Comprehensive, Coherent, District-Wide Tutoring >>>>> Ed Graff’s Third Priority as Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools

Once new Superintendent Ed Graff (nine months into his tenure at the Minneapolis Public Schools) has overhauled curriculum for the level of knowledge intensity and grade level specificity that defines excellent education;  and trained teachers capable of imparting  knowledge-intensive education to students of all demographic descriptors;  he should oversee the design of an aggressive program of skill remediation for students lagging disastrously below grade level.

 

Astonishingly, there is no comprehensive, consistently administered tutoring program at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) to ensure that students struggling below grade level in reading and math are given the help that they need to reach grade level performance.  Failure properly to serve struggling students has been manifested in private and public efforts.

The Private Vendor Fiasco under No Child Left Behind

 

I have written in many places of the favorable features of the No Child Left Behind law passed as a bipartisan initiative in both houses of Congress in 2001, stressing objective testing that in Minnesota meant a state-designed grade 9 assessment for writing and Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) for students at grades 3-8 and 10 for reading, grades 3-8 and grade 11 for math; disaggregation of data according to student demographic characteristics; objective identification of schools that continually failed students in certain demographic categories; and gradations of punitive sanctions ultimately resulting in staff restructuring at schools that failed students for five successive years.

 

But No Child Left Behind regulation mandated private market interventions to help low-income, low-achieving students rise to grade level in reading, math, and writing. What should have been a tutorial initiative organized and delivered by the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized school districts to confront their own failures fell to private businesses, under the notion that competition to raise student performance would achieve what the public school system had not.

This was a disastrous failure.

During an approximately eight-year phase that began during the 2004-2005 academic year, numerous commercial vendors competed to provide tutoring services to struggling students as mandated by No Child Left Behind legislation. The private market for tutorial services was fraught with corruption and achieved nothing substantial in behalf of low-achieving students. Some vendors promised students and their families gifts of computers and other items if they signed up for their programs. All but a very few commercial tutoring enterprises evidenced far more concern in enrolling students for tutorial sessions costing typically between $30 and $75 an hour, as opposed to interest in student achievement.

Officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools in the Office of Funded Programs attempted to coordinate the private market effort by fifty or more vendors per year, but MPS staff rarely visited the academic sessions run by the private companies, so that any regulation pertained to invoice submissions and accounts payable. Much of payment rendered by MPS for these private services was subsidized by the federal government via Title IX funding, but the school district itself bore costs that subsidies did not cover, and a great deal of staff time was invested in the monumentally unsuccessful private market tutoring effort.

When Minnesota Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius and other officials at the Minnesota Department of Education successfully gained a waiver from No Child Left Behind regulations in the autumn of 2012, private tutoring activity waned. For two years beyond the approval of the waiver, administrators under Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s direction at MPS opted to maintain private tutoring activity, but no major private, for-profit agencies have been active in tutorial services at MPS for the last two academic years of 2014-2015 and 2015-2016.

And officials of the Minneapolis Public Schools have offered no viable, well-coordinated effort to address the problems that federal officials vainly hoped would be solved by the private market.


Failure to Design and Implement a Viable Tutoring Program at the Minneapolis Public Schools

Tutoring efforts at the Minneapolis Public Schools constitute an ineffective hodgepodge.

 

R. T. Rybak departed the reformist nonprofit agency Generation Next before that organization delivered on its promises to enroll a bevy of tutors to help struggling public school students in Minnesota. This was after officials at Generation Next committed two years of staff time to arrive at the obvious conclusion that aggressive remedial instruction should be rendered to ensure that all students are reading and performing mathematical operations at level of school enrollment by grade 3.
  

Students at K-5 and K-8 institutions in the Minneapolis Public Schools receive some help through the Beacons after school program. But academic assistance in Beacons is not high quality or properly measured for effectiveness, and students spend as much after school time in recreational pursuits as they do in striving to achieve academic proficiency. 

 

Those wishing to sign up as volunteers for the Minneapolis Public Schools may sign up under categories that include Community Volunteers, Elementary Literacy Tutor Program, and Adult Education Volunteers.  Other programs included on the MPS website for prospective volunteers that have relevance to tutoring include Math Corps, Reading Corps, City of Lakes Americorps, and

VISTA.  But there is only one person---  Kaylie Burns Gahagan---  with prime responsibility for coordinating volunteers, not all volunteers render academic instruction, and there has been no major effort to place a sufficient number of tutors working to advance the academic prospects of all students needing remedial instruction in all schools.

 

At schools classified as High Priority, efforts have been made to assist struggling students for designated periods of the regular school day, as well as after school; some gains have been documented, but these initiatives are nascent in development, and overwhelmingly student performance has not reached the goal of grade level performance.

Summer school and specialized summer tutorial assistance programs at the Minneapolis Public Schools are inadequate and feature notable teacher ineffectiveness. Further, leaders of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers have often voiced opposition to aggressive remedial efforts in summer and after school programs.

This combination of private enterprise and public school failure is stark, given that the problem is so clear and the program for action so logically apparent.

We must do better, according to a program with features given below:

Toward a Coordinated Effort at the Minneapolis Public Schools for Addressing the Needs of Students Struggling Below Grade Level in Reading and Mathematics

There is no office or department at the Minneapolis Public Schools responsible for the coordination of a district-wide tutoring program. There is a volunteer services coordinator, but volunteerism can take many forms and this official does not focus exclusively or even very heavily on tutoring. The Minneapolis Public Schools does have a large (42-person) Teaching and Learning Department within which one would think there would be a point person for overseeing a tutorial program--- but all one finds are six secondary and eight elementary resource personnel who implement curriculum in math and reading. Chief Academic Officer Susanne Griffin oversees MPS adoption of math and reading curriculum that is synchronous with standards generated (in 2003, with updates in the succeeding years) at the Minnesota Department of Education.

This curriculum establishes the skill sets that students are to have at each grade level and applies to all students. And indeed all students should be expected to learn knowledge and skill sets given in curriculum consistent with state standards.

But only 44% of MPS students meet state standards in math, while a similar 43% of students meet state standards for reading. This means that over 55% of students at MPS need remedial instruction that is not currently being rendered in any comprehensive way from school to school.

Without adding staff to the already bloated Department of Teaching and Learning, there needs therefore to be a reshuffling so that more staff energy is invested in skill remediation for academically struggling students--- a majority of students in the Minneapolis Public Schools. There should be a clearly identified point person for elementary school (grades K-5) students, a clearly designated person for middle school (grades 6-8) students, and another for high school (grades 9-12) with responsibility for implementing a district-wide tutorial program.

At the building level, what needs to be done is not mysterious:

Students need to progress in the K-5 years through a sequence of skills in math and reading that I have identified for grade by grade acquisition in the August 2014 edition of Journal of the K-5 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, closely tallying with Minnesota state academic standards and with curriculum generated by the Core Knowledge Foundation.

 

In math during the K-5 years, students need to progress through skill acquisition that includes pre-math positional terms (up, down, under, over, and the like), time telling (analog and digital), units of money, the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, data representation (graphs, charts, tables), and introductions to geometry and algebra.

In reading during the K-5 years, students need to progress through alphabet recognition, phonemic awareness, vocabulary of ascending syllables and degrees of abstraction, sentence construction and recognition, paragraph construction and comprehension (with use and understanding of topic sentences), and reading of a variety of fictional and nonfictional works of thematic variety and topical diversity, allowing for an expanding and ever-richer vocabulary.

One hour a day should be set aside for students to work on enrichment activities connected to the skill level that each student is manifesting:

For students who have mastered grade level skills, this will mean working on advanced material that challenges students to solve intriguing math problems or read for the enhancement of literary appreciation or knowledge acquisition.

For students who are lagging below grade level, this will mean working one on one with a well-trained tutor until the necessary math and reading skills are acquired. Work with a tutor should be viewed as an opportunity to master important math skills and to read an array of interesting and high quality fictional and nonfictional material.  Students should receive positive feedback for progress made; tutors should convey a sense of joy in learning and delight in the opportunity to spend time with the young person.

Over time, most struggling students will gain the basic skills that they need in the course of remediation during the K-5 years. But enrichment classes should be available at the middle school (grades 6-8) and high school (grades 9-12 levels) also, so that students have both the chance to ascend to academic challenges either for mastery at grade level or advancement from already secured grade level position.

Enrichment sessions of both types should be available after school also, with priority given to students who are struggling below grade level; but students evidencing grade level performance ad

above should also be given after school opportunities for knowledge and skill ascendance in the form of human and material resources for research and specialized study of topics of driving interest, and for training of the type needed for success on ACT and SAT exams.

Both in-school and after-school programs for skill and knowledge enhancement should be administered in the spirit of challenging students to know all that they can know and to become all that they can be.

Once the program for academic enrichment (advanced and remedial) is well integrated into academic culture at the Minneapolis Public Schools, administrative staff and teachers at the building level can take responsibility for implementation and improvement, with successes and innovations shared across the district. Involvement of central office personnel will be critical at the initial stages; over time, though, well-trained teachers and tutors at the building level can implement enrichment activities as a primarily site-based responsibility, subject to oversight from central office personnel.

Such a program of academic enrichment will necessitate well-trained teachers of the type that I have specified in my academic journal and in the next article as you scrollon down this blog. 

The program will also require a great increase in the number of tutors and very careful training of these tutors.

An aggressive program of volunteer solicitation should secure high quality talent among college students, workaday professionals, and academically astute and pedagogically adept parents and retirees.

But expansion of professional staff hired for the express purpose of tutoring will also be necessary.

Academic enrichment (advanced and remedial) should be a budgetary priority of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

This will make the central bureaucratic paring that constitutes the fifth part of my five-part plan for overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools all the more imperative:  We must greatly trim the central bureaucracy;  prove fiscal responsibility;  shift resources to budgetary priorities that advance the work of teachers, teachers’ aides, and tutors for the benefit of students;  then generate any additional sources necessary to increase the pay of newly trained, professionalized teachers, and to secure and train high-quality tutors so as to prepare all students for maximum academic achievement.