Let’s Be Clear as to the Political Actors Most Instrumental in School Change

Joe Nathan’s article (“Schools keep improving, so let’s get our candidates on board”) in the January 29 issue of the Star Tribune is errant as to the nature of change needed in PK-12 education and with regard to the political actors most important in education policy formation;  he also is misguided in asserting that there has been significant improvement in the schools of Minnesota.

 

In the course of the last four decades, those of us interested in school change have witnessed programs for fomenting change come and go, often with radical philosophical shift from one reformist phase to another.   In the 1980s came the federally commissioned A Nation at Risk report and the call for more effective curriculum and teaching, particularly in math and science;  this gave rise to such approaches as Outcome Based Education (OBE).

 

In the early 1990s, Minnesota became the national leader in the charter school movement.  A bit later in the decade, the education establishment (education professors, public school administrators, teachers unions, Minnesota Department of Education [MDE]) instituted Profile in Learning (a portfolio and demonstration approach) that did not pass muster as a measurement of student achievement with outside reviewers.  Meanwhile, a bevy of students aspiring to graduate from high school proved unable to demonstrate even middle school competency on the Minnesota Basic Skills Test (MBST).  

 

In the early years of the new century and millennium, the standards movement brought grade-level academic standards and the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs).  These standards and assessments were generated to meet requirements of No Child Left Behind,(NCLB)a promising program that was brought down by political winds blowing from both left and right when results proved embarrassing to the education establishment.

 

Now we have the Minnesota response to the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, (ESSA) which offers assistance to struggling schools, rather than punitive measures.  But the education establishment in Minnesota will prove just as incapable of raising student achievement under the ESSA program as it was under NCLB.  Any meaningful change will have to result from initiatives authored by a few courageous decision-makers at the level of the locally centralized school district.

 

There has in fact been no significant improvement in the quality of education in Minnesota.  Only 59 percent of students met MCA math standards in 2016-17;  only 60 percent met MCA reading standards;  these were the same levels of achievement as those recorded in 2015-16.  For the same academic years in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), the percentage of students meeting math standards declined from 43.8 percent to 43.4 percent, while the percentages for reading achievement went up slightly, from 42.9 percent to 43.4 percent.  In MPS schools, fewer than twenty-five percent of African American, American Indian, Hmong, Somali, and Hispanic students meet state standards for math and reading.

 

We should take little solace in those measures of improvement cited by Nathan.  Four-year graduation rates have improved ever so slightly as “multiple pathways” have been forged for students to graduate at still very humble rates, in an environment of reduced academic rigor.   Over 20 percent of students across Minnesota still need remedial instruction when matriculating on college campuses;  for students graduating from the Minneapolis Public Schools, the figure is 33 percent.  Early childhood programs are worthy endeavors but will only prove successful in an atmosphere of change at the K-12 level.

 

Even students who trod across the stage to claim a diploma most often know nothing of traditional or contemporary Iraq or Afghanistan.  They most often cannot locate the Mediterranean Sea on a map. They typically have little sense of Newton’s terrestrial or Einstein’s cosmological physics. They most often have no sense of GDP or deficit or debt;  or the psychoanalytical, behaviorist, humanist, cognitive, or neural schools of psychology.   

 

To remedy this abysmal situation, we must implement knowledge-intensive, skill- replete curriculum with accompanying teacher retraining at the level of the locally centralized school district.  Elections at the state level will bring little change:  Candidates of the DFL are bound to their teacher union (Education Minnesota;  Minneapolis Federation of Teachers) supporters;  Republicans profess deference to local control.  So meaningful elections are for school board candidates;  next November, MPS Board of Education districts one, three, and five;  and two at-large seats are at stake.

 

Most charter schools are worse than the mainline public schools.  Joe Nathan and all of those professing an interest in education should give full attention to improving education at the level of the locally centralized school district.  And they should realize that local school board members, rather than state office holders, must make the needed changes for the impartation of excellent education, for which our precious young people have been waiting for at least four decades.