Boston Boondoggle for MPS?

By Sarah Lahm

The Minneapolis Public Schools has no money; we all know that. It’s in constant belt-tightening mode, with a side of publicly touted layoffs and “right-sizing” to make it all real. 

MPS to Staff

Remember this, from March 2015?

Central office staff at the Davis Center will be reduced by one-sixth, saving the district $11.6 million. The money will primarily go toward reducing class sizes, lowering special education caseloads and additional study time at middle and high schools, the district said.

 

“’We want schools to have the flexibility and autonomy to make decisions at the school level that are in the best interest of their specific students,’” Minneapolis Public Schools spokeswoman Rachel Hicks said.

Hicks is gone, of course, as is most of the rest of MPS’ Communications department.

Maybe that’s why someone forgot to trump up the fact that a cohort of MPS brass, along with a school board member and a state senator, recently went on a $25,000 jaunt to Boston.

Harvard Delegation
Click to enlarge

They were there to study the district’s English Language Learner (ELL) program, under the watchful eye of John J-H Kim. Kim is the faculty co-chair of Harvard’s Public Education Leadership Program (PULP–no, PELP. Sorry).

Pulp: the substance that is left after the liquid (money) has been squeezed from a fruit or vegetable or public school district

Rest easy, everyone. PELP is a joint project between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. For $2,800 per person–not including airfare and other transport needs–your local school district dilletantes can drink from the Harvard fountain of knowledge for four or five days, and probably get a handsome, superintendent-worthy stamp on their resume.

I’m imagining PELP 101: How can I run my school district like a business?

It makes perfect sense that John J-H Kim would be helping run the thing. He is not only the co-chair of PELP, which brings in public school district types for an undoubtedly transformational summer camp experience, but he is also the CEO of Boston-based District Management Council (DMC).

Cha-ching.

DMC makes money–a lot of it, I’m guessing–by getting million dollar contracts with school districts around the country. And, they also have a private club for these districts, if they will shell out $25,000/year.

Minneapolis is listed as a member of DMC’s secret club, but I haven’t been able to verify yet whether this is a wish list kind of thing, or an actual list of districts that are paying to play with DMC. (In case you were wondering: membership does include discounts on DMC’s technology products).

DMC has also been quite busy in MPS of late, pushing a special education audit that has put them in the glare of parents with kids in the autism program. DMC’s audit is being used, it seems, as a reason to push abrupt change on MPS’s special ed staff and families. 

Or maybe they just need to go along on the next PELP junket, in order to see the DMC light?

Lingering questions:

  1. What big PELP-y surprises are in store for MPS’s ELL department?
  2. Why didn’t any teachers go? 
  3. AchieveMpls–“As the strategic nonprofit partner of the Minneapolis Public Schools, our shared goal is every student career and college ready. Join us!”–paid for state senator Patricia Torres Ray to go? More on that later.
  4. Budget watch! DMC is also the brains behind MPS’s awkward efforts to implement a “student-based” funding model–watch out, folks. Wonder if that came up at PELP?

I’m no John J-H Kim, but please consider throwing some funds my way. I’ll even make up a certificate for you!

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5 thoughts on “Boston Boondoggle for MPS?

  1. Next time let me book your flights.

    Come on the whole team? You guys dont even pass this information on to the teachers???

    And, who did get laid off and sent in to the classrooms? lol

  2. Nice catch, Sarah.

    The airfare alone is over priced, unless they’re traveling other than economy class. And, Cambridge/Boston is a great place to be in the summer, but so is Minneapolis. There’s people right here in Minnesota who have some really phenomenal experience teaching ELL students, but why work with folks who know about the local area, which is one of the crucial aspects of ELL education, when you can go to Massachusetts?

    Just to put education conference prices in perspective: I’ll be attending the US MoodleMoot2015 next week. This is a conference of all of the people who are interested in using Moodle in education. Moodle https://moodle.org/ is the largest Learning Management System in the world. (BTW, it’s also free. The MPS has recently dropped Moodle to use another system that reportedly isn’t working very well and costs a couple $million or so a year, but that’s a story for another day.) The Moodle https://moodle.org/ conference hosted this year by the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus will be attended by educators from all over the U.S., and will include, also, people from all over the world, many of them in person and others virtually. I thought the conference fee of $500 for 3 days was kinda steep but worth it. If you stay at The Commons on campus the rooms are about $140 per night. Throw in an extra $100 for meals and local travel per day, which is generous because there are lots of meals included in the conference fee, and you have another $400. So, add them all up: $500 – conference, $560 – room, $400 meals and local travel, for a total of $1,460.

    The MPS would’ve saved about $20,000 if they’d sent all of those people to the MoodleMoot instead of sending them to Boston. Some of them could even have stayed over night at the Commons and enjoyed imbibing with the Aussie, Irish, and Dutch Moodlers who will be there and are well known for being ‘social’ when F2F as well as online.

    Oh, you say, but is it fair to compare a Moodle conference to a conference at Harvard about ELL? Well, Moodle is used by language teachers all over the world to teach all kinds of languages. When I used it in the MPS, my ELL students and their families loved it. Many times, I had parents thank me for posting assignments on Moodle because they could easily translate them into a language they could read and then help their children with their homework. Moodle is an incredibly effective ELL instruction tool. Once upon a time, the MPS even paid me and about 30 other teachers in the MPS, many of them ELL teachers, to take a course from a Harvard spin-off company to learn how to use Learning Management Systems to teach students, ELL and not ELL. Did that approach work, what happened to all of those trained teachers and the Moodle tool they were trained to use? That’s a story for another day.

  3. Are there any independent peer reviewed studies that the PELP principles are based on? Throwing money at a business plan that is “married to” the education sector as the video reports seems just a way to ultimately funnel money to the business sector that is working to privatize the public education sector. Harvard has lent its name to corporate education reform efforts in the past, namely the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded and flawed MET (measures of effective teaching) study as well as the invasive and at times inappropriate Tripod Student Perception Survey, developed by Ron Ferguson at Harvard. Harvard’s hands are dirty.

    More on critiques of the MET report from the Vamboozled website: ” In January I wrote a post about “The Study that Keeps on Giving…” Specifically, this post was about the study conducted and authored by Raj Chetty (Economics Professor at Harvard), John Friedman (Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard), and Jonah Rockoff (Associate Professor of Finance and Economics at Harvard) that was published first in 2011 (in its non-peer-reviewed and not even internally reviewed form) by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and then published again by NBER in January of 2014 (in the same form) but this time split into two separate studies (see them split here and here).”

    http://vamboozled.com/the-study-that-keeps-on-giving-hopefully-in-its-final-round/

    On a side note, do Steve Flisk and Patricia Torres Ray fly first class on the Minneapolis Public School district’s budget? Their flights were so pricey, but they are first class corporate ed reformers so it sort of makes sense.

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