Minneapolis’ Nellie Stone Johnson school, a high poverty K-8 site in north Minneapolis, was named after a pioneering African-American woman who had a “long and distinguished record of public service in support of the advancement of minority concerns.” Johnson was in fact a labor activist and the first “Black person elected to citywide office” in Minneapolis. 
But, will the school named after her survive a bout of “autonomy”?
On Tuesday, April 14, the Minneapolis school board will vote on whether or not to allow Nellie Stone Johnson (NSJ) school to become one of four “autonomous” district schools in the city. This is being pushed forward under the Community Partnership Schools (CPS) concept, which the district and the Minneapolis teachers union agreed to embrace during 2014 contract negotiations. (The CPS model is intended to pair district schools with outside partners, as the schools are given more “freedom” in how they structure their days and hire staff members, etc.)
In the fall of 2014, Nellie Stone Johnson school had a new principal and a mostly new staff, after a few years of leadership change and the loss of some experienced teachers. The school also had a new relationship with a nearby community organization called the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ), which is run by Sondra Samuels, wife of current Minneapolis school board member Don Samuels. NAZ won a federal “Promise Neighborhood” grant in 2011, worth $28 million. (It is important to note that this five-year grant is set to expire in 2016, or before the three-year “trial” period would be up for NSJ’s experiment with autonomy, should it become a CPS site.)
All of this “newness” is making it harder to document the community’s involvement in the push to turn Nellie Stone Johnson into a “partnership” school, which would further connect it to its proposed partner, NAZ. If this goes through, NAZ’s “scholar coaches” would be placed in classrooms throughout the school, as support staff.
In fact, behind the scenes and under the cover of anonymity–which seems to be the only way to puncture the “Come on get happy!” promise of these partnership schools–employees with inside knowledge of Nellie Stone Johnson are speaking out and raising questions.
Yesterday, I published a post that included excerpts from a NSJ staff member, who has sent an emailed list of concerns to school board members. The email included this blunt statement:
“This movement was forced from the district down. From a Union meeting I attended at NSJ, it should have come from the community up. It did not.”
These assertions are backed up by recent conversations I have had with other people from the school, including another employee who isn’t satisfied with the plan to “autonomize” NSJ:
- People at NSJ “don’t seem to understand the concept” of the Community Partnership School model
- The presentation to families about converting to a CPS site was “not professional” or thorough, and included leading questions, such as: “Do you want your children to go to a better school?”
- The budget for next year is uncertain for NSJ, as it will depend on how many students actually show up at the school (because of MPS’ requirement that all CPS sites also pilot a new “student-based” funding model).
- “A lot of positions at the school have been cut,” and people were told it was due to seniority. But, this employee is suspicious of that because of the proposed partnership with NAZ and their “scholar coaches,” who will be paid half of what the district pays associate educators to work at the school.
- The whole NAZ connection is worrisome. The organization’s presence at Nellie Stone Johnson has been growing since last year, leading to the impression that the “whole partnership thing has been in the works for a while.” Still, this employee maintains, “Nobody can explain what NAZ’s role is in the building.”
- Another concern: there is no engaged, informed parent body at Nellie Stone Johnson (the principal herself made this clear at a fall 2014 staff meeting, when she introduced the CPS model). “Parents don’t really know” what CPS is about. This employee’s fear? “When they look up, everything’s going to be in place, and they (parents) won’t have a say in it.”
- Final question on this employee’s mind: “Is CPS a pretty package with an empty box inside?”
The tricky thing is, if NSJ becomes a partnership school, it won’t really have autonomy, as in, independence. Instead, it will be bound to the same accelerated, test-based “accountability” guidelines laid out by the district’s new strategic plan, Accelerate 2020. (I believe this is what former MPS Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson used to call “bonded autonomy.”)
Nagging questions: What happens if Nellie Stone Johnson becomes a Community Partnership School but can’t meet the “accelerated” pressure from MPS to boost student test scores? What are the consequences of “failing” at autonomy?
Reflection time: Why might MPS be pursuing this? Is it because Minneapolis became a “portfolio district” back in 2010, under the guidance of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE)? The CRPE was started by Paul Hill, and is built around a market-based reform model of school choice (autonomous, independent schools as far as the eye can see).
Here is a video of Hill describing the portfolio district concept, in which he states, among other things, that “diversity is a problem that districts have to solve in new ways,” that the purpose of schools is to serve the economy, and that “collective bargaining agreements further constrain schools.” It also says that districts should be “seekers of the best schools for children, no matter who runs them” (This starts with “flexibility” in hiring practices, and requests for deviation from the union contract–kind of odd for a school named after a labor activist….)
This is the language of the market-based, privatization movement for public schools (privatization=independent, non-public entities managing public schools and public money). And this is the guiding light and structural framework for the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Community Partnership School model.
Don’t believe me? Just watch.
(Side note: The union may have signed off on this for a variety of reasons, including a documented preference for alternative school models, such as the “Site-Governed Schools” concept it helped bring to MPS in 2009. To date, however, there has been only one site-governed school in Minneapolis, Pierre Bottineau French Immersion. This school will cease to operate as an independent school this fall, after just a few rocky years in existence.)
What is the difference between an “autonomous district school” and a “partnership school” versus a charter (in Minnesota)? Charters are usually subject to the same *state* testing obligations as district-run schools – are the MPS Accelerate 2020 guidelines that different from state-wide rules?
Minnesota is still a local control state, so the district in Minneapolis sets its own test-score based targets. Minnesota has a Race to the Top waiver, and each school is supposed to document its progress, but the goals of the Accelerate 2020 plan are unique to Minneapolis. Charter schools have their own little districts in MN, so “autonomous” district schools are still under the district umbrella, and employ unionized teachers. “Partnership” schools may be quite charter-school like, however; time will tell.