Article #2
The Tortured History Behind the
Every Student Succeeds Act
and the
North Star Accountability System
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 on 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.
Consider first of
this 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ESSA, the requirements of that law superseded those of NCLB and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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