Sep 1, 2018

Minnesota Department of Education Incompetence and Dismal Prospects for the North Star Accountability System Maximize Already Favorable Conditions for the K-12 Revolution


The K-12 Revolution is in rapid motion, quickly and incessantly advancing the cause of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education in the meaningful unit of delivery in the United States:  the locally centralized school district.


 

The very incompetence that I witness at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) makes the education establishment vulnerable to my highly effective combination of activities in the form of teaching, research, and multimedia articulation of principles.

 

At the convention of an MPS Board of Education Committee of the Whole last Tuesday, 28 August, representatives Michael Diedrich and Dennis Duffy from the MDE came and presented a summary of the new North Star Accountability System, devised to meet the strictures of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) passed by the United States Congress in 2016. 

 

Perhaps you’d be interested in this review of the following tortured history:

 

The Every Student Succeeds Act replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which had prevailed since 2002.  Both ESSA and NCLB were passed in fulfillment of the provisions, and as the current versions, of another law, the Elementary and Secondary School Act of 1968, the purpose of which was to achieve educational equity by providing resources to schools with large percentages of students from families of low income.  The leading indicator for low income for public school students is now qualification for free or reduced price lunch.  After a second attempt, the Minnesota Department of Education received a waiver from NCLB in 2015, instituting a Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS) that, as is the case with the new North Star system, took into account factors that included Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) scores, upon which the MDE relied heavily, but also gave considerable weight to graduation rates and improvement over time.  With the passage of ESSA, the requirements of that law superseded those of NCLB and necessitated new plans from state departments of education that had received waivers.

 

Commissioner Brenda Cassellius and staff at MDE present the new system as focusing on assistance to struggling schools, rather than on punitive measures;  and as taking into account more than just scores on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs).  The latter are included and actually are powerfully indicative of the need for assistance to struggling schools, but this new system also gives considerable weight to improvement over time, and at the high school level to graduation rates.

 

Terrible news came out on Thursday (30 August) in the form of MCA results for spring 2018.  For all of Minnesota, proficiency rates remained flat for reading, with 60% of students in the state demonstrating proficiency in reading;  worse, math proficiency declined from 59% in academic year 2016-2017 to 57% in 2017-2018.  The following table reveals a black-white gap of 35 percentage points in reading and 38 percentage points in math:

 

Proficiency in Reading and Math for Minnesota Public School Students, by Racial Groups

 

     2017-2018

 

                           Reading           Math                                  

 

African

American              34%              28%

 

American               35%             29%

Indian

 

Hispanic/                38%             33%

Latino

Hispanic/                38%             33%

Latino

 

Pacific                      48%             40%

islander/

Hawaiian

 

Asian                        55%             56%


Two or                     56%             50%

more

races

 

White                      69%             66%

 

All Students           60%             57%

 

In MPS schools, overall student proficiency in reading rose slightly, from 43% in 2016-2017 to 45% in 2017-2018;  but math proficiency was flat, remaining at 42 percent (42%).

 

In the St. Paul Public Schools, the gap for reading remained constant for 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 at fifty (50) percentage points and for math increased from forty-five (45) to forty-nine (49).  Overall proficiency rates were even lower than those for MPS, flat at 38% in reading and actually declining for math from 35% in 2016-2017 to 33% in 2017-2018.

 

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A review of the deeper history of this sordid tale is revelatory:

 

During the mid-1990s, three outside reviewers found the portfolio-based MDE Profile of Learning accountability system lacking in objective legitimacy, so that the quest for a new system went forward.  During the late 1990s and the early years of the new century and millennium, students had to take a Minnesota Basic Skills Test (MBST), which measured no more than middle school math competency, in order to graduate.  Despite the low skill level needed to indicate achievement measured on this high school graduation test, students failed in droves, causing much embarrassment, consternation, and dissembling by Education Minnesota and Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) unions and others in the education establishment.

 

But the push for higher standards was on, and so they came with the federal No Child Left Behind Act (2002), Minnesota State Academic Standards (2004), and objective measurement for the latter in the form of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs).  The MCAs required annual testing in math and reading for students at grades 3-8;  science testing at select years;  and a writing proficiency exam (grade 9) and reading MCA (grade 10) during high school, with an indication of proficiency on these tests necessary for graduation.  There was also a mathematics MCA taken at grade 11, but the demonstration of proficiency as a graduation requirement was deferred for several years;  in the meantime, with brain-boggling silliness, the Minnesota Legislature mandated that the mathematics test nevertheless be taken by a student three times before then being excused from further attempts.  In what I deemed the “three strikes and you’re in” system, a student who had not demonstrated math competency could then stride across the graduation stage to claim a piece of paper called a diploma.

 

Under heavy pressure from their teacher union supporters, Mark Dayton and his designated MDE Commissioner Brenda Cassellius prevailed upon the then DFL- dominated Minnesota Legislature to jettison the grade 9 writing and grade 10 reading MCAs as graduation requirements;  thus, the much-feared mathematics test (the contents of which would draw yawns from students in Finland, Poland, Germany and East Asia) as a graduation requirement predictably never materialized.

 

Minnesota students still took the MCAs but the nixed graduation requirements and pejorative comments leveled at these objective assessments by Mark Dayton, a parrot for Education Minnesota and the MFT, overtime vitiated the MCAs as viable measures:  An opt-out movement led by the unions was embraced by enough parents to undercut the MCAs as dependable indicators for schools at which heavy percentages of students did not take these tests.  Then came the MDE waiver, followed by the end of NCLB and the inauguration of ESSA in 2016, and now in 2018 the North Star Accountability System, tied to ESSA requirements.

 

Under the North Star system, various Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs) will be offering support to schools whose proficiency rates designate them for either targeted or comprehensive support, the latter for the most academically challenged schools. 

 

But we have scant information as to exactly what assistance is to be offered, and we should have little faith that there will be many at these centers truly capable of rendering assistance.  The wretched record of MDE over the course of the last quarter of a century gives no reason to think that any system superintended by that department has the remotest chance of success.

 

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With the various actors in the education establishment now so vulnerable for this record of massive failure, the conditions are highly favorable for delivering my daily demonstration of the possibilities for knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education by students in the New Salem Educational Initiative;  and my multi-platform message for the overhaul of curriculum, thorough retraining of teachers capable of delivering such a curriculum;  academic enrichment and remedial assistance as appropriate;  outreach to families struggling with dilemmas of functionality and economy ;  and continued bureaucratic paring.

In the United States, with our mania for local control, meaningful change in K-12 education must come at the level of the locally centralized school district, achieved by people working at that level.

With my bevy of current activities and with the presentation of Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, I am exerting maximum pressure on the public servants at this level actually to serve the public, implement my plan for the impartation of grade level-specific knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum, and provide a model for making of this nation a democracy that we heretofore have only claimed to be.

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