Tag Archives: Al Fan

Minneapolis’s Previous School Board Can’t Vote on Proposed Policy Manual

January 10, 2017

Tonight, the new Minneapolis school board members will be seated. Just before that meeting, last year’s board will hold a ceremonial event to welcome the new members and conduct the oath of office.

What will not happen is a previously expected vote by the departing board on two key issues: 1) the revised policy manual largely orchestrated by outgoing member Josh Reimnitz, and 2) the make-up of the district’s Workforce 2020 advisory committee. In a December post, I spelled out the concerns with the revised policy manual, which is based on a somewhat obscure model called Carver Policy Governance

After months of work in 2016, it seemed as though the board’s policy committee, led by Reimnitz, would be able to get the policy manual passed at the December board meeting, despite concerns that the proposed revisions (intended to guide the school board’s work) had yet to be thoroughly vetted by the public. Adding to this concern was the seemingly sudden realization that no Equity and Diversity Impact Assessment had been completed for the new policy manual, although such an assessment is a district requirement for any new, notable “future policies, practices, programs and procedures.”

This realization–that no such assessment had been done–killed chances for a December vote. Rumors then circulated that the 2016 school board would get one more chance to push a vote through on the revised manual. That’s because the first meeting of the new year includes a nod to the outgoing members, as noted above, and a suspected (planned upon, really) opportunity for the exiting board members to squeak in a couple of votes before the new board is officially seated.

Not true. Statute dictates that the departing board members’ voting rights were valid until December 31, 2016, and not a day after. Reimnitz (along with the other two outgoing members, Tracine Asberry and Carla Bates) will therefore not be able to weigh in on whether or not the board should adopt the trimmed down policy manual he helped craft. (Many close observers say the manual is simply not ready for prime time, either. and in need of further hashing out.)

The policy manual vote is nowhere to be found on tonight’s agenda. Neither is any further discussion of who should be on the district’s Workforce 2020 committee. This committee is a state-mandated advisory group, and it must include community members who will attend monthly meetings and advise the school board on “rigorous academic standards and student achievement goals and measures.” All board members were allowed to suggest two names for this committee; those names were then slated for approval at December’s board meeting.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, the board came to an awkward pause that night, when it appeared not all board members were prepared to sign off on the Workforce committee–as the suggested names had not been previously given to the board for review. Should the board vote in one fell swoop on something they hadn’t seen until just then? Questions like this caused citywide representative, Rebecca Gagnon, to stop the process. Three hours and ten minutes into the four-hour long meeting, Gagnon told board chair Jenny Arneson that she “didn’t know we were voting on this tonight.” 

“We’re not, unless we approve it,” Arneson quickly replied. But, unless Gagnon had spoken up, it seems clear that the vote on the committee’s make-up would have sailed forward, with no public discussion on the proposed names on the list. Does it matter? Maybe not. But at least two names on the list–Al Fan and Kyrra Rankine–stand out as worthy of further scrutiny.

To be eligible to serve on the district’s Workforce committee, participants are supposed to be “teachers, parents, staff, students, and other community residents invested in the success of Minneapolis Public School students.” But Kyrra Rankine has been a longstanding Teach for America–Twin Cities employee, and Al Fan is the executive director of Minnesota Comeback, a moneyed education reform group with a declared goal of creating “30,000 rigorous and relevant seats” (?) in Minneapolis, by 2025–in “sector neutral” settings. 

Sector neutral means any school setting–charter, private, public–is fine, so long as it “beats the odds” for kids in poverty. This may be one (arguably unsuccessful) way to fund education, but it is certainly not the same thing as being “invested in the success of Minneapolis Public School students.” The public doesn’t “own” Minnesota Comeback the way it owns a public school district. There are no meetings posted on the Minnesota Comeback website, and no elected officials sit on its policy and “talent” committees. Minnesota Comeback is wielding influence with minimal public oversight. There are no four-hour long videos of any Minnesota Comeback gatherings to pour over and report on. 

Democracy!

The Minneapolis Public Schools might be a bureaucratic mess in the eyes of many, but it also must answer to the public through open meetings, a democratically elected school board and public data requests. Minnesota Comeback must, presumably, only answer to its funders, such as the Minneapolis Foundation, which described the group this way in a December, 2015 newsletter:

  • Minnesota Comeback (formerly the Education Transformation Initiative) will develop a portfolio of strategic initiatives and school investments to ensure that all Minneapolis students attend high-quality schools by 2025.

Minnesota Comeback and Teach for America are frequent darlings of the local philanthropic community, as evidenced by the Minneapolis Foundation’s 2017 grant cycle. Should their representatives have a seat on a Minneapolis Public Schools Workforce 2020 committee?

Perhaps, but it seems that is a conversation the school board should have in public. And, with the rush to vote stopped, it looks like that’s what citizens just might get in 2017–for the proposed policy revision and for the Workforce 2020 committee.

Also up tonight: a shuffling of school board officers. Jenny Arneson will no longer be board chair. Instead, Don Samuels, Nelson Inz and Rebecca Gagnon are vying to fill her spot. Vice Chair is expected to go to Kim Ellison, while Arneson has put her name in for Treasurer. New board members Bob Walser and Ira Jourdain are said to be interested in taking over Reimnitz’s seat as Clerk, who oversees the board’s policy committee. The meeting starts at 5:30 p.m. at Davis Center headquarters and is broadcast live online here.

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MN Comeback: Reheated Ed Reform Treats

March 3, 2016

As part of my ongoing series on McKinsey & Company’s influence on the Minneapolis Public Schools, I promised a closer look at the latest group that wants to have its way with the district, MN Comeback. Access Part 1 of my McKinsey series here, and go from there.

On Tuesday, March 1, MN Comeback held its quarterly meeting within the warm and naturally lit Heritage Park YMCA space, on the near-north rim of Minneapolis.

While a handful of Heritage Park residents whirred along on exercise machines across the hall, MN Comeback meeting attendees snacked on free doughnuts and cupfuls of coffee. Those attendees included some well-known names: R.T. Rybak, Minneapolis interim superintendent Michael Goar, former Minneapolis superintendent Bernadeia Johnson–who introduced herself as an educational consultant, and early charter school legislator Ember Reichgott-Junge. 

Later, as I tried to capture my thoughts on the event, scenes from The Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s early comic series, Life is Hell, popped into my head. One of Groening’s most unforgettable comics featured repeat characters Akbar and Jeff as owners of an exclusive Airport Snack Bar. Their tagline? “Where the Elite Meet to Eat Reheated Meaty Treats.”

MN Comeback meetings could be seen as the place where the Elite Meet to Promote Reheated Education Reform Treats.

Let me explain.

MN Comeback is the latest attempt by the Minneapolis Foundation and other high-end funders to push a specific education reform agenda on the Minneapolis Public Schools. In 2006-2007, this involved working through the Itasca Project to put a McKinsey & Company-written, market-based reform plan in place for the Minneapolis schools.

That plan hasn’t amounted to much, although it did help usher in a Leaning Tower of Pisa-like stack of silver bullet initiatives and priorities, including an influx of non-education trained, transformational staffers. (Just read through the district’s “Human Capital” department’s recent hires for a few choice examples of this.)

Suzy Redo 2
MN Comeback PPT slide

Then, 2013 brought the awkward RESET Education campaign, which looked like another meeting of the moneyed and powerful minds, brought together to transform the lowly Minneapolis Public Schools. 

RESET promoted a grab bag of educational quick fix solutions, all wrapped up in a neat marketing plan. Here are the five gap-destroying strategies RESET settled on:

  • Real-time Use of Data
  • Expectations not Excuses
  • Strong Leadership
  • Effective Teaching
  • Time on Task

Like a reheated airport snack bar hot dog, these strategies may look good from afar, but under close inspection, they are not very satisfying. The first and most obvious reason is, these are top down, catchy solutions cooked up in boardrooms and “expert” planning sessions–far from the sometimes distressing world of actual public school classrooms. (Another obvious reason? Childhood poverty–which is tied so tightly to race here–has deepened and nearly doubled in Minnesota in the past 20 years, just as funding for public education dropped, and money for families in need stagnated.)

And that is probably why RESET quietly retreated to the background, only to be reborn as MN Comeback. The solutions being promoted are the same; they just come under a different banner now. 

Alongside RESET, the Minneapolis Foundation hosted something called the Education Transformation Initiative (ETI). The ETI was awarded a $200,000 “education ecosystem” grant from the local Bush Foundation as recently as 2014, but a MN Comeback funder I talked with at the March 1 meeting said that the ETI had been transformed into MN Comeback. 

The language and promise of the ETI–of transformational, data driven, union-free policies for public schools–was supported by the same tight-knit group of non-educationy heavy hitters, including the Walton Foundation (Wal-Mart), the reform-happy Joyce Foundation, and the local Robins Kaplan Miller Ciresi Foundation.

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MN Comeback Team Roster

The ETI was staffed by former McKinsey & Company consultant Amy Hertel, through her position at the Minneapolis Foundation. In 2015, Hertel became Vice President of Network Impact for something called Education Cities, which is yet another reiteration of Gates/Walton/Broad Foundation money being used to prop up non-classroom careers for people who swear they only want all kids to be able to “access great public schools.” 

The ETI became MN Comeback, which is now part of Hertel’s group, Education Cities. MN Comeback is managed here by Al Fan, formerly of the short-lived group, Charter School Partners. At a fall, 2015 MN Comeback meeting, Fan admitted that he’s “only been at this” education reform stuff for 5 or 6 years, after a career in marketing, I believe, at General Mills.

This may explain the vagueness that is MN Comeback. The group–which apparently has raised $30+ million to support its campaign–says it wants to bring “30,000 rigorous and relevant” seats to Minneapolis by 2025. But Fan could not explain what “relevant” means, and, so far, “rigorous” only means the boosting of test scores. 

The MN Comeback funder I chatted with on March 1 was a nice person, whose professed good intentions I can’t argue with. But he did say that he knows little about education, and that one main thing he thought was holding the Minneapolis schools back was that parents just didn’t have enough info about all of their school choice options. “If the school across the street from you isn’t good, you should be able to go a mile away to a better option,” he explained.

Looks like we can add a naive belief in the transformational power of school choice to MN Comeback’s menu.

Up next: A closer look at MN Comeback’s partnership with the Minneapolis Public Schools.

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