Students at the Minneapolis Public Schools Are Being Set Up for MCA and ACT Failure Once Again

Evidence strongly suggests that students in the Minneapolis Public Schools are being set up for failure once again on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs), and on the ACT exam used by college admissions officials to rate chances for postsecondary success.

 

Whether the preparatory experience that they are being given is a matter of intention on the part of officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools, or incompetence on the part teachers and administrators at the Department of Teaching and Learning, students are not receiving anything approaching the necessary training that they would need to score at grade level in reading and math.

 

My students in the New Salem Educational Initiative will be prepared for these tests, but they are not being given the required training in their schools of enrollment. 

 

Remember that my students are either enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools or they started in the schools of that district before they either moved (in the abiding manner of impoverished, residentially mobile folks) or their parents exercised other school options.  My students overwhelming start in schools of North Minneapolis, but then I follow them wherever they go, whether (most typically) to South or Northeast Minneapolis or to other school districts.  

 

Inasmuch as I am a supportive critic of the locally centralized school district, most of all in the iteration at the Minneapolis Public Schools, I encourage my students to stay in the schools of MPS, where they can get breakfast and lunch, extracurricular activities, social interaction with peers and adults, and a modicum of foundational skills.  But then they get most of their education with me during the two hours that we spend together each week.

 

Consider these salient examples of ill preparation for the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments.

 

One of my grade 3 students, who attends Jefferson K-5, has not gained necessary skills in rounding numbers to the thousands;  she has not properly been taught to multiply numbers with three digits top and one digit bottom;  and, though she is at the top of her class in knowledge of her multiplication table, she is not given nearly enough practice with these factors and products at school in order to gain mastery to the point of automaticity.  Nor has she been given enough reading experience with a wide variety of texts to accumulate the necessary vocabulary to score at a high level of reading comprehension on the Grade 3 Reading MCA.

 

So I have gone into overdrive on my work with her on these skills, and we are quickly getting her ready for the MCAs in April.

 

I have a student who now attends Ramsey K-8 and is making all A’s and B’s in her classes, but in the absence of my instruction she would be clueless as to how to perform many skills, most recently evident in her lack of understanding of geometric translations and reflections, based on the instruction that she is getting at school.    Her lack of reading a multiplicity of literary forms and articles pertinent to the full range of subject area information leaves her in abiding need for the articles and the explicit vocabulary instruction that I provide.

 

I have another grade 7 student, this one attending Folwell K-5, who manifests similar lack of school-based preparation.  He, like my student at Ramsey, records that there is often way too much drama going on in class to concentrate at the level that he requires, or even for the teacher to get through her mathematics topic of instruction for the day.

 

And I have a grade 9 student attending North High School, one of the nicest young men I have ever met, eager for an education of excellence.  In his math class his teacher is purportedly readying students to take a practice ACT exam, but on a recent day in the run-up to taking that exam, students sat and watched a video on a completely irrelevant topic.

 

The Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments are well-designed instruments, item samplers of which can be found at the website of the Minnesota Department of Education.  Those samplers reveal assessments closely aligned to the Minnesota state standards for mathematics and reading.  An inspection of those exams conveys to anyone knowledgeable of grade appropriate curriculum that these assessments go right to the core of important material needed for grade level mastery.

 

The ACT is also a fine assessment, but it features truly college-level mathematics (as high as trigonometry) and reading that requires strong knowledge and skill sets for which most students at the Minneapolis Public Schools are not ready to display based on the quality of instruction that they are getting.  This is especially true of children from economically challenged circumstances and parentage that does not reflect a high level of education.

 

My babies in the New Salem Educational Initiative are being set up for failure once again.

 

So I work all the harder.

 

I make sure that my students are ready for the assessments looming for them, giving them the knowledge and skill sets that they need, many delivered through the medium of my nearly complete new book,  Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education (providing comprehensive curriculum for economics, psychology, political science, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English usage, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics).

 

But the poor quality of instruction that they are receiving in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools does not incline me toward favorable assessment of another sort, focused on the quality of curriculum and teaching, rendered in the analysis section of my other nearly complete book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.