Article #4
MDE 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ESSA, the requirements of that law superseded those of NCLB and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.
……………………………………………………………………
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.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
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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