Minneapolis Public Schools’ CDD Plan is a Path to School Closures

December 1, 2020

At last, the purpose for the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Comprehensive District Design (CDD) plan is becoming clearer.

On December 1, the finance committee of the Minneapolis school board will hold a regularly scheduled meeting. Among the documents prepared for this meeting is an Executive Summary from Superintendent Ed Graff about the district’s pro-forma budget.

The pro forma budget documents are an overview of what Graff and his team are expecting MPS’s financial picture to look like in the next five years.

It’s not pretty.

Graff notes that MPS is “cautiously” assuming the CDD plan will be successful–but only after several years of enrollment declines, due in large part, one assumes, to the high level of disruption and uncertainty the CDD is expected to bring about.

Under the CDD, which is the district’s most current strategic plan, approximately two-thirds of all MPS students are slated to change schools, beginning in the fall of 2021.


The percentage is estimated to be higher than seventy percent for students of color. Teachers and administrators will also have to move en masse, although there has been no official communication yet about what that may look like or how that will impact academic programming.

On November 29, families received notice about which school their children will be automatically assigned to for the 2021-2022 school year–unless they utilize the district’s school choice feature, which is scheduled to open up on December 5, much later than originally stated.

Graff’s pro forma summary indicates that MPS expects enrollment to falter due to the changes brought on by the CDD until the 2025-2026 school year, when the district projects that it will “begin increasing its enrollment.”


Here’s the important point, though, per Graff’s note to board members:

Our analysis finds that, regardless of whether the CDD succeeds, the district is burdened by an unsustainable fiscal structure and should urgently seek to identify and act on cost efficiencies to prevent entering statutory operating debt in the 2023-24 school year.

Here’s my theory: The CDD is a trojan horse, wrapped in the language of addressing racial equity but designed instead to usher in another round of austerity measures for MPS.

It is worth pointing out that the most vocal defenders of the CDD have been affiliated with the private Graves Foundation.

Parents have largely been left either in the dark regarding the upcoming changes (a parent I know of from a refugee community was astounded to learn that her four children will now be sent to three different schools under the CDD when they have been attending the same one) or left to battle one another on various Facebook pages.

I would wager that the CDD is little more than a consolidation tactic built on the principles of downsizing, economizing, and the management and reduction of costs, including teacher and staff salaries.

That’s how it started, anyway, and, as the famous quote goes, when someone, or something, shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

The CDD came to the Minneapolis schools through Dennis Cheesebrow, an organizational consultant who helped realign the St. Paul Public Schools in 2014 with an eye towards closing schools, minimizing choice, and improving the district’s shrinking bottom line.

The plan Cheesebrow helped craft for the St. Paul schools was built on the premise that all students, “no matter their zip code,” would be able to access a high quality (perhaps well-rounded, even) education in their own neighborhood.

That hasn’t
happened, although it would be unfair to pin this solely on either Cheesebrow or district leaders in St. Paul.

Many public school districts are struggling to stay afloat amid rising costs and shrinking revenue, not to mention a damaging, bipartisan narrative that positions individual choice as the way out of America’s devastating racial and economic inequality.

Nevertheless, Cheesebrow’s design still stands as the basic framework for Minneapolis’s CDD plan. Under pushback, however, MPS repackaged the CDD into a more politically palatable racial equity plan, with some noble aspects to it.

Shuttling more students to the city’s storied but too-small North High School makes sense, as does the realignment of some transportation routes
and other boundary shifts. Attempting to address race, privilege, and the various hurdles students and families face is also valid.

But framing the CDD as anything other than a top down, austerity driven realignment seems like a dangerous falsehood that may ultimately weaken MPS beyond repair.

This point was covered in an opinion piece from March, when three educators and parents of color–along with signees from various MPS sites–made the following point: “From the beginning, the Comprehensive District Design (CDD) was created without substantial input from students, families, principals, or educators.”

The piece, written by Asha Farah, Silvia Ibañez, and Ron Simmons, also argues that the CDD lacks both a solid academic plan (but instead tears apart existing programming) and a collaborative approach to dealing with issues, such as poverty and housing instability, that make MPS’ mission so challenging.

Now, given the pro forma summary offered by Graff, we can see that the CDD will not save MPS from having to close schools in the near future, as it’s hard to see what other cost-saving measure would help shore up the district’s finances.

Perhaps the district is too large, with too many partially filled schools, to operate effectively. If so, that should have been honestly explained to the public
and not buried within the CDD.

The finance committee meeting begins at 5 p.m. on December 1 and can be viewed here.