Decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools are now either operating on wildly improbable assumptions or knowingly making false declarations via
the district’s Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan and a document called the Educational Equity Framework:
The 2020 Plan sets targeted increases of 5% per year in academic achievement levels of MPS
students as a whole; a comparable figure of 8% for the most academically challenged students;
and 10% for the four-year graduation rate.
But two years into this six-year plan, academic
achievement levels are mostly flat and for American Indian and African American males have
even declined. The graduation rate still languishes at 64% overall for the district as a whole;
the four-year graduation rate for American Indians and African Americans is just 36% and 52%
respectively.
Consider these figures, from among the most recent data provided by the Department of Research, Evaluation, and Development (REA) at the Minneapolis Public Schools:
Percentage of Students Recording Grade Level Performance on MCAs:
Disaggregated Data for Academic Years Ending in 2014, 2015, and 2016
Math
African American 2014 2015 2016
Male 20.8% 22.0% 19.1%
Female 21.2% 20.7% 20.5%
African (Somali, Ethiopian,
Liberian--- late
20th/early 21st
century immigrant populations)
2014 2015 2016
Male 24.2% 25.0% 23.6%
Female 24.1% 25.9% 21.5%
Hispanic 2014 2015 2016
Male 32.1% 33.5% 32.1%
Female 29.4% 30.3% 30.4.%
Native American/ American Indian
2014 2015 2016
Male 19.9% 16.5% 16.0%
Female 25.0% 21.9% 21.3%
Asian 2014 2015 2016
Male 44.1% 47.4% 45.4%
Female 51.3% 53.4% 54.1%
Whites/ Caucasian 2014 2015 2016
Male 76.7% 78.4% 77.4%
Female 77.0% 77.9% 78.4%
All Students
2014 2015 2016
Male 43.1% 44.3% 42.9%
Female 43.9% 44.5% 44.4%
Percentage of Students Recording Grade Level Performance on MCAs:
Disaggregated Data for Academic Years Ending in 2014, 2015, and 2016
Reading
African American 2014 2015 2016
Male 18.8% 18.5% 18.2%
Female 24.0% 24.5% 23.4%
African (Somali, Ethiopian,
Liberian---
late 20th/early 21st
century immigrant populations)
2014 2015 2016
Male 18.8% 19.3% 20.4%
Female 27.6% 24.3% 23.2%
Hispanic
2014 2015 2016
Male 22.0% 22.9% 24.7%
Female 24.5% 26.6% 27.6%
Native American/ American Indian
2014 2015 2016
Male 18.3% 13.9% 15.3%
Female 23.6% 26.1% 25.9%
Asian 2014 2015 2016
Male 36.0% 35.8% 38.8%
Female 44.7% 44.1% 50.6%
White/ Caucasian 2014 2015 2016
Male 75.3% 74.3% 74.0%
Female 81.0% 80.2% 80.0%
All Students
2014 2015 2016
Male 39.2% 38.7% 39.6%
Female 45.3% 45.1% 45.8%
Both Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan and the Educational Equity Plan merely offer page-filling verbiage, constituting documents
the chief value of which is to provide legal cover and an appearance of action, in the absence of any
viable program for achieving favorable academic results.
Thus was I appalled when, in his “State of the Schools” address, Superintendent Ed Graff
conveyed a desire “to change the narrative” about the Minneapolis Public Schools, declaring the
school district to be “MPS Strong,” thus adding to the prevailing fiction attending the abiding slogan
at the Minneapolis Public Schools, declaring that every student will be “Career and College Ready.”
This is wretched.
This is wild sloganeering that has no bearing to reality.
Such declarations come in full frontal view of the statistics given above, in the knowledge
that less than 46% of the district’s students are achieving at grade level in reading and math; and that for American Indian and African American males less than 20% are achieving at grade level.
But there are lives in the balance.
The sanguine, feel-good message that Graff
spouts suggests an imperviousness to the reality of the sanguinary consequences produced when
young people who face challenges of familial poverty and frequent dysfunction are then ill-served
by their schools.
Putative academic institutions that should impart knowledge and skills paving a
route out of cyclical generational poverty instead lay pipelines running from failing schools to
the life of the street and on to institutions of incarceration.
The Minneapolis Public Schools is at the moment nowhere close to any of those programmatic
features necessary for the attainment of educational excellence, specifically,
1) installing a knowledge-intensive, clearly sequenced curriculum throughout the K-12 years;
2) retraining teachers, who come out of teacher preparation programs ill-equipped to deliver such
a curriculum;
3) designing and implementing a coherent program of skill acquisition for failing students,
replacing the disarticulated, inadequate tutoring initiatives currently prevailing;
4) greatly expanding outreach and services to students who come from challenged economic
and familial circumstances; and, so as to make possible the preference that should be given to
these priorities,
5) cutting the central school district bureaucracy by at least 25% from its presently
bloated staff count of about 550 members.
Decision-makers at the national level can do little to make structural change in K-12
education in the United States.
But you have the power to take action at the level of the locally
centralized school district with the deliverance of the vitally necessary wake-up call to local-level
decision-makers whose actions forever affect the lives of our precious young people.
There are lives in the balance.
Make the needed statement.
Vote “No” on the MPS referendum on 8 November.
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