Like children from a seemingly beneficent family who must confront the realization of troubling underlying dysfunction, my fellow supporters of the DFL should be feeling jarring cognitive dissonance over recent education legislation. Since most of you currently dwell in either ignorance or denial, though, let me explain.
First, understand the history behind recent legislation emanating from the State Capitol.In the spring of 2003, committees formed at the behest of then-Minnesota Commissioner of Education Cheri Pierson Yecke (an appointee of Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty) created new academic standards for the state’s K-12 students. The teachers union, Education Minnesota, opposed the standards and the idea of testing based on them from the very moment of the new system’s inception. This opposition could be seen, too, in key blocks of an education establishment that is far more unified than most people realize. Key political actors among university education professors, the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, and central school system bureaucracies certainly have their own agendas, but they all serve as apologists for the failures of our K-12 public education system.
Having contributed mightily to the 2012 election victories of Governor Mark Dayton and those DFL politicians now dominating the legislature, Education Minnesota called in its chips immediately. Dayton and his Minnesota Education Commissioner appointee, Brenda Cassellius, went to work undermining the system by which schools have been under pressure to improve. Cassellius sought waivers for requirements that were effectively identifying failing schools, she oversaw the establishment of a murky new system measuring school performance, and she and Dayton issued a succession of statements meant to undermine the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) as the essential measurement of school performance.
Citizens and taxpayers of Minnesota are now asked to believe that our destiny includes eradication of the achievement gap, curtailment of high school dropouts, and the world’s best workforce by 2027.
This success is predicted as the outcome of increased public expenditure, unaccompanied by any structural change in K-12 education. Forty million dollars will now be spent on preschool scholarships of up to $5,000 for children of impoverished families. Another $134 million will be available to sustain all-day kindergarten in school districts deciding to provide such instruction. New expenditures of $234 million will go for basic classroom education. Total outlays for K-12 public education in Minnesota will now amount to $15.7 billion.
For all of this, we are promised a system that will more quickly identify student academic problems and better prepare them for college.
We have little guarantee, though, that newly funded preschool experiences will be of high enough academic quality to be effective. We are asked to believe that full-day kindergarten training for more students will provide the key to closing the achievement gap, even though such training typically results in academic gains that endure only until third grade. And we are asked to trust that teachers who have been unable properly to prepare children of color and children of poverty for grade level performance will now be more successful in preparing students for the much more difficult ACT, typically taken by students in Minnesota to demonstrate readiness to collegiate admissions officials.
And thus are we expected to enter the fantasy world of the Minnesota education establishment. Failure rates for children of color and students from impoverished families became such an embarrassment that the education establishment successfully lobbied to eliminate the need for students to pass the high school writing and reading tests in order to graduate. But somehow, never having proven themselves as successful K-12 students, high school graduates will now emerge from our public schools fully ready for matriculation at the collegiate level.
Meanwhile, there has been no meaningful structural change in our public school systems. Merit pay has not replaced the “step and lane” system of remuneration. The pool of new classroom educators remains overwhelmingly dominated by graduates of wretched conventional teacher preparation programs, over people of high skill and talent who have gained alternative certification. Curriculum is content-poor, especially at the K-5 level. We continue to have too many central school district bureaucrats while making do with too few teachers’ aides and not enough professionals effective as liaisons to the families of students.
So, fellow Democrats, are you now feeling that cognitive dissonance over claims by DFL politicians? How do you evaluate their claims for the recent convening of the Minnesota State Legislature as an “education session” that puts us on the road to first-rate public education, even as you confront the abiding reality that the predicted success must be achieved with the same failed K-12 system? Or are you in denial, as you have been for so long, to the detriment of those young people mired in poverty and systemic abuse, whose interests you--- too often disingenuously--- claim you want to serve?
