Tag Archives: Schott Foundation

Minneapolis Public Schools Redesign Plans Marred by Inaccurate Information

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

January 27, 2020

On January 24, the Minneapolis Public Schools sent an email to parents and community members with the following subject line: Comprehensive District Design Digest: Everything you need to know!

The cheery exclamation point did little to calm fears, however, regarding the district’s comprehensive design proposal (known as the CDD).

For one thing, the email sent to MPS families and staff included a summary of the five options now contained in the district proposal, but there was no link provided to the actual document so that people could read through it themselves.

A parent requested the link on Facebook from a district employee, and it was then provided, but this does not seem like an effective way to build trust in MPS’s potentially massively disruptive plans.

Incomplete Information

The proposal, thus far, is outlined in a PowerPoint document that will be discussed at the school board’s January 28 Committee of the Whole meeting and at the district-sponsored listening sessions that will be held over the next several weeks.

This approach–selectively releasing explosive information just days before public engagement sessions are slated to begin–seems designed to further stoke panic, division, and discord between parents and various school communities, with little sense of how to actually bring people together for the common good.

And the plan itself is laced with incomplete or inaccurate information, which is also sowing mistrust and fear in some corners of the district.

MPS Seems Bent on Slandering K-8 Schools

The CDD proposal released on January 24 continues an attempt to prove that K-8 schools are somehow worse for students than standalone middle schools. In so doing, the proposal offers a shoddy side-by-side comparison of unnamed (but easily identified) district schools.

Slides 45-46 seem to pit Barton Open K-8 against Justice Page Middle School. Barton is listed as “School A: K-8” and Page is “School B: 6-8.” A list of what each school ostensibly offers, in terms of enrichment and support, then follows.

But the list under School A: K-8 (Barton) is selectively narrow and purposefully incomplete, in order to drive home MPS’s pitch that K-8s are inadequate. This is slide 46:

Barton does offer team sports (though fewer in recent years, thanks to district-level budget cuts), though, and health in grades 5-8, not just in 7 and 8. Phy Ed also happens for every kid, K-8, and not just in 8th grade.

Barton offers art, too, and many other specialized elective course offerings, including Film Studies and a semester-long deep dive into the Holocaust and its connections to current events.

The dance class Barton offers as an elective is built around students as creators, since the class culminates in a show of dances choreographed by students. In recent years, there have been powerful works done that reflect students’ interest in Black Lives Matter and gun violence, for example.

The school also has a robust after-school debate league, and has recently fielded English, Spanish and Somali-speaking teams.

Good School vs. Bad School = A Problematic Framing

Barton does not have AVID (a separate programming model built around providing more support and smaller class sizes for students in need) but it does offer in-school classes for students who need homework help and so on–all on an absolutely bare bones budget, of course.

It may also offer something else, thanks to its smaller size: an opportunity for closer connection among teachers, staff, and students. This connection might foster stronger relationships, which is also a form of essential support. (Nicole Naftziger, MPS parent at a community K-8, has done a thorough job of debunking claims–often using MPS’s own data–that 6-8 schools are better for all students.)

But the CDD proposal seems designed to tell a purposefully inaccurate story.

Electives Are Not Offered to All

Justice Page is “School B” in the above slide, and it does appear to boast an impressive number of elective classes. But upon closer inspection, these course offerings are most available to the students who are already successful–as least as far as standardized test scores go.

That’s because the course offerings sheet available on the Justice Page website, which guides students through the enrichment classes available to them, includes the following caveats:

ELL students, in other words, are presumably isolated from the rest of their peers and not allowed to participate in enrichment courses with native or proficient English speakers.

And kids who perhaps don’t test well or who are somehow below grade-level in math or reading (the two most tested subjects) will also miss out on at least one enrichment class, and be shuttled into a remedial class–even though there is good pedagogical support for not doing this.

Should MPS Understand Its Own Schools Better?

While I don’t presume to know all of the reasons Page has structured their course offerings this way (it may be what the staff feels is most helpful for students), it certainly challenges the narrative that all kids will receive a “well-rounded education,” as MPS claims, at large, standalone middle schools.

My critique here, however, is not directed at Page, nor should this be read as a simplistic defense of Barton. My own kids have gone to Barton but my youngest will go to Page if K-8s are eliminated in MPS, and I deeply believe there are no “perfect” schools, including Barton.

Every school is a complex mix of success stories and sometimes deep-seated obstacles. Barton is no different, although it does–like Justice Page–benefit from the kind of stability and community support that should be cultivated at all MPS sites.

Rather, I am using an example concerning two schools that are in my neighborhood to poke holes in the incomplete and factually inaccurate marketing plan/proposal MPS released on January 24.

Beware the Red Herring

If we are to accept the idea that large-scale disruptions are urgently needed–now–in order to save money and better serve MPS’s most marginalized communities, then we need factual information that can be vetted and verified.

We can’t build a better MPS on half-truths and skimpy marketing plans.

Communities in north, northeast and the south/central neighborhoods have experienced the most disruption and upheaval in recent history. North High School was recommended for closure by district officials in 2010; it is still in the process of trying to rebuild its community.

Some people also maintain that the Central neighborhood has never gotten over the closure of its high school in the 1980s. From a website run by Augsburg College historians:

Central High School was the heart of the Southside African-American community for most of the twentieth century. Despite protests, the Minneapolis Public Schools decided to close the building in 1982. It was demolished soon thereafter (except for the gymnasium, which remains). The school was also critical in the life of Prince Rogers Nelson, who attended high school here from 1972-1976. 

The essential question, then, is what MPS can do collectively to support schools across the city, especially since closures are almost certain to follow–even though the January 24 CDD proposal states such decisions will be made after the board votes on a plan.

Community-Led Change

Disruption and the creeping Charlie-like spread of neoliberal, market-based education reform ideas are exactly what has been done, repeatedly, in Minneapolis and other large districts. (Just take a look at the proliferation of charter schools in north and northeast Minneapolis, in particular.)

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is jitu.jpg
Jitu Brown

What hasn’t been tried–as a school board member acknowledged recently–is a grassroots, community-led approach to strengthening existing schools within MPS. This is a strategy supported by many racial and education justice activists, including Jitu Brown of Journey for Justice and the leaders of the Schott Foundation based in Boston.

Will it really work to push through school closures, dramatic boundary changes (some of which I think hold promise, including the move to send Kenwood area kids to Anwatin and North High), teacher and staff upheavals, and so on? Where will this put the district in five years?

And, amid MPS’s faulty claims that standalone middle schools are somehow better for students, the Minneapolis City Planning Commission appears to have given the green light to yet another K-8 charter school in northeast Minneapolis, Metro Tech Academy.

“We don’t have failing schools—as a public we’ve been failed.”

—Jitu Brown

Minneapolis Ranks High–Relatively–On Loving Cities Index

Uncategorized, , ,

March 20, 2018

Want Education Reform? Try Love

Since 2000, according to his own estimation, Bill Gates’s philanthropic foundation has dedicated $1 billion to the remaking of America’s schools. Speaking at an urban education conference in 2017, Gates said he hopes to address disparities in outcomes between students of color and their white peers. While noting that race-based differences in school success measures are still a problem, Gates makes it clear that he still believes in schools as the “unit of change” when it comes to boosting student achievement. 

Never once in his speech did Gates mention the broader inequalities—from immigration status to lack of prenatal care—that impact students’ lives. Instead, as outlined in his 2017 speech, Gates and his foundation have maintained a laser focus on what happens inside the classroom or, in the case of its promotion of charter schools, on what type of school kids attend.

From Ronald Reagan to Clinton, Bush, Obama and now Trump, the federal government has supported a Gates-like view of education policy by promoting everything from a national, standardized curriculum (Common Core), to the continued use of testing to rank teachers, schools, and students.

But there is a different perspective available, thanks to a new report from the Boston-based Schott Foundation. 

Called the “Loving Cities Index,” the Schott Foundation report looks at multiple and intersecting factors that create unequal opportunities for students—often before they ever set foot in a public school classroom. Schott Foundation researchers did a deep dive into ten U.S. cities from Long Beach, California to Springfield, Massachusetts and points in between, evaluating four “areas of impact”: Care, Commitment, Stability, and Capacity.

Cities across the United States are built around policies rooted in “implicit racial bias at best, and explicit racism and hate at worst,” the report argues. The result is that too many families still lack access to healthcare, job, and housing options that would provide a solid foundation for their children’s academic success. Over 40 percent of students of color across the country attend schools where at least three-quarters of the student body live in poverty or are considered low-income, the report notes. In contrast, just over 7 percent of white students attend these same types of schools.

No city scored well on the Schott Foundation’s Loving Cities scale. Minneapolis and Long Beach were at the top, offering just over half, on average, of what the Foundation believes kids need to thrive, including healthy food, safe neighborhoods, reliable public transportation and access to advanced coursework. Charlotte, North Carolina, was the lowest performer, along with cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Little Rock, Arkansas. These cities were flagged for offering just over one-third of the social and environmental support services deemed necessary for greater student, family, and community success.

Some of the solutions offered by Loving Cities include school support staff who can coordinate “with community partners to bring outside resources inside schools—from immediate needs like food or clothing to more complex ones like counseling or emotional support.” The report also describes the need to address “white-washed” teaching of our history of oppression, and the importance of building a common understanding of how we have historically created opportunity gaps. Another important part of the equation involves “progressive” school funding policies, with sufficiently high funding levels and higher rates of funding for high poverty districts.

By zeroing in on segregation, environmental racism, police brutality, and unfair banking practices, for example, the Schott Foundation offers a seismic shift in how policy makers, philanthropists, and the general public can approach education reform.

The Schott Foundation offers a seismic shift in how policy makers, philanthropists, and the general public can approach education reform.

This is a radical departure from the market-based reform model pushed by Republican and Democratic leaders, along with billionaires like Bill Gates, and venture capitalists eager to take a crack at reshaping—not to mention profiting from—America’s “untapped” public education system.

Market-based reform measures have succeeded in scattering the education landscape with seemingly endless “choices” for families, including charter and voucher schools. But 90 percent of students in the United States still attend traditional public schools, and as Schott Foundation president Dr. John Jackson notes in his introduction to the Loving Cities Index, “parent income remains the number one predictor of student outcomes—not type of public school, labor contract, or brand of assessment.”

In other words, promoting school choice as the solution is a distraction from the basic fact that parent income, along with interrelated racial and economic segregation, remain powerful determinants in the quality of education a child receives.

Attacking these more economically oriented issues appears to be uncomfortable for billionaires like Gates—perhaps it calls into question the largesse he accumulates while income inequality balloons. Maybe that is why he avoids tackling the racially biased policies that the Schott Foundation and others insist stand in the way of progress for all America’s students. As the report states, “Placing the blame at the doors of educators, parents, students and the public school system is the easy route that has proven to do very little to solve the problem.”

This piece was originally published by The Progressive.

Like my work? Consider supporting it through a much appreciated donation. And thanks to those of you who already have!

Donate via PayPal