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ESSA, the requirements of that law superseded those of NCLB and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.
