Minneapolis Public Schools “Ghosted” by 2040 City Plan

May 29, 2018

Will the Minneapolis Public Schools exist in the year 2040? Judging by the Minneapolis 2040 master plan, it won’t.

Minneapolis 2040 is a visioning document, designed to offer a planned-for picture of what the city will look like over the next 22 years (as part of the Met Council’s Thrive 2040 project). It has been in development since before 2014, and is now in the last stages of community input. By the end of 2018, the Minneapolis City Council will vote on the 2040 plan and the vision of Minneapolis it provides. After that, assuming the plan is accepted by the Council, it will be put into action via updates to the city’s zoning laws. 

The zoning laws will dictate how, exactly, Minneapolis will morph into the city depicted in the 2040 draft. (Zoning issues tend to really get people’s goat.) The vision is for a city with business nodes in multi-use neighborhoods, full of green space, access to transit, bike lanes, high density housing and…no schools, it would seem. A glance through the guiding principles and priorities behind the Minneapolis 2040 draft reveal virtually no mention of the city’s public education system, or education in general.

The six guiding values for the Minneapolis 2040 will hopefully lead to “An inspiring City growing in equity, health, and opportunity,” according to a 2018 City Planning Commission press release. Those six values center around growth (boosting Minneapolis’s population and its tax base); livability (safe, green, healthy neighborhoods with access to amenities); economic competitiveness (including private/public sector innovation); health; equity and racial justice; and “good government.”

These six values are expanded upon by a list of fourteen priorities, as identified by the Minneapolis City Council. The priorities offer more information about the values guiding the 2040 plan, but again make very little mention of public education and what role, if any, schools will play in this future version of Minneapolis.

The emphasis seems to be more on turning Minneapolis into a “city without children,” in the words of writer Benjamin Schwarz. (He attributes this push to a “bevy of trend-conscious city planners, opportunistic real-estate developers, municipal officials eager to grow their cities’ tax bases, and entrepreneurial urban gurus that ballyhoo the national renaissance of what inevitably gets described as the Vibrant Urban Neighborhood.”)

After the six guiding values and the fourteen priorities comes the ninety-seven (97!) goals of the 2040 draft plan. There is one goal that specifically touches on the importance of investing in children from birth to age 5, but beyond that…nothing.

9. Complete neighborhoods: In 2040, all Minneapolis residents will have access to employment, retail services, healthy food, parks, and other daily needs via walking, biking, and public transit.

–Goal nine from Minneapolis 2040

Where is the Minneapolis Public Schools?

Is the city of Minneapolis ghosting its own public school district? Why is there a minimal commitment to having schools in neighborhoods, or schools within walking distance of every family, as the plan spells out with parks? It is hard to imagine that this is simply an oversight, as the plan itself, and the Minneapolis 2040 website, is very thorough and full of a wealth of information, values and vision statements.

If Minneapolis is hoping for double-digit growth, and is planning for this growth with equity, racial justice and equal opportunity in mind, then where does education fit in? If our collective goal is to attract more residents, where should they send their children to school?

Image result for itasca project
Itasca Project, 2015: New York Times photo

It is important to consider that the Met Council is providing the overarching guidance for the 2040 plan. The Met Council has close ties to the Itasca Project, which helped fund an ill-fated  2007 reboot of the Minneapolis Public Schools via McKinsey and Co. consultants. In the Itasca Project worldview, education should be “aligned with employers’ workforce needs”—a questionable premise that undergirds neoliberal education reform policy around the world. 

Some would argue, of course, that education should serve communities and help support the dynamic, democratic foundation of our society—and not just train workers for the benefit of profit-minded, globally connected businesses. But the Minneapolis 2040 plan actually appears to have its roots not in local city planning priorities, but in a 2008 document produced by the Brookings Foundation.

Business-Driven City Planning

The document, called the Blueprint for American Prosperity, was crafted by the Brookings Foundation’s Metropolitan Policy Program. It is focused on “unleashing the potential of a metropolitan nation,” and argues that cities are the place to turn when looking for ways to keep the U.S. economy at the top of the increasingly competitive global rat race. The document is long and focuses a lot on the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of federal policies, and instead seems to position businesses and corporations as the rightful redesigners of American life.

This probably has to do with who is funding the nearly century-old Brookings Foundation these days. Among the usual suspects are the Gates and Walton Foundations, which both happen to be pretty in favor of market-based, union-free education reform.

The Blueprint also utilizes data from McKinsey and Co., a global consulting firm dedicated to increasing profits and worker efficiency around the world. (To be fair, they are also engaged in promoting “long-term” capitalism, which focuses on more sustainable growth and, theoretically, a broader sharing of wealth and resources.)

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, China and India have more than twice as many young professionals in fields including engineering, finance, and life sciences research as the United States. Nonetheless, only a fraction of those workers—about one in eight by McKinsey’s estimates—would make suitable candidates for employment with a multinational corporation.

Blueprint for American Prosperity (13)

The Blueprint is full of the same ideas as the Minneapolis 2040 plan, including the need for new zoning laws that prioritize higher density housing, transit needs, “vibrant neighborhoods,” less sprawl, and income inequality–but it comes at these from a business plan model, rather than a workers’ rights or family friendly angle.

That’s because it is a business plan model.

The following is from a website connected to Jon Commers, of the local Donjek strategic planning firm. Commers is also a St. Paul-based representative on the Met Council. (Commers’ company, Donjek, was hired to help guide and implement the Blueprint for the Twin Cities in 2009. In 2011, he was appointed to the Met Council.)

In 2009the Brookings Institution approached leaders in the Minneapolis Saint Paul region about a pilot initiative to apply a business planning approach to regional economic development. Partners including the Itasca Project, City of Minneapolis, Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), Regional Council of Mayors, City of Saint Paul, Target Corporation, Urban Land Institute Minnesota, started an initiative to undertake business planning for the metro area’s regional economic development. Additional funders including the Minneapolis Foundation, Saint Paul Foundation and Wells Fargo Foundation have provided financial support to the project.

The Blueprint for American Prosperity was the Brookings Institution’s pilot program at the time. It later showed up in a resolution put forth by then-Minneapolis City Council member, Elizabeth Glidden. The resolution includes this clause: 

Whereas, the need for regional cooperation and leadership by public and
private entities in the area of economic development has been highlighted by the
Itasca project and the Brookings Institutions’ Blueprint for American Prosperity;  

The Met Council, of course, also played a role in the largely taxpayer-funded creation of the new U.S. Bank Stadium, a project that has helped direct tax dollars and resources away from public education. And the funders of the Blueprint initiative that led to the Minneapolis 2040 plan—including the Minneapolis Foundation—have been key supporters of the spread of local school choice schemes at the expense of public education.

I have reached out to Minneapolis city planning officials for more information on the role of schools in the 2040 plan. When I receive a response, I will add it here.

If leaving the schools out of a master vision for Minneapolis’s growth was purposeful, then to what end?

This fall, three new charter high schools will open in Minneapolis. Two will likely struggle to survive (Northeast Polytech; The Studio School), in the competitive pursuit of students (students bring funding). One, the Hiawatha Academy High School in the Seward neighborhood, will be buoyed by philanthropic dollars, including investment from the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart dollars) and from local, wealthy supporters of market-based education reform, including the folks behind Minnesota Comeback.

The school will likely pull students from Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High, a burgeoning, diverse school with urban farming classes, a Heritage Spanish program, IB classes with a career and tech education focus and…seats to fill. In a competitive, market-based school choice landscape, there will be winners and losers.

Schools? No, School Choice

Minnesota Comeback, as I have documented, is a local “harbormaster” in the national, Education Cities network. Both Education Cities and Minnesota Comeback enjoy financial support from very wealthy individuals and foundations, including, locally, the Minneapolis Foundation (where Minnesota Comeback was reportedly “incubated.”

The group, run by former General Mills marketing director Al Fan, maintains a “sector agnostic” vantage point. Instead of just supporting the growth of charter schools, the organization says it supports “high performing” seats in schools of any shape—public, charter, private or religious.

This is a district-less vision for the future of education in Minneapolis, where neighborhoods and community schools do not particularly matter. Rather than a robust, philanthropist-driven embrace of the concept of public education (that it is a cornerstone of our democracy and a public entity worth supporting, for example), Minnesota Comeback’s ideology revolves around a partially privatized system of individual choice. 

A May 25 post on Minnesota Comeback’s Facebook page illustrates this very concept. The children are our future, the post claims, and right now, according to Minnesota Comeback’s standardized test-based calculations, “only 4,300” of Minneapolis’s 30,000 plus students attend a “high-performing” school. The solution, in Minnesota Comeback’s view? Embrace the scattered playing field of the school choice market.

Their Facebook post advises just that. It lists twelve schools that “do well by students underserved” and have space available for the upcoming school year. Seven are charter schools with mostly segregated populations. One of those charter schools, Nompeng Academy, hasn’t even opened its doors yet, but is still being sold as a high performer, based on its affiliation with an existing charter school in Brooklyn Park.

One commenter on the Facebook post plaintively asked why the FAIR school in downtown Minneapolis did not make the list of recommended schools. In response, Minnesota Comeback has this to offer:

For a school to be high performing, proficiency OR growth needs to be at/above the state average. In instances where a lot of high school students opt out of the MCA, we look at the school’s average ACT score – we consider 21.0 (or above) high performing because colleges and universities consider 21 “college ready.”

This is a game we can’t win. MCA and ACT test scores play a huge role in segregating not only charter schools, but also public schools and colleges. Fixating on them as the determinant of quality fits exactly into the rapid push to privatize America’s public school system, as detailed in a recent Talking Points Memo series called “The Hidden History of the Privatization of Everything.”

Since 2000, the testing market has roughly tripled in size, to nearly $4 billion a year, with annual achievement tests spawning a range of more frequent tracking assessments. As testing has flourished, more and more functions of the school publishing industry the have fallen into fewer and fewer hands. In 1988, ten publishers shared 70 percent of the textbook market. Today, the “Big Three” —McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the juggernaut Pearson—control at least 85 percent of the market. These lucky few have since expanded their offerings; Pearson hawks everything from student data trackers to online credit-recovery courses to ADHD diagnostic kits.

Take a look at one of the charter schools featured in the Minnesota Comeback Facebook post. Hennepin Elementary School is a small charter school in south Minneapolis, with 338 students; ninety percent are black, ten percent are Latino. Ninety-six percent live in poverty, according to federal standards.

Although Hennepin Elementary’s test scores are not exactly “beating the odds,” as market-based reform purveyors like to say, it sure is trying. The school gives its young charges “double sessions of reading and math on a daily basis” and tests all kids, even kindergarteners, on multiple occasions throughout the school year. According to a school testing calendar, kids are tested and retested on a continuous cycle.

Is there any public, charter or private school in the metro area with a majority white population that is built around constant testing and test prep? Would any wealthy funder of Minnesota Comeback send their own child to a school that doubles down on math and reading, the two most tested subjects? Perhaps not.

The Shrinking Minneapolis Schools

Meanwhile, the Minneapolis Public Schools is set to embark on another round of challenging conversations about the district’s “footprint,” as Superintendent Ed Graff has repeatedly said. The district is $33 million in the hole for the upcoming school year. It has seven high schools. Three of them are near or over capacity (South, Southwest, Washburn), while four are under-filled (North, Edison, Henry and Roosevelt). Then, there are the smaller, alternative high school programs run by the district, including Wellstone International, Heritage and FAIR school.

That’s a lot of seats to fill. There are also finances to think about. The expansion of school choice as the solution to education issues means that one pot of money–the per-pupil, general education funds provided by the state–is getting sliced into smaller and smaller pieces. Thanks to state law, districts like Minneapolis must pay the lion’s share of both transportation and special education services that charter schools provide—with no oversight over how the money is being spent.

So how do public schools fit into the Minneapolis 2040 plan? And why have they been seemingly excluded thus far? 

The last community engagement session for the 2040 plan is being held on May 31 at Powderhorn Recreation Center from 5:30-8:00 p.m. 

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If there is hope for a renewal of our belief in public institutions and a common good, it may reside in the public schools. 

–Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Have We Lost Sight of the Promise of Public Schools?”

7 thoughts on “Minneapolis Public Schools “Ghosted” by 2040 City Plan

  1. Are you familiar with the concept of learning ecosystems? It’s Ed Reform 2.0. Since you all were first in line with charter schools, maybe you are first in line with the “no school” model of cyber-instruction / surveillance and community-based “projects,” with badges paid for via ESAs. Would love to talk more if you want to email me. Have been doing a deep dive into Steve Rothschild, Twin Cities Rise, Human Capital Performance Bonds, and Art Rolnick formerly of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. https://www.google.com/amp/s/wrenchinthegears.com/2016/09/23/from-neighborhood-schools-to-learning-eco-systems-a-dangerous-trade/amp/

  2. This is absolutely riveting, Sarah. As I was reading, I was thinking about Los Angeles and its new superintendent, Austin Beutner. He is the perfect person to be installed for a plan like this, trusted by the City’s elites and never once elected by the public for the many positions he has held.

  3. Our superintendent is part of Ridge-Lane, LP-former PA Governor Tom Ridge (also Homeland Security). Merchant banking firm to run all of the P3 programs. Bi-partisan 12 former governors, strong military ties, very much the Deep State in this new “Pay for Success” world, of which education is just one part. https://www.ridge-lane.com/team/

    My testimony to the SRC: https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/05/17/yes-i-am-an-advisor-for-ridge-lane-superintendent-hite-may-17-2018/

    My testimony to Philadelphia City Council: https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/05/16/speaking-out-against-pay-for-success-predatory-public-private-partnerships-and-dr-hites-ties-to-ridge-lane-lp/

  4. The post and the comments by others are on point. The Minneapolis story is unfolding in other metro areas. Public education is either invisible or coupled directly with economic development and faddish rhetoric about ecosystems for LRNG. The real dealing is for profits through social impact bonds an easy sell to taxpayers and public officials who are not usually informed about profits to be made by outsourcing public services to profit-seeking investors.
    The Brookings/McKinsey consultations/recommendations are all about business development as if a panacea. I would not be surprised if WeWork is looking for space to commandeer for the gig economy.

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