K-12 Education in Minnesota is in Predictable Disarray

Public K-12 education in Minnesota is in disarray. One year after the farcically dubbed “education session” of the Minnesota state legislature, this is entirely predictable.


One year ago, Governor Mark Dayton, Minnesota Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius, and the DFL-dominated Minnesota state legislature celebrated passage of legislation to fund all-day kindergarten, increase spending for early childhood education, and elevate revenue available to local school districts for conventional programming. Such funding appears to advance the prospects for children in our K-12 schools, suggesting increased school readiness for students from challenged economic circumstances and signaling support for financially strapped local school districts.


In fact, though, spending allotted for these purposes creates false hopes and sustains business as usual. Increasing school readiness without overhauling education across the entire K-12 experience does nothing to advance the skill and knowledge base of students as they move through their elementary and secondary years. Elevating revenue for local school districts without demanding better educational outcomes just perpetuates a system that dooms students to thirteen years in a desultory K-12 experience that leaves them knowledge-poor and skill-deprived.


Allotment of so much money for unlikely returns is a waste of Minnesota state funds. Other action taken by the legislature of 2013 is more clearly injurious to K-12 students. Legislators in that session voted to terminate requirements that students pass the grade 9 writing test and grade 10 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) for reading in order to graduate, and they made permanent a similar termination with regard to the grade 11 MCA for math. During the same time span encompassed by the 2013 legislative session, Minnesota Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius announced that these high school level MCAs, as well as the math and reading MCAs for grades 3 through 8, would be phased out in favor of assessments supposedly aligned to the ACT college readiness instrument and to the requirements set by admissions officers at colleges and universities.


What these legislative actions and executive judgments have in fact done is to end the system put in place, beginning a decade ago (spring 2004) with the establishment of academic standards for math, reading, science, and social studies by committees composed of Minnesota citizens and education professionals under the guidance of personnel at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE). The MDE thereafter constructed MCAs for science, reading, and math; the latter two were used to rate student performance at individual schools, with disaggregation of the data to indicate performance for students by ethnicity and economic status. This system met the requirements of No Child Left Behind legislation, the most promising federal initiative in United States history with regard to holding educators responsible for educational outcomes.


Performance on the MCAs by students of color and by those from impoverished economic circumstances proved dismal, whether at ill-regarded urban schools or highly rated suburban schools. Educators in many quarters were deeply embarrassed. Members of the DFL began a retreat from support for the MCAs under pressure of Education Minnesota, the Minnesota state teachers union that figures prominently in the election of state Democrats. Republicans then began their own retreat from support for a system of testing that disaggregates the data and holds educators accountable, now claiming that government-mandated programs of the sort offend their local control sensibilities.


Thus it was in this atmosphere that Governor Dayton, Commissioner Cassellius, and the DFL-dominated Minnesota legislature of 2013 did the bidding of Education Minnesota and the education establishment, undercutting the credibility of the system of educational accountability that was effectively spotlighting the inability of public school educators properly to educate all of our children.


Educators in our K-12 schools are now administering the MCAs in the absence of any pressure to ensure that students are well-prepared, secure in the knowledge that the ever-shifting target has been moved again and that they will not be held accountable for results under the imprecise Multiple Measurement Ratings system inaugurated by the Dayton-Cassellius administration. We now await the new regimen of testing that will operate under the fanciful notion that students who could not pass tests assessing their readiness for, and performance in, high school will somehow perform better on assessments judging their college readiness. Meanwhile, some teachers are contributing further to the disarray in our K-12 schools by refusing to administer MCAs that they know are slated for oblivion.


Everything about the history of education in the United States since the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, the federally funded study that detailed the poor performance of the nation’s K-12 schools, suggests that decision-makers at the federal and state levels of government are incapable of generating a viable and durable system of accountability for the public schools. Rather than await the next doomed program to emanate from those levels of government, community activists must seize the mandate for local control of education in the United States and move forcefully to exert pressure on locally centralized school districts to provide all of our precious children a K-12 education worthy of democracy.