Today I got a notice from Pinterest in my email. It’s tagline goes like this: “Boring living room? How to liven things up.” 

Immediately, it struck me as an apt parallel to the attempt to introduce “Community Partnership Schools” into the Minneapolis Public Schools. (I am imagining a behind-closed-doors PowerPoint pitch that went something like this: “Boring public school system? How to liven things up with autonomous schools!”)

The PR promise of the school district’s community partnership plans drips from the MPS website–“Community Partnership Schools are collaborative, innovative, site-based, educational models that meet the unique needs of their students, accelerate learning, and prepare them for college and careers”–but will it be able to deliver on this promise?

The concept for this new model of public school was cemented during 2014 negotiations between MPS and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. The idea was that school communities could choose to become “partnership” schools, and become more autonomous, in exchange for “greater accountability.” 

These schools are supposed to be designed with lots of community input (meaning actual parents, teachers, maybe even some students) and fresh ideas (just like the Pinterest email) for how a newly liberated, autonomous school will be able to quickly boost student achievement.

That mostly means test scores, in the parlance of MPS’ new strategic plan, Acceleration 2020 (buckle up, kids), which is calling for all schools–autonomous or not–to produce large gains in student test scores:

• 5% annual increase in number of students meeting or exceeding state standards on standardized reading & math tests
• 8% annual increase in the number of “low performers” who meet or exceed state standards in reading and math

So, the district sets the overall standardized test-based targets for each school (this may be the “bonded” part of autonomous schools that former Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson used to talk about), and the Community Partnership Schools get to…innovate on their way to achieving those goals, while other schools do not? I am not entirely clear on the promise and premise of this new way to jazz things up in MPS, or why a school would have to become “autonomous” just to do what it thinks is best for its students and staff.

Also, MPS already has an “autonomous” school model in place, which the teachers’ union brought to the table, back in 2009-2010, after getting legislation passed allowing for “Site-Governed Schools.” The language surrounding the purpose of Site-Governed Schools is almost exactly the same as that being used now for Community Partnership Schools, and focuses on greater “flexibility” for these schools in several areas, such as how budgets are spent, what curriculum models are used, and who works at the schools. 

Since the Site-Governed Schools law went into effect more than five years ago, MPS has–or had, rather–just one such school: Pierre Bottineau French Academy (the school will no longer exist next year, as I understand it, and will instead be absorbed into Cityview Elementary School). The story of Pierre Bottineau, which started with the glow of community-led innovation, is a troubling one, and calls into question MPS’ ability to carry out such autonomous schools that have been “freed” from district-created shackles. (I did a whole series about Pierre Bottineau for the Twin Cities Daily Planet last year; the articles can be found here.)

MPS’ “Office of New Schools” was originally tasked with running the Site-Governed Schools and bringing greater autonomy, as well as market-driven choice and competition, into the district, under the guidance of the Center for Reinventing Public Education (MPS–like Memphis and New Orleans–is one of the Center for Reinventing Public Ed’s “portfolio“ districts).

In fact, the Office of New Schools was created within MPS when the last strategic plan–written by McKinsey and Company consultants back in 2007–promised to bring accelerated success and greater flexibility and freedom to the district. Since then, the Office of New Schools has had at least five directors–most of which have had a charter school background but little else in the way of public education experience. Today, it is being run by 2009 Rice University graduate Betsy Ohrn, who is a TFA alum and now serves on the board of directors at Venture Academy (a “blended learning” charter school in Minneapolis) with Jon Bacal, who was the first director of the Office of New Schools.

These days, the Office of New Schools has been tasked with implementing MPS” latest push to bring “innovation” into the district, as it has been overseeing the Community Partnership Schools application process. So far, the first round of contenders for this more autonomous (I must remember to get that word accurately defined) school model are:

• Ramsey Middle School (which, by the school’s own admission, already enjoys a fair amount of autonomy)
• Bancroft Elementary School (which would like to go further in its mission to become an IB school)
• Folwell Arts Magnet (also would like to go further with its magnet school mission)
• Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary School, which is currently a K-8 school in north Minneapolis, but will become a K-5 next year.

All four of these schools–should the Minneapolis school board allow them to become partnership schools at the board’s April 14 meeting–will also be expected to pilot MPS’ new, more autonomous and decentralized funding model, called “Student-Based Allocations.” (This topic requires its own separate blog post). Why should they have to become Community Partnership Schools and try out a new funding model at the same time? Good question.

Ironically, or perhaps, forebodingly, the Office of New Schools was rated MPS’ least effective department by district principals very recently. Just 22% of MPS principals–who are slated to become the “entrepreneurial” leaders of their schools, as the district tries to become more decentralized–identified the Office of New Schools as satisfactory; in contrast, the English Language Learner department was considered the most useful, according to 79% of principals.

If the Office of New Schools could not effectively manage the one site-governed, autonomous school it has authorized, and today’s principals do not consider it an effective department, how will it handle implementing the Community Partnership School model?

And how will any of this serve the district’s most vulnerable students and schools, who are perhaps in need of more support and less autonomy?