Minneapolis Department of Teaching and Learning Staff Should Be On Notice: Academic Achievement Levels Must Be Raised to Grade Level for Students of All Demographic Descriptors, or Your Employment Will Be Terminated

Staff members in the Department of Teaching and Learning must be put on notice that their jobs are on the line.  They must design and implement a new strategy for promoting academic achievement for students of all demographic descriptors, in accordance with my five-point plan for MPS transformation:  1) curricular overhaul;  2) teacher retraining;  3)  skill remediation (tutoring);  4)  family resource provision and referral and;  5) bureaucratic paring.  For staff in Teaching and Learning, focus on curriculum, teachers, and tutoring is paramount.

A review of the brutal facts will give readers firm evidence as to the ineffective of staff in the Department of Teaching and Learning for four consecutive academic years (we will soon have evidence indicating ineffectiveness for five academic years, as Chief of Research and Accountability Eric Moore gives the grim results for academic year 2017-2018.

 

Here are the results for the four consecutive years of reference:

 

Percentage of Minneapolis Public Schools Students Recording Grade Level Performance on MCAs:

Disaggregated for Ethnicity and Gender

 

Academic Years Ending in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017

                               

Math

 

                                                                2014             2015           2016           2017

 

African American 

 

                Male                                     22%               23%            21%            18%

                Female                                 22%               22%            21%            19%

 

Hispanic

 

Male                                     32%               33%             32%            29%

             Female                                 29%               30%            30%             28%

                             

Native American/ American Indian

 

Male                                     20%               16%            16%            18%

              Female                                 25%               22%            21%            17%

 

Asian

 

Male                                   44%                 47%            45%               45%

              Female                               51%                 53%            54%               50%

 

White/ Caucasian

 

Male                                   77%                 78%           77%                77%

              Female                               77%                 78%           78%                77%

 

All Students

 

Male                                     43%               44%           43%                41%

Female                                 44%               44%           44%                43%

 

 

          Reading

 

                                                                2014             2015           2016           2017

 

African American 

 

                Male                                     19%               19%            19%            18%

                Female                                 25%               24%            23%            25%

 

Hispanic

 

Male                                     22%               23%            25%            23%

             Female                                 25%               27%            28%            28%

                             

Native American/ American Indian

 

Male                                     18%               14%            15%            19%

             Female                                 24%               26%            26%            27%

 

Asian

 

Male                                   36%                 36%            39%               37%

             Female                               45%                 44%            51%               45%

 

White/ Caucasian

 

Male                                   75%                 74%           74%                75%

              Female                               81%                 80%           80%                81%

 

All Students

 

Male                                     39%               39%           40%                40%

Female                                 45%               45%           46%                47%

 

Superintendent Ed Graff has astutely overseen a reduction in Department of Teaching and Learning staff members in from 52 in autumn 2016, to 38 members in January 2018, to just 30 members by august 2018.  Of those 30 staff members, twenty-four (24) have major responsibility for boosting academic achievement.

 

The following twenty-four (24) people should now be fast about articulating a program for curricular overhaul, teacher training, and skill remediation (tutoring) with the capability of raising academic achievement for students of all demographic descriptors to grade level or beyond:

 

Cecilia Saddler, Deputy Chief of Academics, Leadership, and Learning 

Tommie Casey, AVID Program Manager

Christen Lish, K-8 AVID Coordinator

Paula Kilian, 6-12 AVID Coordinator

Jessica Driscoll, K-5 Literacy DPF, Network

 

Julie Tangeman, K-5 Literacy /

Marium Toure', K-5 Math DPF

Mary Lambrecht, K-5 Math DPF, Network

Natasha Parker, K-5 Math TOSA

Sara Naegeli, K-5 Literacy DPF

 

Ashley Krohn, K-12 Library and Media Information

Kimberly Henscheid, SSPA

Nora Schull, K-12 Arts DPF

Sarah Loch, K-12 Health/Physical Education DPF

Ted Hansen, Fine Arts TOSA

 

Chris Jones, 6-12 Math TOSA/Network

Chris Wernimont, 6-12 Math DPF

Hamdi Ahmed, 6-12 Literacy TOSA/Network

Hibaq Mohamed, 6-12 Literacy DPF

Jennifer Rose, K-12 Science DPF

 

Katie Stephens, 6-12 Literacy DPF/Network

Lisa Purcell, K-12 Social Studies DPF

Christina Ramsey, K-8 Talent Development / Advanced Academics

Kelly McQuillan, 9-12 Talent Development /Advanced Academics

 

Another year of failure should induce the expulsion of all of these staff members from their current positions.

Toward An Assessment of Academic Year 2017-2018 at the Minneapolis Public Schools

Academic year 2017-2018 was the second in the tenure of Superintendent Ed Graff, whose employment with the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) began on 1 July 2016.  During two years as superintendent, Graff has done a superlative job in reducing the tremendous bureaucratic burden that previous administrations have inflicted upon Minneapolis students, teachers, and community members.  When Graff assumed office, there had been a faux reduction of the bureaucracy at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) under Interim Superintendent Michael Goar;  under budgetary exigencies, Goar had wielded an unsophisticated budgetary hatchet in paring Davis Center staff from well over 600 Davis Center staff members to five hundred fifty-five (555).

               

In the first months of the Graff tenure, figures that I accumulated indicated that the bureaucratic bloat had recurred:  The number of Davis Center staff members grew back like insidious weeds in a garden, to six hundred fifty-one (651).  But from that point on, Graff began a persistent regimen of eliminating extraneous positions and unproductive staff members, so that at the present time, on the cusp of academic year 2018-2019, staff composition at the Davis Center is just four hundred twenty-seven (427), a remarkable 34% reduction.

 

This is an extraordinary accomplishment. 

 

When I commented to an MPS equipment and building maintenance employee that I was impressed at the time of the Goar reductions, his reply was that yeah, but others have tried and ultimately failed:  Special interests reassert themselves and the bloat always resumes.  And, indeed, for a while that seemed to be the case in the early Graff tenure;  but when he got serious about Davis Center staff reductions, his commitment was genuine and fervid.  Many people know of this accomplishment and have expressed their admiration, so that Graff has received a bevy of positive  reinforcement for this major achievement, especially in a budget that had produced a $33 million deficit, in an administration that is going to voters with dual referenda issues in November 2018.

 

But student achievement levels have been essentially flat.  For key demographic groups, particularly African American and American Indian males, academic performance has declined.

 

Thus, Ed Graff;  Teaching and Learning Department head Cecilia Saddler;  Associate Superintendents Ron Wagner, Brian Zambreno, and Carla Steinbach;  and elementary and secondary school leaders at the Davis Center and school sites must now show how they are going to articulate a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum, delivered in logical grade by grade sequence to students of all demographic descriptors.  They must detail how they are going to retrain teachers capable of delivering such as curriculum.  They will have to explain how they are going to design and implement a program of skill remediation (tutoring) for struggling learners.  They have the responsibility to present a comprehensive plan for reaching out to the families of students struggling with challenges of poverty and functionality.  And Graff must continue to pare and rationalize the central staff bureaucracy so as to capture some of the resources necessary to implement the other four programmatic features for the overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

In the articles to appear on this blog, you will read and examine sequentially the information and data pertinent to the lamentable MPS student academic achievement record;  the wretched performance of the Office of Black Male Achievement and Department of Indian Education;  the paring of positions at the Department of Teaching and Learning, and thus the implied pressure that staff members in that Department should be feeling to design a viable academic program;  and the terrible achievement levels of students at schools for which the associate superintendents have responsibility.  You will be able to read a full review of my five-point program for overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools, so that MPS becomes a model for other locally centralized school districts;  and you will be given information for examination of prospects for moving toward that model in academic year 2018-2019.

 

We are approaching important temporal junctures in the K-12 Revolution.


Read all of my articles with great care.


The time is now.


The revolution is in motion and shall proceed relentlessly.

Minnesota Department of Education 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.

Minnesota Department of Education Announcement of 2017-2018 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment Results

A Note to My Readers:

 

Yesterday, Thursday, 30 August, the Minnesota Department of Education announced yet another dismal showing of the state’s students on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs).  In a looming article I will remind you why we get these results year after year.

 

For now, examine carefully the data revealing the wretched academic performance of students in Minnesota:

 

Proficiency in Reading and Math for Minnesota Public School Students

 

2016-2017            2017-2018

 

Reading                    60%                        60%

 

Math                         59%                        57%

 

Proficiency in Reading and Math for Minneapolis Public School (MPS) Students

 

 

2016-2017            2017-2018

 

Reading                    43%                        45%

 

Math                         42%                        42%

 

Proficiency in Reading and Math for St. Paul Public School (MPS) Students

 

2016-2017            2017-2018

 

Reading                     38%        38%

     (37.8%)  (38.4%)

 

Math                          35%        33%

 

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%

 

Note that the above figures reveal a thirty-five (35) percentage point gap between African American and white students for reading and a thirty-eight (38) percentage point gap for math.  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).

 

A previously touted charter school, Hiawatha Academy, must face the bracing news revealed by the following  record:

 

Proficiency in Reading and Math for Students at Hiawatha Academy

 

2016-2017            2017-2018

 

Reading                     39%                    31%

 

Math                           42%                   34%