Monthly Archives: March 2018

Minnesota’s Charter Schools Suspend Kids of Color, Too

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March 27, 2018

Linda Brown died on March 25 at age 75. As I read through memorials about her life and her role in the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, I was struck by this: 

In 1979 Linda Brown—who was now a mother with her own children in Topeka schools—became a plaintiff in a resurrected version of the Brown v. Board case that sued Topeka schools for not following through with desegregation.

Linda Brown; AP Photo

This 1979 lawsuit was not settled until 1993, when a judge finally approved a desegregation plan for the Topeka schools. I hadn’t realized before how powerful Brown was, nor how long she had fought for equal access to integrated, well resourced schools. 

I wonder what she would think of our charter school landscape today. In Minnesota, home of bipartisan school choice legislation, we are facing a significant but little acknowledged problem:

Students of color who attend racially and economically isolated charter schools are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white peers.

This problem has actually been widely acknowledged—when these students of color attend public schools. A March 18 article in the New York Times, by Erica L. Green, took a long look at discipline rates in Minnesota’s public schools, with a special emphasis on racial disparities in the Minneapolis Public Schools. “Why are Black Students Punished So Often?” the article’s headline asked, before pointing to Minnesota as a central case study.

Green’s article is on target. She uses data and anecdotal evidence to highlight the higher numbers of push outs and suspensions black and Native students receive in our public schools. “It is a reality that district leaders here have been grappling with for years: The Minneapolis school district suspends an inordinate number of black students compared with white ones, and it is struggling to figure out why,” Green writes, before dropping this statistic:

Last year, districtwide, black students were 41 percent of the overall student population, but made up 76 percent of the suspensions.

But what Green’s article does not cover at all is this: the highest school suspension and expulsion rates for students of color can often be found in the Twin Cities’ ever-expanding landscape of highly segregated charter schools.

In fact, some of the local charter school networks with the highest discipline rates have long enjoyed reputations as “beat the odds” schools that supposedly serve students of color better than the Minneapolis Public Schools.

First, a data dive overview.

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) collects statistics on student discipline rates (called incident reports) for all of Minnesota’s public and charter schools. Only suspensions, expulsions and exclusions (a shorter term expulsion, as I understand it) are included in the state’s discipline data.

The Minneapolis Public Schools also keeps track of student discipline incidents, thanks to a publicly accessible “data dashboard.” Unlike MDE’s more limited reporting, the Minneapolis schools provide a wealth of information. All discipline incidents are reported for every site in the MPS system, from the more extreme suspensions, expulsions and referrals to law enforcement, to the milder “Other” category that may include phone calls home to parents or guardians.

The MPS data dashboard allows interested citizens to drill down on a per-school basis, seeing how many students at any school site were disciplined in a given year (going back to 2013-2014). One can find out how many special education or advanced learners were disciplined, for example, or how many Native, African-American or white students were cited.

It is also possible to pick up another important but often overlooked discipline data point: one student may be responsible for multiple discipline incidents. This is an intense level of disaggregated data that allows for a higher level of public scrutiny and oversight.

There is no comparable data dashboard for charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run. Instead, to find out what is happening with discipline in charter schools, it is necessary to use the state’s more limited data reporting system. Simply put, there is less public information regarding what happens to students in charter schools.

Some Startling Charter School Examples

Eric Mahmoud has run the Harvest Network of charter schools for many years now. His portfolio of schools, all on Minneapolis’s northside, has expanded to include a small list of very segregated K-5 and K-8 schools. A banner on the network’s website promises that “College Starts Here!” But discipline rates for the network’s students of color are off the charts. 

Take the Mastery School. This K-5 Harvest Network school is praised on its website for having small class sizes as well as an “African American focus.” It has just over 150 students. According to the Minnesota Department of Education, 95 percent of Mastery’s students identify as black. 81 percent live in poverty.

In 2016-2017, the school reported 85 discipline incidents to the Minnesota Department of Education. That adds up to an incredibly high discipline rate of around 55 percent.

All of the discipline violations at The Mastery School were directed at the school’s majority black population. Similarly, Harvest Prep, a K-4 site in the Harvest Network, has just over 260 students. It reported 83 discipline incidents in 2016-2017. 79 of those went to black students, who make up 95 percent of Harvest Prep’s population. (90 percent of Harvest Prep students live in poverty, according to MDE.)

Keep in mind, these are young, elementary school students being suspended or expelled.

The Harvest Network has deep ties to Minnesota’s philanthropist community, with venture capitalist and charter school champion, Ben Whitney, acting as vice chair of the network’s board of directors. Whitney is also a prominent member of Minnesota Comeback, the local education reform outfit with national ties that is funded by philanthropic heavy-hitters including the Walton Foundation of Wal-Mart fame.

It seems fair to ask: What exactly are charter school funders and board members supporting?

KIPP School

KIPP is a charter school that operates out of a former Minneapolis Public Schools building in the very northern corner of the city. It currently serves 337 students in a range of grades, including K-2 and 5-8 (with plans to add grades 3 and 4, according to the school’s website). State records show that 92 percent of KIPP’s students live in poverty and 96 percent are listed as Black/African American.

Four students in the school are white although it sits in Minneapolis’s Shingle Creek neighborhood, which is 41 percent white.

In 2016-2017, 80 discipline incidents were reported to the state by KIPP. That is a suspension rate of just under 25 percent, given the school’s total population of 337 students. That is more than double the rate of the Minneapolis Public Schools. According to MDE data, 100 percent of the discipline incidents at KIPP were directed at black students.

For a more relevant comparison, consider Minneapolis’s Bethune Elementary School. Like KIPP, it is located in north Minneapolis and serves a majority black population, with 95 percent of its students living in poverty. In 2016-2017, Bethune reported five suspensions—nowhere near the 80 serious discipline incidents KIPP reported.

KIPP, it must be pointed out, is part of a national network of charter schools with close local and national ties to Teach for America. It enjoys tremendous, bipartisan political and philanthropic support here as a “gap-closing” alternative to traditional public schools.

Notably, Cam Winton, policy advocate for the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, sits on KIPP’s board, as do many others with ties to corporate entities such as 3M and General Mills. KIPP is also listed as one of the “Team Members” for Minnesota Comeback, the reform outfit that would like to create “30,000 rigorous and relevant seats” for Minneapolis kids, using a “sector agnostic” framework.

Again. What are these high-profile, right-leaning civic and political leaders supporting via charter schools like KIPP?

Hiawatha Academies, Too

Hiawatha Academies is another philanthropist supported charter school network. While KIPP serves a majority of black students, Hiawatha’s student population—spread out at the elementary and middle school levels, with a new high school set to open in the fall of 2018—is mostly Hispanic (89 percent of students).

In 2016-2017, Hiawatha Academies reported 169 discipline incidents to the state. Of those, 47 were doled out to black students and 127 went to Hispanic kids. (A handful went to the school’s small populations of white and Native students.)

Hiawatha Academies, which is another “beat the odds” partner for Minnesota Comeback, serves around 1,200 students. It’s discipline rate is higher (14 percent) than that of the Minneapolis Public Schools (10 percent), particularly for Hispanic and black students.

There’s More

Even charter schools without ties to corporate supporters or wealthy philanthropists tend to discipline their students at high rates—when those students are kids of color who live in poverty.

Example: Sojourner Truth Academy is a Pre-K-8 charter school in north Minneapolis. It’s been around since 1999, and, according to its website, the school’s mission is to “prepare children for the future by building confidence and a strong sense of self-worth through small classrooms and an open, safe, family-like environment.” State records show that 96 percent of the school’s 379 students live in poverty and 99 percent are students of color.

In 2016-2017, Sojourner Truth Academy had 173 discipline incidents worthy of either suspension or expulsion. That is a rate of nearly 50 percent.

Two of the worst offenders

Prairie Seeds Academy is a K-12 charter school in Brooklyn Park, just across the border from north Minneapolis. In 2017, the school tallied 769 students. 64 percent are Asian, its largest demographic group. 77 percent of all students live in poverty. In the 2016-2017 school year, Prairie Seeds Academy racked up 277 discipline incidents. 

The vast majority of those incidents (172) went to black students. Considering there were only 165 black students at the school in 2016-2017, that number is astoundingly high. 

The Minnesota Transitions Charter School network, based in Minneapolis, serves a wide variety of students (online, in school, sobriety high school) in a diverse collection of small charter schools. The network’s total population in 2016-2017 was just over 3200 students; 60 percent were white.

Minnesota Transitions Charter Schools reported 310 discipline incidents in 2016-2017. Eighty percent—or 248—of those incidents were handed out to black students, who make up 21 percent of the school’s population. The school’s white students accounted for 14 discipline marks.

What about segregated white charter schools?

Local charter schools that serve mostly white students have nearly non-existent discipline rates. Twin Cities German Immersion and Nova Classical Academy—two St. Paul-based charters with virtually all white student bodies—had so few incidents to report in 2016-2017 that there is no state data available for the schools.

Great River Montessori, another mostly white, middle class charter based in St. Paul, reported only 14 discipline incidents in 2016-2017 for a student population of around 300.

Minneapolis Schools: A complicated picture

Majority white charter schools have very low, mostly statistically insignificant discipline rates.  Majority white Minneapolis Public Schools sites are the same. I can’t find any suspension or discipline incidents to speak of when I look at data from Minneapolis’s Lake Harriet Lower School, a K-4 site where 85 percent of students are white and 6 percent live in poverty, according to federal guidelines.

Burroughs Elementary, another southwest Minneapolis K-5 site with a majority white population (75 percent) had a handful of discipline incidents (but no suspensions) last year. The majority involved white students. Dowling Elementary, a fairly well-integrated Minneapolis school near the Mississippi River, had a student population of 499 last year, and racked up just one suspension.

However, Minneapolis’s Hall International Elementary School (a Pre-K-5 MPS site in north Minneapolis) has some troubling statistics. 93 percent pf the school’s population is students of color. 93 percent live in poverty. The school had 43 suspensions in 2016-2017. 41 of those went to African-American students.

Separate and Unequal Schools

What is the pattern here? Wherever there are highly segregated schools made up of marginalized students of color, discipline incident rates tend to be very high—even when the students involved are quite young. This goes for public schools and charter schools, including those sites celebrated for “outperforming” the Minneapolis Public Schools.

Does this mean that students of color who live in poverty behave poorly, as some noxious commentators have recently suggested? Does it mean that all schools–public or charter–that serve segregated, non-white populations are poorly managed or staffed by teachers who, as a Minneapolis schools administrator states in Green’s New York Times article, “only see” black (or Native) children when there’s trouble?

The data doesn’t tell us any of this. It does tell us that charter schools full of vulnerable students—students in crisis, living in poverty, or bearing the worst of America’s racist and classist legacies—have discipline rates equal to or often greater than that of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

This should tell us that school choice schemes have not solved the problem of separate, segregated and very unequal schools.

Rest in power, Linda Brown.

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Minneapolis Ranks High–Relatively–On Loving Cities Index

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March 20, 2018

Want Education Reform? Try Love

Since 2000, according to his own estimation, Bill Gates’s philanthropic foundation has dedicated $1 billion to the remaking of America’s schools. Speaking at an urban education conference in 2017, Gates said he hopes to address disparities in outcomes between students of color and their white peers. While noting that race-based differences in school success measures are still a problem, Gates makes it clear that he still believes in schools as the “unit of change” when it comes to boosting student achievement. 

Never once in his speech did Gates mention the broader inequalities—from immigration status to lack of prenatal care—that impact students’ lives. Instead, as outlined in his 2017 speech, Gates and his foundation have maintained a laser focus on what happens inside the classroom or, in the case of its promotion of charter schools, on what type of school kids attend.

From Ronald Reagan to Clinton, Bush, Obama and now Trump, the federal government has supported a Gates-like view of education policy by promoting everything from a national, standardized curriculum (Common Core), to the continued use of testing to rank teachers, schools, and students.

But there is a different perspective available, thanks to a new report from the Boston-based Schott Foundation. 

Called the “Loving Cities Index,” the Schott Foundation report looks at multiple and intersecting factors that create unequal opportunities for students—often before they ever set foot in a public school classroom. Schott Foundation researchers did a deep dive into ten U.S. cities from Long Beach, California to Springfield, Massachusetts and points in between, evaluating four “areas of impact”: Care, Commitment, Stability, and Capacity.

Cities across the United States are built around policies rooted in “implicit racial bias at best, and explicit racism and hate at worst,” the report argues. The result is that too many families still lack access to healthcare, job, and housing options that would provide a solid foundation for their children’s academic success. Over 40 percent of students of color across the country attend schools where at least three-quarters of the student body live in poverty or are considered low-income, the report notes. In contrast, just over 7 percent of white students attend these same types of schools.

No city scored well on the Schott Foundation’s Loving Cities scale. Minneapolis and Long Beach were at the top, offering just over half, on average, of what the Foundation believes kids need to thrive, including healthy food, safe neighborhoods, reliable public transportation and access to advanced coursework. Charlotte, North Carolina, was the lowest performer, along with cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Little Rock, Arkansas. These cities were flagged for offering just over one-third of the social and environmental support services deemed necessary for greater student, family, and community success.

Some of the solutions offered by Loving Cities include school support staff who can coordinate “with community partners to bring outside resources inside schools—from immediate needs like food or clothing to more complex ones like counseling or emotional support.” The report also describes the need to address “white-washed” teaching of our history of oppression, and the importance of building a common understanding of how we have historically created opportunity gaps. Another important part of the equation involves “progressive” school funding policies, with sufficiently high funding levels and higher rates of funding for high poverty districts.

By zeroing in on segregation, environmental racism, police brutality, and unfair banking practices, for example, the Schott Foundation offers a seismic shift in how policy makers, philanthropists, and the general public can approach education reform.

The Schott Foundation offers a seismic shift in how policy makers, philanthropists, and the general public can approach education reform.

This is a radical departure from the market-based reform model pushed by Republican and Democratic leaders, along with billionaires like Bill Gates, and venture capitalists eager to take a crack at reshaping—not to mention profiting from—America’s “untapped” public education system.

Market-based reform measures have succeeded in scattering the education landscape with seemingly endless “choices” for families, including charter and voucher schools. But 90 percent of students in the United States still attend traditional public schools, and as Schott Foundation president Dr. John Jackson notes in his introduction to the Loving Cities Index, “parent income remains the number one predictor of student outcomes—not type of public school, labor contract, or brand of assessment.”

In other words, promoting school choice as the solution is a distraction from the basic fact that parent income, along with interrelated racial and economic segregation, remain powerful determinants in the quality of education a child receives.

Attacking these more economically oriented issues appears to be uncomfortable for billionaires like Gates—perhaps it calls into question the largesse he accumulates while income inequality balloons. Maybe that is why he avoids tackling the racially biased policies that the Schott Foundation and others insist stand in the way of progress for all America’s students. As the report states, “Placing the blame at the doors of educators, parents, students and the public school system is the easy route that has proven to do very little to solve the problem.”

This piece was originally published by The Progressive.

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Minneapolis Southwest High School Community Roiled by Rumors of Violence

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March 15, 2018

On March 14, interim Minneapolis Southwest High School principal, Karen Wells, sent an email home to families, informing them that a “small fight” had taken place during the day, as Southwest students participated in the National School Walkout.

Today, that “small fight” is snowballing into a major incident. It reportedly began as students were participating in the walkout, when one student was allegedly seen waving a Trump flag and calling out racial slurs. A small group of students then engaged in a physical confrontation with the one waving the flag. The fight, Wells said in her email, was “quickly broken up.”

It did not end there. Rumors raced through the school, with fears of gun violence and retaliation causing some parents and students to skip school today and reach out to the Minneapolis police for information. Parents are reporting that school officials determined there was no credible threat, although extra security measures were apparently taken at Southwest today.

Local and national news outlets picked up on the story, with CBS and the NY Post stating that no one was arrested after “a student carrying a flag with the word ‘Trump’ on it was assaulted outside of Southwest High School.” 

Now, the flames are being fanned by Olivia Anderson-Blythe, a reporter for the Republican aligned, questionably funded, Alpha News site. On Twitter, Anderson-Blythe and a group with the Twitter handle “CrimeWatchMpls” have been retweeting one another about reports of violence at Southwest High School.

The CrimeWatch group has an accompanying Facebook page full of comments about “snowflakes” and kids who don’t appreciate the gift of a taxpayer-funded education.

Anderson-Blythe published another story about Southwest High School on March 13, after apparently attending (and recording) a community meeting that was held at the school on March 8. That meeting was called at parents’ request after a lunchroom fight between two students was videotaped and shared on social media sites.

The March 8 meeting was led by Carla Steinbach, Associate Superintendent for the Minneapolis Public Schools, with Southwest administrators, Wells and Tara Fitzgerald, also weighing in. Although the fight and the administrators’ supposed Draconian response (students were not allowed to leave the lunchroom during the fight, nor were they then given passes to leave class) was the official reason for the meeting, many other concerns and questions arose during the 90 minute session.

Inequity and racial tension dominated the conversation, yet the meeting seemed to end on a high note, with Steinbach enthusiastically calling Southwest a “great school,” and other parents and administrators agreeing to come together again soon for more dialogue. Still, it was impossible to ignore an elephant in the room: the school’s administrative team was “decimated in 2017,” a parent stated, leaving, perhaps, unprepared leadership in charge.

Longtime Southwest principal Bill Smith was pushed out last summer, along with two assistant principals, Sue Mortensen and Brian Nutter. Although an Office of Civil Rights complaint was rumored to be the reason for the shake up, sources say that it was instead an internal investigation prompted by allegations of race-based discipline disparities that led to the changes.

While Smith and Mortensen elected to retire one year earlier than expected, many observers believe Nutter–a younger administrator with deep roots in the Minneapolis schools–was unfairly pushed out by top-level district decision makers. (Today, he is reportedly on his way to the Middle East to serve with the National Guard.)

In place of these three, Southwest has largely been managed this year by Wells, who has no high school administrative experience, and Fitzgerald, who was previously removed from her position as principal of Northrop Elementary School. This has proven problematic in the eyes of some, as Southwest is the district’s largest and arguably highest profile high school. 

Others, though, have praised Wells for working well with the school’s large population of students of color.

Southwest often gets dinged for its position in one of the whitest, wealthiest corners of the city. Still, it serves over 700 students who live in poverty, according to federal guidelines, and 45 percent of its 1,800 kids are students of color (per Minnesota Department of Education data). Successfully meeting the needs of a wide swath of the city’s population is undoubtedly challenging, especially in this era of videotaped fights and real or alleged threats of gun violence, not to mention pending budget cuts and administrative upheaval.

UPDATE:

In an official statement, MPS spokesperson, Dirk Tedmon, addressed the latest incidents at Southwest. Here is part of MPS’s response:

State law limits the information that can be shared regarding Minnesota students, so
Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) is prohibited from sharing details of the brief fight that occurred on March 14 across the street and off school property. MPS does not condone fighting or disrespectful behavior. When it happens, we follow the same behavior and safety guidelines for all students involved. 

MPS continues to believe the events of March 14 provided a focused opportunity for student voice on an important civic issue that is bipartisan in nature. One of MPS’s priorities is giving students skills for critical thinking, building positive relationships, hearing diverse views and problem-solving in challenging situations. The District’s hope and expectation would be students approach one another in a respectful manner, even when they disagree. At the same time, we realize some students, much like our society in general right now, sometimes have difficulty constructively engaging in civic discourse. As a learning organization, MPS’s
obligation is to create spaces for students to learn this skill.

MPS’s diversity is one of its greatest strengths and helps students grow into well-rounded, global citizens. It is important to maintain a safe, positive learning environment for each Minneapolis Public Schools student in every one the District’s schools, and we are committed to doing that.

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Minneapolis South High Students Walk Out, Then Face Budget Realities

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March 15, 2018

On March 14, hundreds of Minneapolis South High School students quietly walked around the school’s perimeter for seventeen minutes as part of the National School Walkout. 

Today, they are nervously waiting to see which of their teachers will get the ax as budget cuts roll through the Minneapolis Public Schools. It’s on everybody’s mind, according to my daughter, who is a student at the school. She is wondering if there will be a list of those who get laid off. How will we know who it is, she asked me.

“Everyone is trying to figure out who will be gone from each department. People are worried about (a favorite English teacher whose name I will leave out) because he’s pretty new to South.”

“They are cutting at least one full-time teacher from each department,” she insisted. “This is crazy. How can they do this?”

She is pretty sure her language teacher this year will be on the list. 

This is the teacher that my daughter has come to respect immensely this year, for teaching the kids not just French–her official job–but for talking a lot about gender equality and justice, and about the cultural and racial tensions that exist within the traveler’s paradise of Paris and France. She’s a fun teacher who has the misfortune of being new to the Minneapolis Public Schools.

I feel sick, Mom, my daughter wrote to me. 

On March 14, I went to South to observe the student walkout. It struck me as a solemn thing of beauty, as sort of an unexpected picture of what an integrated public high school looks like.

There were kids in letter jackets and hijabs, parkas and shorts. Some had hair dyed blue; others sported afros or up-dos. There were students in khakis and some in chunky high heels, moving as smoothly as possible down the icy sidewalk. There were ear buds, ripped jeans, and a woman dressed as a butterfly, riding beside the kids on a bicycle decked out with orange and black wings. 

Two blind students walked with the help of classmates and canes. A teacher in a plaid shirt huffed along alone while a girl in sheer black tights and pink high tops bounced ahead of him. Three girls in long skirts marched close together, forming a barrier against the early spring wind. A car barreled past, honking in support but missing the point that this was a mostly silent walkout in honor of victims of gun violence.

There were black hoodies and someone in a shimmery purple coat. A student in a gray fedora was pushed along in a wheelchair. 

At 10:17 a.m., the school’s bell pierced the quiet. Kids started to peel off and duck back through the school’s double doors, painted in bright orange (half of South High’s orange and black colors). As I drove away, I noticed blue plastic bags tacked onto the scrawny looking trees surrounding South.

They are there as part of an “integrated economics/science lesson,” according to South’s Twitter feed. Mr. Patton, a teacher in the school’s American Indian All Nations program, is teaching kids how to turn sap into maple syrup.

The bright blue of the syruping bags struck a sweet note amid the beige block windowless world of South.

I hope this teacher can stay at South. I hope the maple syrup lesson will be here next year. I hope people in Minnesota begin to understand, as Governor Mark Dayton said on March 14, how “badly the state’s financial support…slackened” when it comes to public education.

Minnesotans understand the importance of education, but what most don’t realize is how badly the state’s financial support had slackened in the years before I became governor.

When I started, the state’s funding for elementary and secondary education per $1,000 of personal income, was in the bottom half of the fifty states. Most recently, we ranked 18th, according to the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence. That’s better, but it’s not good enough.

And it explains why our public schools are constantly having to hold special property tax referendums to ask for what should be funded by the much more progressive state income tax.

–Governor Mark Dayton,State of the State address, March 14, 2018

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Minneapolis Public Schools Hosts Teach for America Recruiting Event

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March 5, 2018

A Teach for America recruitment event was held March 2-3 at the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Davis Center headquarters, just as schools across the district are being hit with a familiar reality: budget cuts.  

The district is grappling with a $33 million budget shortfall for 2018-2019. Cuts to teaching staff, along with increases in class sizes, are expected to be part of the answer to this large deficit. Although details are still being finalized, some Washburn High School community members, for example, are reporting a projected loss of 16 full-time positions for the coming school year.

Minneapolis’s other large high schools, South and Southwest, are also expected to lose key staffing positions, on top of years of previous cut backs. As tough budget decisions hit schools, parents and staff are expressing concern on public Facebook pages, noting that classes of 27 kindergarteners and 30-40 middle and high schoolers are already the norm in many schools across the district. 

This is partly why the Teach for America recruitment event raised ire for the Minneapolis Public Schools staff who happened upon it while attending training sessions on March 3. First, the event was held at the district’s Davis Center, a sleek, taxpayer-funded building on the city’s north side. Second, the Minneapolis Public Schools was listed as one of TFA’s “School Partners,” with Human Resources (and TFA alum) employee Daniel Glass identified as the hiring “point of contact.”

Glass’s LinkedIn account indicates that he was a 2015 “Leadership Fellow” for KIPP, one of the charter schools featured at the March 2-3 TFA recruiting event. At the time, he was also working for the Minneapolis Public Schools as a Special Projects Coordinator, leading to recent, controversial “fox in the henhouse” allegations from the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.

Communication Breakdown? 

Several other MPS employees were also listed as being part of the event, including administrators and teachers from Roosevelt High School, Green Central Community School and Andersen United Community School. They were joined by a roster of charter school operators and TFA employees, as well as state legislator and education reform advocate, Carlos Mariani.

Many district staff and school board members privately reported feeling caught off guard by the TFA event, saying that they had no idea it was taking place at the Davis Center. In an official statement, however, Minneapolis Public Schools Human Resources staffers (including Glass and HR director, Maggie Sullivan) confirmed that they agreed to host the TFA event for free, in exchange for being allowed to attend without paying a registration fee.

Waiting for the action at MPS

While confirming that MPS representatives were at the TFA recruitment event, the statement noted that, “All candidates will be considered through the same pool process for potential teacher vacancies for the 2018-2019 school year and MPS does not set targets for specific recruitment pathways.” 

The statement touched on the district’s current financial straits, saying, “…we anticipate the recruiting class may be smaller than in previous years.” Still, it read, “MPS is committed to actively recruiting talented and diverse teachers, especially in difficult to staff areas such as special education and bilingual education.”

An update to MPS’s response made it clear that, while they will continue to attend a wide variety of recruiting fairs, they are not “hiring any current TFA members this year.”

Elite Teaching Corps?

It is no secret that TFA corps members are not expected to embrace teaching as a profession. A Minneapolis-based job posting for the group includes these recruitment talking points: 

  • As a Teach For America corps member, you’ll be a full-time teacher for two years at the preschool, Pre-K, kindergarten, elementary, middle, or high school level, with the opportunity to lead real change and make an immediate impact on your students and the community you serve. 
  • You’ll gain access to numerous graduate school and employer partnerships that will help you advance your career and leadership trajectory. 
  • To be considered, the posting advises, applicants must have at least a 2.5 college GPA. 

The TFA recruitment posting also states that the organization is looking to “actively recruit a highly diverse corps.” This is a point made by Minneapolis’s HR staffers as well, in response to my request for information. “At the event yesterday,” the statement read, “35% of the attendees were people of color and 29% were looking for positions in high need areas.”

This may not be comforting to the parents of special education and “high needs” students, as the job description for TFA makes it clear that recruits are only expected to stay in the classroom for two years, after receiving just six weeks of training. While it is undoubtedly true that some TFA recruits make excellent, long-term teachers, the group has also excelled at providing a cheaper, more temporary pool of workers. (Many TFA supporters like to point out that traditionally trained teachers also leave their jobs at a relatively high rate. With recent strike threats in St. Paul, West Virginia and now Oklahoma, perhaps more people will understand why.)

Teach! Or, Help Spread Charter Schools

This is less about the Minneapolis Public Schools than it is about fueling the expansion of charter schools in the Twin Cities. It is easier to defend TFA when the organization can be brushed off as a minor player in district schools, where just a handful of recruits help staff hard-to-fill spots. (And perhaps provide a more diversified, if temporary, pool of workers.)

The bigger picture, however, is more troubling. Nationally, the expansion of highly segregated charter school networks, like KIPP, has been closely tied to a similar expansion of TFA. In 2014, for example, internal documents obtained by New Jersey blogger, Bob Braun, and published here, reveal that “many charter management organizations consider TFA presence in a region a necessary prerequisite for opening new schools.”

What’s more, according to the documents, “charter management organizations including Rocketship, KIPP, Noble, LEARN and Uncommon Schools all indicated that a supply of TFA teachers was a general pre-condition for expanding into a new region.”

In other words, TFA is part of a long game, designed to facilitate the spread of publicly funded, privately managed charter schools. Those schools must come with a more pliable (inexperienced), non-unionized (mostly) workforce of recruits who have been told that their often temporary presence is the way to help foster greater “educational equity” in the United States.Image result for school privatization

It must be made clear that TFA is a polished, billionaire-backed seat of “innovation,” with an expansive PR network. They have become skilled at positioning their organization as the seat of change for marginalized students of color, and many high level policy makers and financiers from across the political spectrum have bought into this pleasing narrative. It is pleasing, I suspect, because it seeks to disrupt teachers unions and traditional, taxpayer-funded, democratically run school boards and districts while simultaneously not asking for systemic change.

Affordable housing? Not on TFA’s radar. Income inequality and the gross hoarding of wealth? Not a good way to build a “weighted revenue pipeline.”

Segregate for Best Results?

We can find evidence of TFA’s target audience in the list of schools present at the Davis Center recruitment event. Here are a few examples, with data provided by the Minnesota Department of Education:

  • Northeast College Prep. Ninety percent of students live in poverty, according to federal guidelines. Close to ninety percent are students of color.
  • Prodeo Academy: Eighty-seven percent of student live in poverty; ninety-eight percent are students of color.
  • Loveworks Academy. One hundred percent of students live in poverty. Not one white student attends the school. 

Only one school on the list, Breck, is a private school. Besides MPS, the rest are charters. But none of the charters listed serve a significant percentage of white students. There were no representatives from the Twin Cities German Immersion School, for example, or Seven Hills Classical Academy–both charter schools that serve a majority of white, wealthier students. (Why is this a problem? Read Nikole Hannah Jones’s work, or watch this John Oliver video.)

The TFA recruitment event included sessions on whether or not ALL (their caps) students are being served in Minnesota’s schools. This is the wedge issue that groups like TFA use to draw comparisons between “schools of choice” (charters) and public school districts. It is a narrative of competition, with some kids and schools “beating the odds” while others go on struggling. This is market-based education reform dressed up in progressive clothing, where wealthy investors pick winners and losers rather than insist that the state of Minnesota fully fund its public schools.

Is this really the type of organization, or event, that the Minneapolis Public Schools should be hosting, for free?

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*For those of you who have continued to ask for an update on the district’s enrollment director, to my knowledge, student placement decisions are still being handled by Bryan Fleming, the MPS Enrollment Manager with a side, school choice consulting business.