Brenda Cassellius, Michael Diedrich, and the Minnesota Department of Education Are About to Be Hit with a Two-Megaton Intellectual Force

This evening at 6:00 PM, Brenda Cassellius and her aide Michael Diedrich are going to try to fool you one more time with a state-level program that they will assert, unlike past wretched failures, is really, really, really going to work this time.  The assertion will come at Minnesota Department of Education headquarters in Roseville.  The program upon which the assertions are going to be based is the North Star Accountability System (NSAS).

 

As background to the tawdry claims of Cassellius, Diedrich, and the MDE, understand that the origins of NSAS is traceable to the 1990s, when a movement for accountability in K-12 education gained steam.  In Minnesota, an attempt to avoid real assessment on the part of education professors, their acolytes in the state teachers union (which became Education Minnesota, to which such local affiliates as the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers give their allegiance), and indeed at the MDE, failed miserably under the scathing review of the Profile of Learning programmatic scam by three outside examiners.  This engendered the Minnesota Basic Skills Test (MBST), a middle school-level  assessment of mathematics and reading skills that droves of Minnesota high schoolers could not even pass in order to graduate.

 

Things got even worse, then, when the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law went into effect in 2002, calling for disaggregation of the data, fully revealing the incompetence of the education establishment (in their manifestations as locally centralized school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools), delivering in hard data the failure of Minnesota school districts to educate anyone very well and to impart a morally reprehensible quality of education to African American, Hispanic, Native American, Hmong, and Somali students. 

 

In Minnesota, the NCLB- required assessment took the form of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) at grades 3-8 and at grades 9 (writing), 10 (reading), and 11 (math).  The grade 9 writing and grade 10 reading assessments came with a proficiency requirement for graduation, against which the teachers unions fought hard.  Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party officials are all lackeys for Education Minnesota, the second largest lobbying group in the state (only the National Rifle Association [NRA] is more powerful);  thus, when Mark Dayton became governor in 2010 and tapped Cassellius as his education commissioner, the latter had to go to work first applying for a waiver from NCLB, then cooperating with the Minnesota Legislature to nix the grade 9 and 10 assessments as graduation requirements.

 

Jettisoning graduation requirements cleared the path for vitiation of the MCAs and the emergence of the opt-out movement.  Cassellius concomitantly superintended the development of the murky Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS), which mixed in consideration of graduation rates, attendance, and academic progress (as opposed to absolute results) into a system that only as a factor among many mentioned student performance on the MCAs.

 

When in 2016 the United States Congress voted in a new system under the Every Student Succeeds Act  (ESSA), Cassellius oversaw an update of MMRS now called the North Star Accountability System, which she and (top aide on this matter) Michael Diedrich are going to try to convince you is really, no fooling this time, going to work.  But what they are selling is just a touched-up version of MMRS, with new emphasis on Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs) staffed with MDE personnel or those acting at MDE behest;  RCE staff members are purportedly going to offer “comprehensive” assistance to those school districts deemed to have failed miserably and “targeted” assistance to those districts rated as having fallen short on one or more key measures (graduation rates, attendance, academic performance by English learners, or the MCAs).

 

This is all a scam. 

 

The RCES will not work for three reasons:

 

1) There will not be enough RCEs to serve all of the students who need remediation; 

 

2) there will not be enough academically astute personnel at the RCEs to render the needed remediation;  and

 

3) local school district teachers and administrators will be typically and variously inept or resistant in their response.

 

The K-12 Revolution must be waged at the level of the locally centralized school district in these less than United States, wherein a mania for local control abides.  The Revolution must be waged upon key programmatic initiatives to overhaul curriculum for logically sequenced knowledge intensity and thoroughly to retrain teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum.

 

I will be delivering this message this evening at the MDE meeting. 

 

I will deliver the message with two-megaton intellectual force.

 

Brenda Cassellius, Michael Diedrich, and the MDE should be on high alert.