Members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education Will Badly Embarrass Themselves At Least Three Times at Their 8 August Meeting (Davis Center, 1250 West Broadway)

Members of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education will embarrass themselves at least three times at their 8 August 2017 regular monthly meeting (generally the second Tuesday of each month, held at the Davis Center, MPS central offices at 1250 West Broadway).

 

According to the best information available to me, the key agenda items focus on approval for  alternative school and School Resource Officer (SRO) contracts and Chief of Research, Evaluation, and Accountability Eric Moore’s report on academic progress made by the district’s students during school year 2016-2017.

 

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There are three alternative schools affiliated with the Minneapolis Public Schools that serve students with highly special needs or circumstances.  These include Longfellow Alternative (for pregnant teens), Metro SJ (for students with residential, emotional, or familial instability;  or with substance abuse issues), and Harrison Education Center (for students with emotional or behavioral issues).

 

Otherwise the contract alternative schools, the contracts for which will be approved tonight by the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education are the following:

 

Transition Plus

American Indian OIC (AIOIC) Takoda Prep

Loring Nicollet Alternative School

Menlo Park Academy High School

MERC Alternative High School

NayWayEe Center School

PYC Arts and Technology School

Ronald McDonald House

Tatanka Academy

Volunteers of America (VOA) High School

 

Urban League High School (the institution once known as the Street Academy), which remains on the MPS website, is according to my information now defunct.

 

What these schools have in common is an ability to connect with students at the personal and familial level;  and lousy academic programs.  They are degree mills that take in the students that the institutions of the Minneapolis Public Schools have failed, herding the young people through to academically insubstantial high school graduation, while at their best providing a safe haven for putting lives in disarray in some sort of order.

 

The contract alternative schools are academically atrocious schools upon which decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools rely because of their failure to provide a viable academic and counseling program to students of all demographic descriptors and life circumstances.

 

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School Resource Officers (SROs) are police officers hired specially to patrol MPS high schools.

 

Zero to very few of these officers would be necessary if decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools would design and implement a program of familial outreach to provide directly or to connect families with services needed to get students from challenging circumstances prepared to learn;  and then to make sure that the teachers and curriculum of the district are knowledge-intensive, skill-replete, and prepared to impart high quality information to all students.

 

Students provided with love and knowledge rarely make trouble.

 

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Most directly, members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education should be deeply embarrassed upon receipt of Eric Moore’s most recent account of the depths of the district’s failure to provide an excellent, knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.

 

This report will show that as a whole only 42.3% of MPS students are proficient in mathematics and only 43.4% are proficient in reading.  These are essentially the same results as reported last year---  down slightly in math, up a bit in reading.  Students of color and those on free and reduced price lunch typically do not give evidence of comparable proficiency rates as high as 25%, and in many specific categories the rate is at 15% or less. Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan of the district, which now is in effect for the third of its six-year term, projects an eight (8) percentage point increase for these underachieving populations, which should mean at least 50% proficiency rates by now.

 

In what fantasy world do members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education dwell?

 

How much of the guilt that should be manifested by these school board members, Superintendent Ed Graff, and other decision-makers the Minneapolis Public Schools for their reprehensible failure will they actually manifest?

 

The fantasy abides but the guilt demonstrated is too little in evidence.

 

And members of the MPS Board of Education are so observably clueless that they will not even fully grasp the depth of their failure as they consider the three most important items on the agenda for the 8 August meeting:  approval of the contract for alternative schools;  approval of 14 SRO officers for the 2017-2018 academic year;  and the relentlessly revealing data that will describe the abysmal failures of all professionals and decision-makers involved in the Minneapolis Public Schools.