K-12 education in Minnesota is in predictable disarray. One of the state’s most challenged districts, the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), is signaling a way out of the mess made by the forces of history and by errant legislative policy.
During the 1970s, North Minneapolis (the MPS schools of which are most challenged in terms of student achievement) underwent a great transition. Civil rights and fair housing legislation had opened up suburban residential possibilities for those African Americans positioned to attain middle class status. Among those stuck in poverty, though, anger seethed. Riots broke out along Plymouth Avenue in the summer of 1967; overwhelmingly, destruction fell hardest on shops owned by members of the long-established North Minneapolis Jewish community, accelerating a residential shift into St. Louis Park.
From the 1920s through the 1960s, programming of the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, particularly under the leadership of W. Gertrude Brown from 1924 through 1937, typified a culturally vibrant North Side African American community harboring deep yearnings for middle class status. Highly motivated Jewish and African American students responded with alacrity to teachers at North High School, at that time the best public secondary institution in Minnesota.
But as middle class African American and Jewish folk moved away from the North Side in the course of the 1970s, relatively low housing costs attracted those moving in from more challenged communities such as Gary, Indiana; South Side Chicago; Detroit, Michigan; and other Midwestern urban outposts. By this time, the old Wheatley had fallen to urban renewal, memories of the rich cultural heritage of North Minneapolis were fading, and North Minneapolis was giving evidence of problems faced by inner city communities throughout the United States.
Crack cocaine hit the streets about 1980 and gang activity rose precipitously. Minneapolis Public Schools educators were overwhelmed by students facing very challenging circumstances. Teachers, very few of whom were African American, had little training pertinent to instructing students from severely challenged families of economic poverty and frequent dysfunction.
This situation coincided with a lamentable trend in departments, schools, and colleges of education to promote a degraded “constructivist” pedagogical creed, according to which students and teachers define subjects to be studied, at whatever pace and in whatever manner that they choose. Education professors appropriated for this innervated approach to education the term “progressive,” but academic content declined in quality for those who most needed carefully defined and sequenced skill and knowledge sets.
In 1983, a federally commissioned study, entitled A Nation at Risk, detailed the poor quality of K-12 education in the United States. Fads for addressing the dilemma came and went until a movement for higher academic standards and measurable results finally produced a worthy bipartisan program, No Child Left Behind. In 2004, consistent with the requirements of this legislation, committees formed by the Minnesota Department of Education generated academic standards for reading, math, science, social studies. Officials of the Minnesota Department of Education also constructed the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) to assess student knowledge in reading and math for Grades 3 through 8. Grade level performance on assessments for writing (administered in Grade 9), reading (Grade 10), and math (Grade 11) was deemed necessary for graduation.
Steadily, as student performance proved embarrassing, Education Minnesota (the well-funded teachers union in Minnesota) went to work on members of the DFL, undermining support for the MCAs and for academic standards. The DFL-dominated, farcically dubbed “education session” of the 2013 Minnesota Legislature terminated the high school tests as graduation requirements. Governor Mark Dayton’s Education Commissioner, Brenda Cassellius, inaugurated an imprecise new Multiple Measure Ratings system and signaled that the MCAs would eventually be replaced by assessments more aligned to the ACT, upon the fanciful notion that students who could not pass high school level tests now are going to be better prepared to take the much more difficult, college readiness instrument. Republicans, meanwhile, typically say that standards and assessments that they once supported now offend their local control sensibilities. Perceiving an opening and adding further to the disarray, certain teachers, never keen on implementing measurable standards, are refusing to administer the doomed MCAs.
In this morally corrupt condition of state-level ineffectiveness, in which academic targets shift, no one can be held accountable, and “local control” becomes the mantra, meaningful overhaul of our K-12 systems must indeed ensue at the level of the central school district. Fortuitously, Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson is demonstrating real promise as a leader intent on doubling down on instruction of students facing the greatest challenges at High Priority Schools, for which she has gained considerable flexibility to hire, train, and retain teachers.
With a Minnesota state system of education in disarray, we must insist that Superintendent Johnson fulfill her promise at the level of the local school district. If she inspires those working for her to give all of our precious children a K-12 education worthy of a democracy, she could offer her accomplishment to leaders of other locally centralized school systems, where the needed overhaul of K-12 education in the United States must occur.
