The Sea of Corruption That Is the Minnesota Department of Education
Historical Context
The islands that are locally centralized school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) are surrounded by a sea of corruption that vitiates preK-12 public education throughout the state and makes imperative that on one of these islands an edifying structure for delivery of educational excellence be built.
The appointment of a commissioner of education in Minnesota is highly political, with the selection occurring at the behest of the governor. With one exception in recent memory, Republican appointees tend to be less activist; they have no ties to Education Minnesota, the state teachers union, so they are not tainted by that association, but inasmuch as Republicans lean toward local control, nothing in the way of very assertive policy typically occurs during Republic administrations. By contrast Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) administrations are heavily beholden to Education Minnesota as a key supportive lobby and campaign funder and enact policy consonant with teacher union positions.
A major exception to the rule of Republican passivity on education policy came during the Tim Pawlenty administration (2002-2010), the first part of which his commissioner of education was Cheri Pierson Yecke. These were the days in which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was launched, Minnesota State Standards were written, and the Minneapolis Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) were formulated. The standards and the assessments were in accord with NCLB strictures; for the next half-decade, a harsh light shone on locally centralized school districts as disaggregated data indicated massive failure on the part of districts throughout the state to impart even basic skills in reading, mathematics, and science to students, especially those on free and reduced price lunch and bearing the burden of historical abuse.
As forces of both the political left and right went to work to terminate NCLB, pressures mounted on Yecke and forced her exit. In 2016, the Every Student Succeed Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB; by this time, Mark Dayton’s administration (2010-2018) that included education commissioner Brenda Cassellius had been in office for six years and seized on waiver opportunities offered by the Obama administration to undo much of what had been put in place under No Child Left Behind. A waiver produced a Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS) that relegated the MCAs to just one of a number of other measures (including graduation rates and incremental academic improvement) used to judge school performance. Then within the last two years of the Dayton-Cassellius administration, the Minnesota Department of Education announced its new North Star Accountability System.
During the Dayton Cassellius years, administration of MCAs continued each spring (typically in April), fulfilling the continuing mandate under ESSA that objective assessment be part of school accountability. But the 9th grade writing test was eliminated and academic proficiency as indicated by the 10th grade reading and 11th grade mathematics MCAs was no longer a requirement for graduation. This created a climate in which the MCAs as assessment tools were vitiated and the opt-out movement could ensue. The anti-assessment advocates in Education Minnesota and local affiliates such as the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers had had their way.
The advent of the North Star Accountability System (NSAS) serves as an example of the cynicism and corruption that invests the Minnesota Department of Education.
I detail the North Star Accountability System as presented by Michael Diedrich to the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect; this series of articles provides the fundamentals of that system and then proceeds to analysis that uncovers the fraud.
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