Ted Kolderie Does Not Understand Excellence in Education or the Proper Mission of the Minneapolis Public Schools as a Centralized School District

Ted Kolderie’s scattershot approach to writing opinion pieces (“The City Schools’ Central Problem,” (Star Tribune, Opinion Exchange, Sunday, April 19, 2015), requires a firm hand in presenting summation. Here is that summary:


Kolderie argues that the Minneapolis Public Schools is in a fight for survival. This can be witnessed in the fact that 17,000 students eligible to attend the district’s schools now attend other public schools. Departing school board members openly wonder whether leaders in the district can respond.


A strategy is now emerging to replace the big urban school district; in Minnesota (similar to options available in other states) students may now enroll in other districts, earn post-secondary credit by attending classes on college campuses and then graduating with one’s high school class, and attend charter schools. The centralized management model of the big urban school district impedes the ability of conventional public schools to compete with the diverse options now available to students.


Actions by the Minnesota State Legislature to restructure public education, such as opening the way for inter-district open enrollment, have presented challenges to which the Minneapolis Public Schools have not responded, despite former Superintendent Richard Green’s vow in 1984 that the district he led would compete vigorously. The option to offer their own charter schools was not enthusiastically pursued by officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools, and directors of “New Schools” have served their time and then moved on without result.


Upset at national government encroachment on state and local prerogatives, Republican chairs of education committees (Rep. John Kline, Minnesota; Sen. Lamar Alexander, Tennessee) have moved to enlarge the state role. But what is the role of states: continue the traditional provision of funds, take over failing school districts, cede the ability to do the latter to city governments, annex bits of urban districts to those of the suburbs, break big school districts into smaller parts? These answers are variously thus far not successful, inconclusive as to results, or unfeasible.


What, then, might the State of Minnesota usefully do? The state should mandate that the Minneapolis Public Schools establish contracts with those representing schools or clusters of schools within the district, requiring accountability for academic performance in exchange for accountability. The Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education would be given first chance to establish these contracts, but if dithering beyond an established time limit would lose that power to the state.


Here and there this sort of approach has been suggested or attempted, but a move in this direction by three Minnesota superintendents back in 1998 proved aborted: Perhaps unforgivably, they never presented a plan to the legislature. And a recent vote by the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education to give greater autonomy to [Community] Partnership Schools will most likely run up against the impulse to centralize and standardize.


Authentic autonomy for performance would return decisions about how to improve learning to schools and teachers; make education responsive to families; and personalize learning according to the needs, aptitudes, and interests of students. This will avoid the scripting of teachers’ work (as is now the case for both the Minneapolis and St. Paul public school districts). Teachers resent this scripting, which is dangerous: Only by giving teachers dignity as professionals will the Minneapolis Public Schools retain quality teachers: and only when teachers are given authority over what matters for learning can the school board hold teachers accountable for student outcomes.


In this manner, the State of Minnesota should mandate accountability-for- autonomy contracts and see if the Minneapolis Public Schools can become a self-improving system, encouraging innovation in the contracted schools while working to improve conventional schools.  


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Kolderie errs on his main premise and the major points flowing from that thesis: Far from being the problem, the centralized school district must always be the solution in the United States.


The best school systems of the world are located in East Asia (Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) and the democratic socialist nations of Europe (Denmark, France, Finland, Singapore, and Sweden). These countries all centralize public education at the national level, so that schools throughout each nation deliver a common curriculum. Most members of the body politic in the European socialist democracies view education in the same way that they view health care, as a vital social good to be distributed equitably to people of all demographic descriptors.


For health care, this results in single payer systems that produce much healthier populations across lines of economic and social class. For education, the result is a common body of knowledge whereby students enter high school with more information stored and processed in their brains than students in the United States typically possess as they stride across the stage to claim a high school diploma.


An ongoing and intractable problem in anything that Ted Kolderie writes is failure to grasp the meaning and purposes of excellent K-12 education and the role of the excellent teacher. An excellent education is knowledge intensive, involving mastery of mathematics, natural science, physical education, history, economics, literature, and the fine arts; with information acquired sequentially and systematically throughout the K-12 years. In high school, each student should also acquire knowledge of a world language and thorough training in the industrial and technological arts. Excellent teachers are those who possess the knowledge pertinent to their subject areas and the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to all students.


The purposes of an excellent education are cultural enrichment, civic engagement, and professional satisfaction:


All people who have been educated in K-12 schools of pubic education deserve to have their brains teeming with commonly shared knowledge pertinent to mathematical and scientific principles underpinning the wonder of the natural world. They deserve to understand the prehistory and history that is their own as human beings. They deserve educations in the fine arts enabling them to appreciate Song Dynasty landscape painting and exquisite bronze sculpture from the Ibo; and to revel in the miracle of music of all genres. They deserve lives of cultural enrichment.


All people who have claimed a high school diploma also deserve to be prepared through knowledge of history, government, and economics to vote with discernment, run for government office, and discuss major issues in private conversations and public forums. They deserve to be ready for the obligation and privilege of civic engagement.


By the time that they graduate from high school students should have such thorough training in the liberal and industrial arts that they have multiple options at either two-year technical schools or four-year colleges and universities. All people deserve to possess the knowledge and skill sets that will allow them to move in this earthly sojourn with professional satisfaction.


This excellence of education would be best defined at the national level for implementation at the local level. But in the United States, there is a fixation on local control. Attempts to enforce or guide national policy such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core are invariably vitiated by interest groups on both the political left and right. So in this nation the unit of centralization must be the local school district. Officials at that level must, with reference to the curricula of Common Core, Core Knowledge, and the world’s best public education systems, define an excellent education in the liberal, industrial, and technological arts; and retrain their teachers in the delivery of this curriculum.


Ted Kolderie argues for decentralization of the Minneapolis Public Schools with an approach to K-12 education modeled on charter schools. Charter schools have been miserable failures. And they will never be capable of educating the broadly informed populace that Thomas Jefferson knew was necessary for a true democracy; or producing a unity of knowledge possessed by people of all demographic descriptors, as advocated by Horace Mann through “common schools.”


Interim School Superintendent Michael Goar and his staff would be much better advised to follow through on Focused Instruction (curricular consistency at all grade levels in all schools), High Priority Schools (aggressive skill development for academically faltering students), and Shift (reduction of central office staff with resource transfers to students and those working most closely with them).


Goar and staff should not allow themselves such distractions as Community Partnership Schools (modeled on faulty charter-school approaches) and the careless verbiage of Ted Kolderie.