them to overcome the issues that they face over there, which are similar in some ways to ours, is to organize and to get involved and participate in the struggles of education for the whole society.”

And then, maybe, the referendum campaign will also look more promising.

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated!

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Minneapolis School Staffer Challenges Harsh Disciplinary Action

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August 6, 2016

How do you go from winning a work-related Peacemaker Award one year, to being told you are unfit for employment the next?

By working for the Minneapolis Public Schools, of course. 

Elisabeth Geschiere

For the past few years, Elisabeth Geschiere has worked for Check and Connect,  a dropout prevention program at Washburn High School. Geschiere is “conversationally fluent” in Spanish, and has worked closely with the school’s Latino population as both support staff and an advisor for the Latino Club. In 2015, she was lauded on the school’s website as “one of a very select group of nominees” to be considered for the district’s Peacemaker Award, which Geschiere then won. The website announcement ends on a high note:

We thank Elisabeth for her tireless commitment to equity, peace, for the students at Washburn.

Now, Geschiere has found herself on the nail end of the district’s often bludgeon-like HR hammer. This spring, students in the Latino Club became upset when the Chicano Studies course they had been told was coming to Washburn was instead rolled into a more general “American Civil Rights” class. The school cited low enrollment as the reason the class had to be scrapped. (Adding more ethnic studies courses is a new focus for MPS, but the classes are electives and thus not required.)

On a day when Geschiere happened to be out sick, the students met with Washburn principal Rhonda Dean to express their dismay over the situation, vowing to make their concerns public at the next school board meeting. When Geshciere returned to work the next day, she says Dean asked her to help the students try to boost the enrollment of the Chicano Studies course they wanted, in order to keep it alive as a possibility. (The students say they have proof that, during their meeting with her, Dean also told them to ask Geschiere for help.)

Geschiere says that is just what she did, by sending out emails to fellow Washburn staffers, alerting them to the course, and otherwise supporting the Latino Club students in their push to make the ethnic studies course a reality. 

Somehow, though, Dean accused Geschiere of telling her students to go to the school board meeting with their complaints. On May 12, one week after Dean asked her to help the students drum up enrollment, Geschiere says Dean called her boss, Colleen Kaibel. Dean wanted Kaibel to “immediately remove” Geschiere from her position–but not until the school’s upcoming Multicultural Arts Festival took place. “I know she is doing good work on that, and the students are excited about it,” Dean told Kaibel, according to Gescheire’s records.

Side note: Geschiere and her Latino Club students started the annual Multicultural Arts Festival three years ago. According to Geschiere, the festival “attracts around 300 parents, students, staff, and community members and happens to showcase Washburn students’ diverse backgrounds and talents as well as the arts.” 

Elisabeth and Latino Club
Geschiere and the Latino Club

Next, Geschiere says she was called to a meeting with the Washburn principal, as well as an assistant administrator and district HR associate, Emma Hixson. During the meeting, Geschiere says she was told that she was “inciting students” and acting “beyond the scope of her duties as Check and Connect staff”–something she was not faulted for when helping to set up the Multicultural Arts Festival, mostly on her own time.)

Weeks later, on June 27, Geschiere received a letter from Hixson. In icy tones, Hixson’s letter accuses Geschiere of telling the students to go to the school board with their concerns about the Chicano Studies course:

Your actions in this matter were outside the scope of your duties as a Check and Connect staff person and inappropriate for your advisory role with the Latino Club outside the duty day. If students brought concerns to you, you should have brought those concerns directly to the administration. It is not constructive or appropriate to take the time of professional staff with questioning, nor is it appropriate for you to have discussed the matter of school curriculum with (other staff).

Finally, Hixson brings the hammer down in the last line of her letter:

This document will be placed in your personnel file and evidence that you are not recommended for rehire with Minneapolis Pubic Schools.

Geschiere says this letter was labeled a “Written Reprimand,” but was clearly intended to end her five-year career in the district. There is no due process apparent here; only a cold note, informing Geschiere of her wrongdoing, which Geschiere insists is based on false information. Moreover, questions linger about what, exactly, Geschiere is being accused of. 

If her alleged crime is talking with students about going to the school board to advocate for themselves, is this considered worthy of dismissal in the eyes of the Minneapolis Public Schools? 

Hixson’s suspiciously toxic letter still sits in Geschiere’s file, although she has written letters to the district’s HR director, Steven Barrett, asking to have Hixson’s letter removed. (She has also received support from her union, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.) After receiving no reply from Barrett, Geschiere wrote to the district’s new superintendent, Ed Graff, and the district’s Chief of Schools, Michael Thomas.

When she also received no reply from these district higher-ups, some of Geschiere’s friends organized a “phone/email zap” on August 5, asking supporters to flood MPS with this message:

I am writing/calling in regard to the unfair treatment of MPS employee Elisabeth Geschiere by the Washburn Administration and HR Department. Geschire has been an outstanding support for marginalized students at Washburn and it appears she is being punished for that. She did nothing wrong. She simply supported students from Latinx Club as their staff advisor. The claims by the Washburn Administration, and subsequently HR, that Ms. Geschiere “incited students” are not only patently false, they are disrespectful to the students who took the initiative to advocate for themselves. I ask you to do the right thing and immediately remove the “letter of no re-hire” dated June 7, 2016 from Ms. Geschiere’s MPS file.

By mid-afternoon on August 5, a message on the Facebook event page created on Geschiere’s behalf held this message: “The public pressure is working! Keep it up y’all! The superintendent reached out to set up a meeting with Elisabeth for Monday. Will keep you posted!”

Geschiere’s experience with Minneapolis’s seemingly hot-headed HR department is just the latest in a string of high-profile encounters between staff and the district, indicating a pattern of behavior some might consider abusive:

  • July 12: Parents, teachers, students and staff from Barton Open School flood Superintendent Graff’s debut school board meeting, advocating on behalf of teachers investigated by Barton’s new principal, Jonas Beugen. District administrator Michael Thomas recently announced his continued support for Beugen, and blamed the Barton events–documented here–on problematic district “procedures and practices.”
  • June 9: Questions emerge about the conduct of Minneapolis administrator, Lucilla Davila, who was then put on leave by the district. Davila was running a nonprofit that did business with the Minneapolis schools, and was responsible for the placement of several principals–including Whittier’s Norma Gibbs. In May, Whittier parents went public with their own complaints about Gibbs and Davila, including the attempted firing of a beloved Whittier staff member.
  • June 8: Geschiere’s coworker, popular Washburn theater teacher Crystal Spring, is threatened with termination by HR director Barrett after being arrested while off work. In a letter sent to Spring, Barrett upbraided Spring and seemed to cast judgment on her actions, telling her it was “troublesome on multiple levels.” Charges were later dropped against Spring, who also had her job restored after a public demonstration on her behalf.

There has been no official word since June regarding Davila’s status. Geschiere has resigned from MPS, a decision she says she made before being put through the HR wringer. Still, before she leaves, Geschiere wants the district to acknowledge and correct the “appalling” and unjust treatment she and her supporters believe she has received–not just for her own sake, but also in light of acknowledged district-level patterns of “problematic” HR practices.

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated!

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Minneapolis Superintendent Search: A Direction Home?

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May 24, 2016

There is one central question hanging over today’s expected announcement of Minneapolis’s next superintendent:

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the reformiest of all?

Is it former Minneapolis administrator, Brenda Cassellius, who helped guide the district through its romance with McKinsey & Company consultants, back in the mid-2000’s? Cassellius is also cut from the same professional cloth–sewn by former superintendent Carol Johnson–as recent MPS administrators, Bernadeia Johnson and Michael Goar. 

This fact alone has scared off some potential supporters, who worry that Cassellius, as superintendent, will push Minneapolis further down the flash in the pan path of the market-based reform movement, where no shiny stone–or successful MPS department–has been left unturned. (Read my series on McKinsey’s influence on the Minneapolis schools for more info about this, starting here.)

Oddly, rumors are surfacing that the local reform glitterati (read the McKinsey series for names) are lining up behind Cassellius’s soft-spoken competitor, Anchorage superintendent, Ed Graff. Graff, if selected, is poised to either be a miraculous uniter, unknowingly aligning divided camps, or–some might hope–a blob of putty in the hands of Minnesota Comeback-like forces, who want to take apart and rebuild the Minneapolis schools in their own, highly proficient image. 

Cartoon by Stephanie McMillan

There can be no denying that Graff interviewed well. He was calm, cool, personable and actually had something of a vision for education. His focus has been on social-emotional learning, which sounds as refreshing as a warm day in Alaska. He smartly would not nod along to board member’s questions about student-based funding and autonomous schools, and instead offered grounded answers that implied he is not likely to be any plutocrat’s puppet. 

Cassellius has earned her marks, too. There must be a reason certain reformers–the kind who would like to convince us that alternative licensure is the burning issue of the day–do not want her in as head of the Minneapolis schools. Is she too savvy? Too familiar with their soulless data maps? Maybe she is the Carol Johnson protegé Minneapolis has been waiting for–the one who, like Graff, is not likely to fall for reform-minded shenanigans imposed on the district by outside political influences and agendas, propped up by hedge fund excesses.

Now that I think about it, either one of these candidates sounds pretty good. And it’s Bob Dylan’s birthday, too. 

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

–Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” 1965

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated!

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Minneapolis Staff and Families Protest Dirty School at Superintendent Reception

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May 17, 2016

What’s more important? Clean schools or a new superintendent? At the Minneapolis Public Schools’s May 16 reception for the district’s superintendent finalists, Ed Graff and Brenda Cassellius, these two questions vied for the public’s attention.

At the district’s gleaming, ergonomically correct Davis Center headquarters, the candidates stood at the front of the school board meeting room, wielding easy campaign smiles and chatting up their past successes and future challenges. Meanwhile, at the back of the room, a crew of students, staff, and families from Minneapolis’s Andersen United Community School stood, hoisting signs and managing squirrely kids throughout the two hour session. 

The capable and affable superintendent candidates–the last two standing in a search that has gone on for eighteen topsy-turvy months–tell one story of the Minneapolis Public Schools. The Andersen school signs tell another.

The candidates signify hope for a new beginning–except for those too cynical to believe that one new leader will be able to tackle the dysfunction that currently occupies the Minneapolis Public Schools. Cassellius seems like a catch, with her current, high-profile position as commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Education and her past experience as a teacher and administrator in Minneapolis. 

But many people have exchanged quiet, surprised whispers since getting introduced to Graff, who has an extensive background in the Anchorage, Alaska schools. “I think I like him better,” a friend told me. He speaks naturally about the importance of social-emotional learning. He remembered people’s names when they were peppering him with questions about cultural responsiveness, staff turnover and other sore spots. His vocabulary seems refreshingly devoid of data-driven dark clouds.

The headlines for the next week or so, until one of them is chosen as superintendent, will be about them. Who is better? Who is worse? Which one will best protect the Minneapolis schools from the shaky overreach of Minnesota Comeback? (There probably won’t be a headline about that, but there should be.)

So, what will it take for someone, anyone, to address the Detroit-style failure going on at Andersen school? The families and staff who showed up to draw attention to Andersen shared this background information:

Issues around cleanliness, safety, and equity have been ongoing for many years. There is documentation dating back to 2004 showing the efforts of staff to make improvements in order to provide adequate learning and working conditions for Andersen families and staff.

The school is infested with cockroaches and mice. Sidewalks are not properly cleared of ice and snow in winter. Dust clogs the air inside the school. Bathrooms are not being adequately cleaned, sanitized, or stocked with soap. 

No one is doing anything about it, the parents and staff said. They brought a stapled-together document, four pages long, outlining the recent history of complaints and demands for action that have, apparently, fallen on deaf district ears.

They’ve petitioned, emailed and called interim superintendent Michael Goar. No real response. They once got promises for a resolution from former district CFO, Robert Doty, only to be told that those promises left the district when Doty did, in 2015. (Apparently, the big school, which hosts a multitude of programs throughout the day, once had a large number of building engineers, but today has just a handful.)

At yesterday’s candidate reception, Andersen staff said district associate superintendent, Paul Marietta, recently told them that they could not use any school resources–such as a Robocall or flyers–to “inform families about a meeting concerning the cleanliness and sanitation of their children’s learning environment.”

Andersen’s demographics also tell a story about the Minneapolis Public Schools:

  • 1,101 students attend Andersen. 97 percent, or 1, 064, of them are poor, according to federal measures 
  • 11 percent are homeless or highly mobile
  • 72 percent do not speak English as a first language

Is this why their cleanliness needs have been ignored for years? When asked, both Graff and Cassellius said they would not tolerate such conditions as superintendent. Any school in the district has to be good enough for my own child, said Graff. Cassellius emphatically said clean schools are a basic right.

At this point, I suspect action–in the form of a steady stream of mops, brooms and soap–is the only thing that will convince Andersen staff and families that their school is more than just a low point on someone’s data map.

Instead of planning and preparing for our students’ success, many of us are spending much of our time sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, and sanitizing our own rooms as well as sending emails, making phone calls and having agonizing conversations about the same issues, day after day.

–Andersen teacher testimony, shared at a 2015 school board meeting

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated.

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Brenda Cassellius: Most Likely to be Minneapolis’s Next Superintendent?

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May 14, 2016

Brenda Cassellius. Photo: MPR

Minnesota education commissioner, Brenda Cassellius, and former Anchorage, Alaska superintendent, Ed Graff, are the two finalists for Minneapolis’s school superintendent position, according a May 13 press release. 

Cassellius’s name on the list is no surprise, since she has publicly shared her interest in the job. In November, 2015, while the previous superintendent search was in full swing, Cassellius told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that she wanted the job, but “not yet.” Her hesitancy may have had to do with interim superintendent Michael Goar’s assumed rise to the district’s top position–an expectation that was dashed after months of page-turning headlines and twists in the road.

Now, Goar is leaving the Minneapolis schools, and Cassellius would seem to be an ideal superintendent-in-waiting, given her extensive background in the city’s school district, as a teacher, administrator and parent. Cassellius has certainly made her own mark in education leadership, but, like Goar and his predecessor, Bernadeia Johnson, she has clear ties to former Minneapolis superintendent, Carol Johnson.

Cassellius, also like Goar and Bernadeia Johnson, followed Carol Johnson from Minneapolis to the Memphis schools and back again. This may be comforting to some, who admire Johnson’s leadership legacy, but troubling to others, who may have been hoping for more of a “fresh start” for Minneapolis. (Casselllius did hold her own in a recent University of Minnesota forum on why we still haven’t “closed the achievement gap,” which is kind of like asking why that war in 1984 never ended.)

Graff, a Minnesota native, became superintendent of the Anchorage schools in 2013, and saw his three-year contract cut short in October, 2015. The reasons for this are not immediately clear, but an article in the Alaska Dispatch News hints at a situation that might sound familiar to Minneapolis residents, or residents of any urban school district facing perpetual “urgent” challenges:

Anchorage School Board President Kameron Perez-Verdia said…that the Board has “very aggressive goals” and in order to achieve those goals, as well as face financial and political challenges, it must find a new leader. 

Ed Graff

Graff (like many city superintendents) sits on the board of the reform–friendly Council of the Great City Schools and was most recently a candidate for superintendent of the St. Michael-Albertville school district in suburban Minneapolis. Part of the reason he wasn’t fully considered for that position, according to a May 10 news report, is that he does not currently have a superintendent’s license:

…there was somewhat of bombshell shared by board chair Doug Birk at the beginning of the meeting — it was learned this same day that candidate Graff lacked superintendent licensure in Alaska and would need lengthy procedural approval from the state of Minnesota in order to get his license.

Graff, with no superintendent’s license and no known connection to Carol Johnson, may be  a long shot for the Minneapolis job, especially given the drama that has accompanied the district’s drawn out search process. (Goar also did not have a superintendent’s license.)

Missing from the list of finalists is Michael Thomas, Minneapolis’s current Chief of Schools. Thomas was a known candidate for the district’s top spot, and a 2015 contender for superintendent of the Robbinsdale Area Schools.

The community is invited to meet Cassellius and Graff this Monday, May 16, at the district’s Davis Center headquarters. The school board will then interview the two candidates at a public meeting on Tuesday, May 17.

No grant, no guru, no outside funding source. My work is entirely funded by my very kind and generous readers. Thank you to those who have already donated!

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