MPS Student Academic Proficiency Rates as Measured by Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA) Results for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019
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Math 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
African 23% 19% 19% 16% 17% 18%
American
American 23% 19% 19% 16% 17% 18%
Indian
Hispanic 31% 32% 31% 29% 26% 25%
Asian 48% 50% 50% 44% 46% 47%
White 77% 78% 78% 77% 77% 75%
Free/ 26% 26% 25% 24% 22% 20%
Reduced
All 44% 44% 44% 42% 42% 42%
Reading 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
African 22% 21% 21% 21% 21% 23%
American
American 21% 20% 21% 22% 23% 25%
Indian
Hispanic 23% 25% 26% 26% 27% 29%
3
Asian 41% 40% 45% 38% 44% 50%
White 78% 77% 77% 78% 80% 78%
Free/ 23% 23% 23% 25% 25% 25%
Reduced
All 42% 42% 43% 43% 45% 47%
Science 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
African 11% 15% 13% 11% 10% 11%
American
American 14% 16% 13% 16% 13% 17%
Indian
Hispanic 17% 18% 21% 19% 17% 16%
Asian 31% 35% 42% 31% 34% 40%
White 71% 75% 71% 70% 71% 70%
Free/ 14% 15% 17% 16% 15% 14%
Reduced
All 33% 36% 35% 34% 34% 36%
Also hold firm to the incompetence demonstrated by graduation rates:
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Percentage of Students Graduating
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Student
Category
African 44.8% 47.8% 52.8% 59.5% 56.9% 61.7%
American
4
American 38.1% 25.6% 36.3% 37.4% 29.8% 37.8.%
Indian
Asian 69.7% 78.8% 83.3% 85.6% 82.5% 87.1%
Hispanic 42.8% 44.5% 57.6% 50.6% 56.7% 57.1%
White 75.8% 77.4% 82.5% 85.1% 86.0% 86.7%
Free/ 47.4% 49.7% 56.8% 56.9% 56.7% 61.4%
Reduced
Lunch
Homeless 26.1% 26.1% 37.3% 35.7% 40.1% 37.8%
Highly
Mobile
Advanced 85.6% 86.7% 90.4% 89.3% 83.3% 90.8%
Learner
Female 60.3% 62.1% 69.0% 71.7% 69.3% 71.8%
Male 51.9% 55.6% 61.3% 63.0% 63.1% 66.6%
All 56.1% 58.8% 65.1% 67.3% 66.0% 69.2%
Students
However bad you may think education is in the Minneapolis Public Schools, the situation is much worse than your perception, and the dilemmas that have gotten the most attention do not represent the gravest vexations of the district.
The problems have little to do with the Comprehensive District Design (CDD), transparency, culturally responsive curriculum, lack of community input, or any of the other shibboleths mumbled by ill-informed critics.
The actual problems center on curriculum and teaching.
Students at grades preK-5 (elementary schools) learn a modicum of reading and arithmetic but little else. Substantive and comprehensive instruction in natural science, the social sciences, quality literature, and English usage is absent. Knowledge imparted as to multiple genres and world traditions in music and visual art is slight. Students graduate from grade 5 having little grasp of economics, government, American history, world history, biology, or quality literature across ethnicity and world traditions. They have gained little introduction to the natural sciences of biology, chemistry, or physics--- with no sense of the origin of the universe, the evolution of plant and animal life on earth, human origin and dispersal, the formation and diversity of ecosystems, the defining qualities and importance of natural elements, and the fundamentals of velocity, mass, energy, Newtonian laws of motion, and Einsteinian theories of the physics of the cosmos.
Substantive education is little better at the middle school (grades 6-8) level. Students progress a bit in mathematics, gaining some knowledge of algebra and geometry, but if they ever gained fundamental arithmetic skills, these atrophy; lack of knowledge of multiplication tables is the rule, not the exception. Students advance little in other academic subjects. They may dabble in a foreign language and gain some vocational skills, but they move on to high school almost as ignorant of biology, chemistry, physics, government, American history, world history, economics, quality world and ethnic literature, and the fine arts as when they entered middle school.
Instruction at high schools is mediocre at the median, rarely excellent, and frequently abominable. Substantive education is lacking, except in Advanced Placement courses, and only a few teachers possess the knowledge base necessary to render quality college preparatory instruction, so that students scoring the 4 or 5 demanded by most colleges and universities are very few. Administrators at the Minneapolis Public Schools and the other schools of Minnesota make a big show of administering the ACT to all students, but they do not prepare them for the test. Across the high schools of the district, the typical ACT median is 16, which barely indicates middle school much less college readiness. Ask a young person from an impoverished and challenged familial situation what she or he scored on the ACT, and the reply is typically “13”--- or worse. Administrators and teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools deliver an acceptable education to no student, of any demographic descriptor; the education rendered to students experiencing multiple life challenges of historical and current societal abuse is morally negligent and vulnerable to litigious action.
One-third of the less than seventy percent of students managing to graduate and go forth to college matriculation require remedial courses. No student is truly well-prepared by the schools of the district. Any acceptable level of college preparation occurs due to the human rarity of herculean personal interest and self-education through extracurricular reading and study; or, as in the case of many students from affluent families, through private tutorial instruction.
Teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools have slim knowledge bases. Elementary school teachers have little subject area knowledge; many are math-phobic and do little substantive reading on their own time. Middle and high school teachers tend to have majors in a specific academic discipline, but few have master’s degrees in the key academic fields of mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, political science, history, economics, or literature: They are not scholars and their academic interest is typically limited in the extreme. In class they show too many videos, give too many “free days,” assign too many frivolous and inefficient projects, and relegate too much student activity to group rather than individual academic endeavor.
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Excellent education is a matter of excellent teachers imparting broad and deep knowledge and skill sets in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts to students of all demographic descriptors; such curriculum is so comprehensive as to be seamlessly and necessarily culturally responsive.
An excellent teacher is a professional of broad and deep knowledge with the pedagogical ability to impart that knowledge to students of all demographic descriptors.
Until we redesign curriculum for knowledge intensity and train teachers capable of imparting such a curriculum, utterance of the typical buzz words and activity of that erratic and episodic sort generated by such distractions as the Comprehensive District Design constitute silly sound and futile fury.
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Not one--- not a single person currently on staff at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway--- is capable of designing knowledge-intensive, logically sequenced curriculum. Superintendent Ed Graff; Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing; Associate Superintendents Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, and Brian Zambreno; the 22 staff members of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Department of Teaching and Learning; the Office of Black Male Student Director Michael Walker; and Department of Indian Education Director Jennifer Simon, and the members of the MPS Board of Education academically abuse the district’s students every day their feet hit the ground.
I have detailed the specific culpability of this intellectually corrupt group in my 595-page book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect, now in circulation physically and available to readers of my blog who scroll back to blog entries for March 2019-2020.
I have explained the corrupt national and state context in which officials at the Minneapolis Public Schools dwell. The demise of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ineffective bromides of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and the cynical ruse that is the Minnesota State Department of Education’s North Star Accountability System indicate that change in pre-kindergarten and K-12 education will never in the United States, with citizen mantras of local control, emanate from government at the national and state levels. Change at the local level then becomes the paramount goal for proponents of change, making imperative that we jettison inept staff members now embodied by Graff, Fearing, Harris-Berry, Ray, Wagner, Zambreno, Walker, Simon, staff members at MPS Department of Teaching and Learning; and that we oust the current members of the MPS Board of Education.
Further corrupting the context in which these errant decision makers and implementers dwell are corrupt officials at institutions such as the University of Minnesota (UM), Hamline, Augsburg, St. Thomas, and UM Mankato. Teacher training mills at these institutions are cash cows that generously fill the coffers of the ever-financially needy institutions of post-secondary education in the United States.
Are these and the other academic abusers of our children clueless, in denial, or outright corrupt?
They live their lives in one or more of those conditions, yielding the same result whatever the combination: an abysmally educated citizenry and ongoing suffering for families living at the urban core.
Given the inefficacy of national and state officials, the intellectually corrupt ideology and vacuous pedagogy inflicted upon prospective public school teachers and administrators by education professors becomes the chief culprit in the system that denies a knowledge-intensive education to our students and the citizens they become. University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel, her predecessors, and all decision-makers at UM either look the other way or are ignorant of the abuse heaped on those who train under education professors in the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). And since this is the case, post-secondary administrators and the education professors that they tolerate become the core culprits responsible for the abysmal level of education inflicted on our students by the Minneapolis Public Schools and other locally centralized school districts.
The corrupt national, state, and post-secondary institutional context in which locally centralized school systems dwell make imperative that we end the tenures of Ed Graff, Aimee Fearing, Shawn Harris-Berry, LaShawn Ray, Ron Wagner, Brian Zambreno, Michael Walker, Jennifer Simon, staff at Teaching and Learning, and the current members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.
We must be strategic in working to oust such inept officials.
This, though, will require the persistent attention of a public that tends toward ephemeral commitments and errant judgment as to the nature of the dilemma in public education. Limited attention spans have been notable even in the cases of those who have flashed on the scene and then withdrawn into their private worlds or other endeavors:
Sandy Vargas, erstwhile head of the Minneapolis Foundation, was going to RESET education; R. T. Rybak was going to atone for 12 yers of neglect of public education as mayor by leading Generation Next toward solutions for the public education quandary but departed for a better paying job at the Minneapolis Foundation.
Former members of the MPS Board of Education Carla Bates, Josh Reimnitz, and--- especially--- Tracine Asberry showed great promise in driving to the core of the vexations at the Minneapolis Public Schools--- but are now nowhere to be seen.
Many local media hosts and journalists give evidence of being ignorant, in denial, or outright corrupt in their failure to expose the abysmal level of education at the Minneapolis Public Schools; this is true of Star Tribune editorial chief Scott Gillespie and commentary editor Doug Tice.
Add also Minneapolis Urban League President/CEO Steve Belton and gadfly activist at-large Nekima Levy-Armstrong to the list of sell-outs and inept officials who sustain the wretched quality of education at the Minneapolis Public Schools;
Steve Belton is a blow-hard who has done nothing to address the most vexing dilemma of the North Minneapolis African American Community in which he is embedded and earns a six-figure salary:
The Minneapolis Urban League has disbanded its failed schools and is never a presence at meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools. One of the organization’s chief foci should be K-12 education, but under the particularly bellicose but incompetent Belton the league remains silent.
Nekima Levy-Armstrong (formerly Levy-Pounds) is an erratic putative activist who puts in short stints at professional posts and organizations, her only consistent traits being those indicating propensities to proclaim loudly and accomplish little. Levy-Armstrong is largely responsible for the academically lightweight Ed Graff becoming superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools. She led a group protesting the likely dubbing of Michael Goar to be superintendent, inducing the second-round of a lamentable two-phase process that led to a 6-3 vote for Graff. After that dubious accomplishment, Levy-Armstrong has been absent from most meetings of the MPS Board of Education and other district congregations. And even if she had showed anything but her typical erratic inconsistency, she has given little evidence of comprehending the nature of excellent education so vital to young people living at the urban core.
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Excellent education is the provision of a knowledge intensive, skill-replete curriculum in the liberal, technological, and vocational arts by excellent teachers, delivered in grade by grade sequence throughout the preK-12 years. As a group, members of MFT59 do not believe in such a knowledge-focused education, and the nature of their training does not prepare them to deliver such an education.
Teacher training is the root of the teacher quality problem at the Minneapolis Public Schools
Teachers at the K-5 level typically receive a B. A. in Elementary Education, the weakest degree on any any college or university campus. They are then encouraged by the step and lane system to secure an M. A. in Elementary Education, for which they take very similar courses, also the least challenging of any master’s degree program. Only a few teachers at the K-5 level receive doctorates; all of those doctorates received by K-5 teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) are in education.
Teachers at the grades 6-8 and 9-12 levels do often receive a B. A. or B. S. in fields other than education, but they almost always receive master’s degrees in education rather than in subject areas pertinent to the fields in which they teach. Only a few teachers at grades 6-8 and 9-12 receive doctorates. Among teachers at grades 6-8 in the Minneapolis Public Schools, none hold a Ph. D. in a field other than education. Among MPS teachers at grades 9-12, only three hold a Ph. D in a field other than education.
One of the two reasons that students graduate from the Minneapolis Public Schools with so little knowledge in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, psychology, literature, English composition, music, and visual art is because curriculum is mostly absent at the K-5 level and is weak at grades 6-8 and 9-12, except for Advanced Placement courses at the 9-12 level (typically taken at grades 11 and 12).
The other reason for the knowledge deficiency of students and graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools is that very few teachers at grades K-5 have much subject area knowledge at all. At grades 6-8 and 9-12, very few teachers are genuine masters of their fields. Very few teachers at these levels have the ability to teach Advanced Placement courses.
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Teachers are thus philosophically corrupted by professors of education, and their potential as scholars is thwarted by the phenomenon of degrees in education having since the 1990s supplanted those in academic subject areas.
Teachers enter classrooms unprepared to impart the logically sequenced preK-12 knowledge and skill sets that comprise an excellent education. They seek the comfort of schools with student populations that are wealthy and unscarred by history. Any given teacher is likely to have very little understanding, despite all the buzz about culturally relevant curriculum and cultural competency, of students of African American, Latino-Latina, Somali, or Hmong provenance.
Teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools are incompetent across an astonishing array of indicators.
The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers protects and promotes such incompetence.
Thus, the MFT is the major obstacle to the impartation of excellent education to students of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Add MFT President Michelle Wiese and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers to the list of culprits in maintaining the abysmal level of K-12 education at the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>>
In the MPS central offices at the Davis Center (1250 West Broadway), the culprits are
Superintendent Ed Graff
Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing
Associate Superintnedent Shawn Harris-Berry
Associate Superintendent LaShawn Ray
Associate Superintendent Ron Wagner
Associate Superintendent Brian Zambreno
The 22 staff members of the Department of Teaching and Learning
Office of Black Male Student Director Michael Walker and his staff members
Department of Indian Education Director Jennifer Simon and her staff members
On the MPS Board of Education, in order of offensiveness there are
District 4 Member Bob Walser
District 5 Member Nelson Inz
District 2 Member KerryJo Felder
At-Large Member Kim Ellison
District 1 Member Jenny Arneson
At-Large Member Kim Caprini
District 4 Member ira Jourdain
District 3 Member Siad Ali
At-Large Member Josh Pauly
At the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) there are
MFT President Michelle Wiess
Rank and file members
At the Minnesota Department of Education there have been and are those responsible for such corrupt pretensions as the North Star Accountability System and World’s Best Workforce, including
Former Commissioner Brenda Cassellius
Current Commissioner Mary Cathryn Ricker
All MDE staff members who have colluded with these intellectually corrupt officials, including prominently Michael Dietrich
Decision makers and implementers dwell at institutions such as the University of Minnesota (UM), Hamline, Augsburg, St. Thomas, and UM Mankato, including
University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel
The presidents and administrative decision-makers the other given institutions
Staff Members and Education professors in the UM College of Education and Human Development
(CEHD)
Key Members of the Private and Public Sectors in Minneapolis, including
Sandy Vargas, erstwhile head of the Minneapolis Foundation, she who was going to RESET education
R. T. Rybak, who was going to atone for 12 yers of neglect of public education as mayor by leading Generation Next toward solutions for the public education quandary but departed for a better paying job at the Minneapolis Foundation.
Former members of the MPS Board of Education, who showed great promise in driving to the core of the vexations at the Minneapolis Public Schools--- but are now nowhere to be seen
Carla Bates
Josh Reimnitz
Tracine Asberry
Former members of the MPS Board of Education who issues bombastic proclamations but has no program and no sustained commitment in any positon he assumes:
Don Samuels
Members of the Public and Press Who Neglect the Responsibilities of Citizenship or give Evidence of Intellectual and Moral Corruption, including
Star Tribune Editorial Board Scott Gillespie
Star Tribune Commentary Pages Editor Doug Tice
That Segment of the General Public That got all worked up about the Comprensive District Design (CDD) but has n ow disappeared into the woodwork
Ineffective Putative Activists and Incompetent Heads of Key Organizations
Minneapolis Urban League President/CEO Steve Belton
Erstwhile law professor, NAACP President, and ineffective gadfly Nekima Levy-Armstrong
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