September 10,
2018
Dear Brenda,
A very Happy
Birthday to you, my friend.
I will always
be glad that we had a chance to meet and exchange views at the occasion of the
second round of the search for a Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public
Schools in the spring of 2016.
I am a good
listener and admire the concise dictum of Mao Zedong to “seek truth from facts.” Would that the great revolutionary had not
departed from his own good advice in launching the destructive Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) and the catastrophic Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution (1965- 1969 [phaase one/ 1969-1976 [phase two]). Because the advice is excellent.
In that
spirit, I did a one hundred eighty degree turn, highly unusual for my factually
driven, decisive self, on the matter of you candidacy.
The reasons
that I came out early against your candidacy are reasons that still abide:
You have been
a disaster as Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner (MDE). You could hardly be other, inasmuch as you
toil for a governor who has done a good number of things to make hippy dippy supporters
in the white liberal establishment cadre of supporters and funders of the
left-of-center Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party happy. But remember I am an activist seeking fundamental
change and have little regard for either DFL/ Democrats or Republicans,
both of which mainly do the bidding of lobbies and must hue to the lines of
those lobbies to gain elective office.
The Achilles
Heel of your own ability to devise good education policy has been teachers unions,
saliently Education Minnesota and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT). Those unions do what good unions do in
advocating for better wages and working conditions for their rank-and-file-members,
but they go further into nonsensical banter to claim to care about students,
who are their sacred responsibility, and the reason that they have jobs.
Dating back
to the 1990s, the teachers unions and those doing their bidding at the MDE
established a project-driven, education professor-corrupted approach to evaluation
laughably dubbed “Authentic Assessment” and inflicted upon the students of
Minnesota as the “Profile of Learning.” In
seeking to get this evaluation system in place, the unions were running scared
from the Minnesota Basic Skills Test (MBST), which indicated that hordes of
Minnesota students who sought to claim that piece of paper called a diploma
could not even demonstrate eighth grade competence in mathematics and
reading. Three outside reviewers found
the Profile of Learning approach to evaluating student academic progress
severely lacking. So the search was on
for another, genuinely authentic system of evaluating student progress.
In 2002 came
No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the most promising educational initiative of my
lifetime. The legislation set ambitious
goals of achievement that the education establishment was incapable of
attaining, so the push-back was tremendous from the center-left and (comparatively
few) hard-left Democrats beholden to the teachers unions; and from the center- right and hard-right Republicans
who had realized that NCLB was, oh yeah, a central government initiative that
demanded competence at the local level.
In Minnesota,
academic standards and the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) to
measure whether students were meeting those standards came into being during
2004-2005. Students at grades 3-8 were
to take annual MCAs in mathematics and reading;
high schoolers were to take a writing test in grade nine, a reading MCA
in grade 10, and a mathematics MCA in grade 11. But mathematics instruction in Minnesota (and
across the USA) is so abominable that everyone knew that students were not
prepared to be held to the results of that exam, so Minnesota legislators
ludicrously mandated that eleventh graders try three times on the mathematics
test but if they continued to fail could be given credit for effort and claim
their diploma anyway. The grade nine and
ten tests, though, were established as Graduation Standards.
Students in Singapore,
Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, and Finland would laugh and say, “How easy,” but
by the standards prevailing in the USA the MCAs were more challenging than had
been the MBST, so of course Minnesota students failed in droves. The disaggregated data was particularly
brutal as to how perniciously the education establishment was failing African America,
Latino/Latina, Native, Somali, and Hmong populations, and students on Free and
Reduced Price Lunch. So embarrassed even
more than as had been case during the MBST era, the teachers unions went to
work to bring the system down.
Mark Dayton
was elected governor in 2010 and you became his MDE commissioner. The two of you quickly went to work to nix
the grade nine and grade ten tests as graduations standards, and you applied
for a waiver from No Child Left Behind.
By the second try, you succeeded in attaining that waiver and thereafter
instituted the Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS), which finessed results
on the MCAs with telling indications of student failure by including other
measures, notably graduation rates and improvement in achievement over
time. This was a muddled method of
evaluating student performance that took NCLB-level pressure off the education
establishment, so your backers at Education Minnesota and the MFT had gained
some measure of relief from their incompetence.
…………………………………………………..
In that
context, the superintendent search of spring 2016 went forward and I
recommended energetically against your candidacy. I confronted you with questions concerning the
nixing of the graduation standards and the instituting of the MMRS; you responded with a brave but predictably unconvincing
defense.
But then came
my bracing surprise, as I sought truth from facts:
You, unlike
Ed Graff (who eventually prevailed over you to become superintendent in a 6-3
vote by the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education), had an
understanding of E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge approach. You told me that you favored
knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education over the smokescreen of putative “critical
thinking” and lifelong learning” espoused by low-life education professors and
inevitably muttered by the teachers whom they have corrupted. You understood the need for aggressive skill
remediation (tutoring). You knew that
merely to administer the ACT to all students has no value, in the absence of
rigorous training to meet the stringent academic requirements of that exam. You did not back away from my assertions
regarding the low level of teacher quality in the Minneapolis Public Schools
and throughout Minnesota. You knew (based
on your own experience living in the projects) that we must reach out to
families struggling with dilemmas of poverty and dysfunction. And you understood that we must pare the central
school district bureaucracy so as to direct our resources for curriculum
overhaul, teacher retraining, academic remediation, and family resource
provision and referral.
So I did the
most complete turn I have ever done. I
advocated for your election as the new superintendent. Your effectiveness would have been at that
level. Any effectiveness that you ever
achieve will be at that level.
But in the meantime
you returned to your work at the Minnesota Department of Education.
………………………………………………………………….
In 2016, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) superseded
No Child Left Behind and opened the
way for the kind of approach that you had already begun with the NCLB waiver
and the Multiple Measurement Rating System. To meet the particular requirements of ESSA,
you and your staff went to work refining MMRS as your work in progress, recently
rolled out in advanced draft form, producing the North Star Accountability
System. I have detailed Michael Diedrich’s
presentation of the new system at the MPS Board of Education meeting early in
this very month of September 2018.
The North
Star system is a mere extension of MMRS, proclaiming that assistance will be
forthcoming to struggling schools and districts from scattered Regional Centers
of Excellence (RCEs). Such assistance
will never be effective, for two reasons:
1) There is
not enough understanding of the constituent components of an excellent
education, nor is their enough talent to staff these RCEs;
2) the teachers unions and other forces within
the education establishment will always resist any meaningful change, and you
do not have the level or quality of staffing required to meet the well-funded and
politically potent resistance that the education establishment will mount.
………………………………………………………………………..
I would
recommend to you that you find lessons in what I deem the Corey Booker Effect and the Michelle
Rhee Debacle. Booker was a very promising mayor of Newark
but left before his work was done to seek higher office, from which he can
never induce the transformation that he could have brought about by persisting
at the local level. Rhee preposterously
sought change at the state level, waddling forth on stiletto heels and masked
with heavy makeup, hobnobbing with the elites so as to fulfill the expectations
of her South Korean parents.
The best
school systems in the world are centrally organized and demand continuity of
excellence throughout the nation. But with
our mania in the USA for local control, all change will occur at the level of
the locally centralized school district.
Change in just one district is monumentally difficult to achieve, but if
it ever happens in one district, that district becomes a model for systems
throughout Minnesota and the United States.
I have never
seen you at a meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education,
continuing to advocate for change where it matters, once your fling with the
district was curtailed. This has been
true, too, of former board members Carla Bates, Josh Reimnitz (Josh did make
one appearance), and Tracine Asberry (the latter, during her time as a member of
the board, was the best I have ever seen).
Notably, also, R. T. Rybak lost his putative enthusiasm for K-12 education
at Generation Next, once the Minneapolis Foundation offered more money.
If you are
truly sincere in wanting to change public education, I invite you to join me in
exerting pressure on Ed Graff and the members of the MPS Board of Education by
becoming active at the level of the Minneapolis Public Schools. Graff has been highly effective in reducing
the central bureaucratic burden, but his programmatic initiatives are woefully
insufficient even for defining an excellent education, much less for raising
achievement levels in mathematics and reading.
…………………………………………………………….
I know that
you care, my friend.
But do you
care enough?
If you do,
then you will commit yourself to the hard work in the trenches, rather than the
pretensions of the tower.
You never had
a chance, given the governor and the party for which you had to do bidding.
But as a
person, you are a gem.
Will you let
the gem that you are shine, burnishing that precious stone to glisten to
brightest potential?
Or will you persistent
in inefficacious proclamations from the tower, looking elsewhere when the
inhabitants of the realm ignore your declarations?
That is your decision,
on your birthday, and beyond.
……………………………………………………………………
For all of
your shortcomings, you are among the best intentioned that I have seen in my 47
years of work for the achievement of educational excellence for young people of
all demographic descriptors.
I love you
like a little sister.
May you be
richly blessed, and all good things come to you and your family.
With best
regards and greetings in
Love and Peace---
Gary
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