The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) is so chronically ineffective that the worry cast with considerable frequency by Katherine Kersten with regard to mandates issued by the MDE are unwarranted. Kersten especially worries abidingly that academic standards issues are too liberal (as in”woke”), as if those standards are ever taught by teachers in systems such as tht eh Minneapolis Public Schools.
Those standards are not taught by the teachers of the Minneapolis
Public Schools, so Ms Kersten can quit fretting.
Take as indication of MDE ineffectiveness a Minnesota State Office
of Legislative Auditor’s (OLA) report issued in 2023, a review
of MDE oversight of four programs: American Indian Education (AIE), Achievement
and Integration (A&I), World’s Best Workforce (WBWF), and Regional Centers
of Excellence (RCE). WBWF legislation in
Minnesota was passed in 2013 and A&I was given that appellation and updated
in the same year. These programs
anticipated federal Every Student
Succeeds Act (ESSA) legislation then under development
and passed in Congress in 2015.
WBWF programs purportedly have the five-fold goal of
closing the achievement gap, readying
all students for school as kindergarteners, promoting
grade-level literacy for all third-grade students,
preparing all high school graduates for career or
college, and sending all high school students forth to
graduation. Similarly,
A&I goals are to reduce academic disparities, pursue racial and economic
integration, increase student academic achievement,
and increase equitable educational
opportunities. None
of the programs under WBWF and A&I have achieved their aims and have no capacity
to do so. These programs serve only to
meet the legalistic requirements of ESSA and the
state response to ESSA known as the North Star
Accountability System.
Minnesota school districts submit annual reports to
MDE concerning programming for WBWF
and A&I, but none of the programs are effective in
increasing student proficiency for those lagging
below grade level, typically serving only a fraction
of the “protected groups” (African American/Black,
Hispanic/Latino, American Indian/Indigenous students,
and those receiving free/reduced price lunch)
targeted for increased proficiency. Further, as the OLA report conveys, MDE does
little besides
receiving the reports and reporting in turn to the
Legislature: no follow-up in terms of investigating
program effectiveness ever occurs.
As to AIE, state legislation and MDE implementation is
also ineffective. The legislation,
passed
in 2021, serves the aim of closing the achievement gap
“between American Indian students and their
more advantaged peers.” In this case, MDE is given an explicit
statutory responsibility to develop a
strategic plan for addressing the achievement gap, and
to consult with the American Indian
community, evaluate the state of American Indian
education in Minnesota, approve pertinent district
and charter school plans, assist districts and charter
schools in meeting goals, and approve
preparation programs for teachers of American Indian
language and culture. The OLA report finds
that MDE has not met most of these statutory
responsibilities.
The OLA report, reflecting negatively on the efficacy
of WBWF, A&I, and AIE programs and
MDE oversight, is more favorable to the Regional
Centers of Excellence (RCE). But the
evidence cited
in offering the positive comments is very thin. The
success cited involved just 20 percent of schools
served. Although
RCE staff members are not formally employed by the state of Minnesota, most of
those involved in addressing academic proficiency have
been teachers certified and operating within
the same system that has produced such wretched
proficiency rates (at the time the report was issued, just 46% in reading and
53% in mathematics for white non-Hispanic students, with achievement gaps of
37, 30, and 29 percentage points between non-Hispanic white students and their
American Indian, African American, and Hispanic peers respectively).
There are only 57 total staff members at the six RCEs
(located in Sartell [11 staff members],
Mountain Iron [10], Thief River Falls [10], Rochester
[15], Marshall [9], and Fergus Falls [6]; the
Minneapolis Public Schools and St Paul Public Schools
supposedly receive direct MDE support similar
to that provided by the RCEs. There are over 2,100 traditional and charter
schools in Minnesota with
a total of 843,404 students. Considering that RCE staff members total only
57, this means that there is
one staff member for every 37 schools and for every
14,797 students. Given the establishment
qualifications of RCE staff members and those high
ratios, the notion that RCES can address lagging
student proficiency rates in Minnesota is
preposterous.
No federal or state level bureaucracy will ever result
in knowledge-intensive, skill-replete
curriculum or improve teaching quality in the school
districts of Minnesota and throughout the United
States. Because
of our mania for local control, only a locally centralized school district
could
superintend the needed overhaul. My own efforts are to induce the requisite
transformation in the
Minneapolis Public Schools.
And any official in that school district, or at the
Minnesota Department of Education, who
would like to engage me in a formally refereed debate
in a public forum regarding the analysis made
above, know that I stand ready at any time to have
that debate.
I do not expect school district or MDE officials to
engage me in that debate; they will not
be eager for me further to expose their incompetence.
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