Voters Should Give MPS Officials a Wake-Up Call on 8 November with a "No" Vote on the Referendum

Voters should give decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) a wake-up call on 8 November by voting “No” on the proposed tax levy.


In proposing this levy, officials at MPS seek to renew the school district’s existing referendum revenue authorization of $1,604.31 per pupil, forecasting that for academic year 2016-2017 the total revenue generated will be $74 million, which amounts to 13% of the district’s general operating revenue of approximately $580 million. If voters vote “No” on the referendum, the current levy allocation will expire at the end of the stipulated nine-year period and that $74 million in revenue will be lost.


If the referendum fails, MPS decision-makers convey that they “will have to make difficult decisions about how to operate the district without a substantial portion of the budget.”


And this is exactly why citizens should vote “No” on the referendum: to induce MPS officials to make those difficult decisions that heretofore they have shown disinclination to make.


I have followed events at MPS and conducted research on the inner workings of this school district for many years, doing so with great intensity in the course of the last 27 months, including academic years 2014-2015, 2015-2016, and the current academic year 2016-2017 to date. From my observations and research, I offer the following account:


After Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s resignation went into effect at the end of January 2015, members of the MPS Board of Education conducted a two-phase search for new leadership that was bungled in many ways. During the first phase, these school board members missed the opportunity to hire Houston Independent School District turnaround specialist Charles Foust, got pounded with a public relations fiasco that whirled around their candidate of choice, and then were impelled by protesters to reverse what had seemed an imminent decision in favor of Interim Superintendent Michael Gore.


In a second phase that lasted from late winter through May 2016, school board members ultimately opted for former Anchorage, Alaska, Superintendent Ed Graff.


With that decision, based on my most recent observations and research, here is the predicament now prevailing in the Minneapolis Public Schools after the two-phase search that cost approximately $250,000:


The Minneapolis Public Schools is now operating on wildly improbable assumptions embedded in the district’s Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan and a document called 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 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 and is under 50% for American Indian and African American males.


The Educational Equity Plan is a jargon-infested document, full of bromides proclaiming a coming attitudinal shift at MPS to honor cultural diversity and attend intensely to the needs of students of color. But the document offers timelines during which meetings will be held, reports will be delivered, and cultural sensitivity training will be administered, without conveying any information on the strategies actually likely to raise academic performance for students of color.


Against a backdrop of terrible school performance recorded recently in the MPS Report Card based on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) results for 2016 and similar results for the Multiple Measurement Rating (MMR) that incorporates data on individual student growth, new Superintendent Ed Graff is conveying a desire “to change the narrative” about the Minneapolis Public Schools. He touts the slogan “MPS Strong,” knowing that less than 43% 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. The sanguine, feel-good message that he delivered during his “State of the Schools” address attests to an imperviousness to reality that could have sanguinary consequences:


Ill-educated inner city youth frequently succumb to the life of the street and travel pathways destined for incarceration.


The Minneapolis Public Schools is a school district that needs transformative change rather than shibboleths forecasting favorable results in the absence of a compelling plan for delivering an education of excellence to all of our precious children.


For the needed change to transpire, decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools need to install a knowledge-intensive, clearly sequenced curriculum throughout the K-12 years; retrain teachers, who come out of teacher preparation programs ill-equipped to deliver such a curriculum; install a coherent program of skill acquisition for failing students, replacing the disarticulated, inadequate tutoring initiatives currently prevailing; greatly expand 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, cut the central school district bureaucracy by at least 25% from its presently bloated staff count of about 550 members.


Against a backdrop of two years wasted in route to hiring a very conventional superintendent, terrible academic results that give the lie to the 2020 Plan, and the lack of any budget prioritization that would include the five most necessary initiatives given above, voters need to give a wake-up call to decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools:


Vote “No” on the MPS referendum on 8 November.