This
is a school district with a hopeless guiding document that three years ago
(summer 2014) set fantastically unrealistic goals, in the absence of any plan
of action for achieving those goals, that called for eight (8) percentage point
annual academic achievement increases for the most underperforming student
populations (students on free and reduced price lunch, including predominately
young people of color). This would mean
that by now, three years into Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan, there would be
a total gain of twenty-four (24) percentage point gains for these students.
But
over the course of the academic years ending in 2014, 2015, and 2016 fewer than
twenty-two percent (22%) of female and male African American students achieved
grade level proficiency in math , and fewer than twenty-five percent (25%)
attained grade level performance in reading.
African American males peaked in math in the academic year ending in
2014, with 18.8% attaining grade level proficiency; that figure declined to 18.3% in the academic
year ending in 2016.
During
those same years, fewer than twenty-six percent (26%) of female and male
American Indian students achieved at grade level in either math or
reading. American Indian males peaked in
2014 at 18.3% achieving reading proficiency in 2014; that figure had declined three
percentage points to 15.3% in the academic year ending in 2016.
Among
Hispanic students over the years 2014,
2015, and 2016, the totals for all females and males came to fewer than
thirty-four percent (34%) attaining proficiency in reading across those years
and fewer than twenty-eight percent (28%) recording grade level performance in
reading. The figure for Hispanic males
in reading peaked at 24.7% in 2016, a small incremental rise over previous
years.
Thus,
instead of that 24 percentage point increase in math and reading skills over
the 2014-2016 period, achievement levels are generally flat or declining.
This
situation powerfully demonstrates the Fantasy Land existence of members
of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education. Outside consultant Michael Casserly of the
oxymoronic organization Council of Great City Schools told these board members
that he had never seen a plan with the guiding notion of “school as the unit of
change” (as opposed to system-wide change) work. There is a Great Leap Forward mentality about
the plan that (as in the case of the late 1950s Maoist notion of underdeveloped
China economically overtaking Great Britain in fifteen years) asserts worthy
targets in the absence of any plan whatsoever for reaching the established
goals.
………………………………………………………………………….
Two
issues dominated the meeting on 11 July:
the looming contract with private 501(c)3 organizations for providing
alternative school settings; and the
contract that also looms for approval at the 8
August
2017 meeting of the MPS Board of Education keeping School Resource Officers (reduced
from the current 16 to 14) from the Minneapolis Police force in the schools.
The contract alternative
schools that for many years have taken those students from the Minneapolis
Public Schools perceived to need a different setting and credit recovery are Indian
OIC (Takoda Prep), Loring Nicollet Alternative Schools, Menlo Park Academy
High School, MERC Alternative High School, NaWayEe Center School, PYC Arts and Technology High School, Ronald McDonald
House, Tatanka Academy, Urban League Academy, VOA High School.
Students enrolled in
these schools receive attention sensitive to their life circumstances, but
academically these institutions are degree mills with inferior, low-paid
teachers and low-content curriculum.
Decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools should admit that
the perceived need to access the services of these schools represents a stark
failure of MPS to articulate and implement a program that serves the needs of
challenged student populations.
Many School Resource
Officers (SROs)are sensitive to the student populations they serve; others have been guilty of crass, insensitive, even racist interactions with students. The perceived need to access SRO services
arises in the absence of teachers and curriculum capable of giving an
engaging, knowledge-intensive education to these students and for lack of a
wide-ranging program sending on-the-ground staff capable of connecting to the
most challenged MPS families right where they live.
Not a single school board
member gives any indication of grasping the realities described above.
The 11 July 2017 meeting
of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education demonstrated the
clueless incompetence of the members of that body and represented in microcosm
the disaster that is the school district of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
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