Tag Archives: Dennis Cheesebrow

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

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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:

File_-Pro-Forma-Executive-SummaryDownload

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.



Minneapolis Parent on School District’s Proposed Redesign: Changes Should Not Be Pushed on Us

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May 11, 2019

Sonya Perez-Lauterbach can appreciate the predicament the Minneapolis Public Schools finds itself in. After decades of competition and pressure from school choice schemes, including charter schools and open enrollment plans, the district says its student numbers are shrinking. Any continued loss of students means a drain on district finances, while costs for aging infrastructure continue to rise.

And so, district administrators say they have pulled together a redesign proposal, based on an internal, eighteen-month process of scouring and compiling data. This proposal–framed by the district as “options for a sustainable path forward”–was released to the public in late April and has thus far caused some measure of confusion and uncertainty among the school communities most likely to be impacted by it.

Perez-Lauterbach lives in north Minneapolis and has a child who is slated to enter kindergarten this fall at Sheridan, a K-5 arts and Spanish dual-immersion school in the northeast corner of the city. She says she is certain that “leading a public school district is not an easy job,” and that any attempt to realign the Minneapolis Public Schools will require humility and an understanding of the complexities involved.

Display of support for refugees, Barton Open School

Side note: Dual-immersion schools are a popular choice for many parents but could become more segregated–or disappear altogether for some communities such as north Minneapolis–under the current district proposal.

Still, Perez-Lauterbach is not yet ready to let the district off the hook. In the face of increased competition for students and resources (thanks to the market-based reform model foisted upon public education systems around the world), she argues that changes “should not be pushed on parents.”

Instead, she would like the district to embrace parents and community members as “partners in making a better school district.” After all, Perez-Lauterbach notes, people naturally seek “ways to regain control in a seemingly unstable environment,” and she assumes that the district does not want parents to opt out of the system altogether in search of stability. (The graduate degree she holds in Learning and Organizational Change is likely an asset here.)

This week, Perez-Lauterbach wrote a letter to members of the Minneapolis school board, expressing her concerns with the district’s proposal and arguing for a better, community-focused path to change. She has given me permission to publish her letter, with her original formatting.

Dear School Board –

To what extent is this comprehensive plan and process building trust and confidence in the MPS system?

I am aware that MPS is bleeding students to the many other school options available today. The financial solvency and future of MPS DEPENDS on increasing market share.  But I believe that increasing that market share is not an issue of redrawing boundaries, or moving programs. When it comes to making decisions on behalf of your child it requires a high degree of CONFIDENCE and TRUST in whomever you entrust your child’s education.  Families also want to KNOW with confidence, that their voice and concerns will be HEARD and ACTED upon. In order to increase market share MPS is challenged with the goal of changing HEARTS and MINDS of parents who have and are exiting the system. MPS board needs to take on a full force focus on building TRUST and CONFIDENCE with ALL its stakeholders. Unfortunately the current plan and process has, so far, NOT built trust or confidence.

As the plan stands there is no access to the data that was utilized to create it. The financial numbers on cost savings or implementation are not verified or even available.  Families were not involved in building the proposed plans. And the current timeline for feedback feels completely inappropriate and disingenuous. In May and June, a time when families should be celebrating pre-k, 5th and 8th grade graduations and the continuation of education, unfortunately they have been thrown into a whirlwind of worry and concern not knowing what their child’s future educational options are within MPS.  Teachers who work tirelessly to create a safe, and stable environment for their students do not have answers as to what will happen to their class and are also burdened with the heightened concern for their own employment and future with the district.

Recommendations:  

  1. Release a clear and heartfelt apology to all the students, families, and teachers for the way this planning process has been handled.  
  2. Re-publish the plan and associated communication with “DRAFT” on it. If you truly desire feedback and buy-in from your stakeholders more steps need to be taken to build confidence that this feedback process is genuine and will significantly impact the ultimate plan.
  3. Adjust the feedback timeline  to include the development and response time to feasibility studies. These are HUGE decisions impacting the lives of thousands of children that are being made based on ASSUMPTIONS of cost savings.
  4. Release the data, assumptions, and insights that were used to build the current plan. As well as the selection process of the consultants who built this plan and the criteria and qualifications of that group.
  5. Review every step of the process with a Change Management Professional with a human-centric perspective and approach.
  6. Equip yourselves, principles, and parent advocates with unified talking points and answers. So far every meeting I attended I have found more confusion and questions generated; confidence has not been instilled.

Many, many families want to support MPS because they believe in public education. But the leadership of MPS must take actions to build trust and confidence so that we can feel good about choosing MPS for our children and even work to convince our neighbors and friends to join in the MPS community. PLEASE USE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO BUILD TRUST by taking corrective steps in the process. I look forward to seeing positive action from the board that radically interrupts the continuation of top down culture and unresponsive leadership that public education is unfortunately known for.

Sincerely,

Sonya Perez-Lauterbach

Public meetings about this proposal are scheduled to take place in May, including the May 14 Minneapolis school board meeting. A final board vote on the plan is currently scheduled for August.

New Comprehensive Design Plan for Minneapolis: A Lesson in Austerity?

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By Sarah Lahm

For the past eighteen months, according to Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Ed Graff, district administrators have been analyzing data and pulling together a path forward for the city’s schools. This behind-the-scenes work has resulted in a Comprehensive District Design proposal that was released to the public in late April. (I previously wrote about the comprehensive design plan here.)

The proposal is being pitched as an answer to mounting pressure from the various school choice schemes that have drained students and funds away from the Minneapolis schools, as evidenced by the following statement on the district’s website:

We recognize that the days are gone when MPS was the only public school option available. Some families are happy with the way we do business. Some are not. We recognize we cannot be all things to all people.

This attempt at frankness continues throughout the district’s introduction to the redesign proposal, through rhetorical questions such as this:

Is the Minneapolis community ready to have difficult discussions about longstanding programs that may or may not be effectively impacting achievement? Are families ready to realistically consider whether taxpayer dollars are being most efficiently used by keeping all schools open instead of consolidating some buildings?

No Outreach, No Communication

Stina Kielsmeier-Cook, a parent of two from north Minneapolis, says she is willing to have these “difficult discussions,” but that, so far, no one from the district has asked for such input. Kielsmeier-Cook’s oldest child attends Emerson Spanish Immersion school near Loring Park, and she hopes her youngest will be able to start kindergarten there in two years.

Emerson is the oldest language immersion school in Minnesota, according to a profile page from the Minneapolis Public Schools. It is a dual-immersion program that serves native English and native Spanish speakers, and Kielsmeier-Cook is quick to mention the school’s “strong history and legacy of immersion.”

“Emerson has lots of teachers of color,” she notes with pride, along with what she says is the “second highest attendance rate” in MPS. Almost eighty percent of the students live in poverty, according to federal free and reduced lunch guidelines, and Kielsmeier-Cook believes the “remarkably stable” environment she’s found at Emerson is serving these students well.

That’s why she was so surprised to learn in late April that the district’s redesign plans include major boundary changes for Emerson. As Kielsmeier-Cook describes it, “there was no outreach or communication” from the district to school-based staff or families. Instead, the proposal just appeared on the district’s website on April 25, and the implications of it sent Emerson parents scrambling for information.

“Parents were just texting each other,” she says, “asking ‘is this what this means?'”

Kielsmeier-Cook has read through the three options listed for the future of MPS but worries that the proposed boundary changes for Emerson would effectively cut off around forty percent of the school’s current student body. “I don’t see how the redrawing of the boundaries would be enough to keep the school open,” she says.

Families like Kielsmeier-Cook’s that live in north Minneapolis and have had access to Emerson through district busing would instead be routed to a Spanish immersion program at Sheridan, an arts and language magnet school in northeast Minneapolis. She and other parents have expressed concern about this, as Sheridan’s program is “really new,” she says, and much smaller and less established than Emerson’s.

Thoughts?

The district’s redesign proposal would also remove the current Spanish immersion program from Anwatin Middle School and send students to either Northeast Middle School (from Sheridan) or to a newly proposed program at Andersen Community School in south Minneapolis. (Staff and families from both Anwatin and Andersen were reportedly surprised to learn of these plans.)

Shaking up Emerson and Anwatin should not be done lightly, parents and staff have said, because successful dual-immersion programs are not built overnight. All of this leaves Kielsmeier-Cook with a question of her own for the district: “Why wouldn’t they ask for our input?”

“I am willing to make changes if I see the bigger reasons why,” she insists, and says she hasn’t figured out what those bigger reasons are yet. Is it about busing? Integration? She isn’t sure, but notes that buy-in from staff and families would have been a good starting point for district officials.

Segregated Immersion Schools?

Randi Anaya is also an Emerson parent from north Minneapolis. Like Kielsmeier-Cook, she says her family may lose their spot at the school if the district’s current plans go through. Although the plan lists three potential options for the district’s redesign, option one–a stay the course model with minimal changes–is described as unsustainable. (See page 27 on the PowerPoint.)

Anaya says she isn’t sure what the real difference is between the second and third options in the plan other than some geographic changes. Option two would carve the district up into two regions along a north-south boundary while option three would result in a four-zone scenario. “This is the first I’m hearing about any of this,” Anaya said in a phone interview. “I’m trying to be open, but I think of the impact on my neighbors.”

She says that many in her community have expressed “concern over immersion schools in Minneapolis becoming more segregated” under the district’s plans. Emerson stands to lose nearly half of its student population, which she said would be “devastating” for the school, not only from a dual-immersion standpoint, but also from an overall viability angle. (Several people have mentioned the high price MPS could possibly fetch for a shuttered Emerson.)

The segregation concern comes from a new boundary for both Emerson and Windom, a popular K-5 dual-immersion program in south Minneapolis. Option two and three from the district’s proposal would divide the schools’ attendance areas up along 36th Street in south Minneapolis. Those who live north of 36th Street would go to Emerson while those living south of 36th Street would head to Windom.

This hard dividing line would be a marked departure for the current state of things, as Emerson and Windom now have somewhat overlapping attendance areas. The racial implications of the district’s proposed changes are impossible to ignore, however. Emerson would likely become an almost entirely Latino school while Windom would become even more white–a trend many in the community say they’ve been trying to combat for years, with little to no help from the district’s student placement office.

Amy Gustafson has two children at Windom and serves on the school’s site council and as co-chair of its Parent Teacher Organization. In her experience, many Windom families want to work with the district to ensure the school remains a vibrant, diverse, dual-immersion site. “I live in Linden Hills,” she notes, “but send my kids to Windom on purpose. They were already bilingual, but I wanted the diversity.”

District statistics show that Windom’s population is fifty-three percent Hispanic American and forty-one percent white, with a small number of African American and Asian American students. Emerson, in comparison, is seventy-three percent Hispanic American with a nearly equal population–thirteen and twelve percent, respectively–of white and African American students.

Gustafson says that most Windom families are committed to keeping the school’s dual-immersion approach alive and well, which would mean having a “balance of native speakers and learners.” For years, however, members of the Windom community have seen their native Spanish speaking population ebb away–a situation Gustafson fears would get worse under the district’s current redesign plans.

Shifting the school’s southside boundary from Lake Street up to 36th Street would, she says, “take sixty to eighty percent of the Latino population out of Windom.” What’s more, Gustafson says many Latino families have reported being told by district placement center staff that they could not put Windom down as their first choice while trying to enroll their children in school.

Instead, she says they have been told to put their neighborhood school down first, or risk getting no spot for their child.

This amounts to a frustrating situation for many. Rather than take a chance on what seems like a waning commitment to immersion programming from MPS, some families are open enrolling to Richfield or Eden Prairie, Gustafson says. Rising home prices in Minneapolis are also pushing some families out of Windom, and Gustafson says the school community would like to work with the district on coming up with some creative solutions, including the idea of creating a dual-immersion K-8 school in a more central location, such as Green Central or Folwell.

This would not only help the school retain more Latino families, and accommodate the high demand for dual-immersion programs, but would also be a better match for what research says is best practice for immersion schools, which Gustafson says is seven consistent years of language instruction.

Historical note: Ten years ago, during another round of upheaval and zoning changes for the Minneapolis Public Schools, Emerson was a K-8 dual-immersion school. At the time, district officials recommended closing the school altogether and moving the K-5 component into a different building. Emerson was pitched as a partner school for Windom, with a promise that such a pairing would “allow the schools to share expertise, leadership, curriculum and resources.”

Instead, Emerson became a K-5 but stayed at its current site in downtown Minneapolis. The justification for moving the middle school program to Anwatin was framed this way by MPS officials: “Pooling resources will result in a more robust, comprehensive middle school program, including more electives offered in a better facility.”

It’s not clear how much, if any, formal collaboration has since taken place between Emerson and Windom.

Confusion Leads to Worry

Anaya, one of the Emerson parents who may lose access to the school, says she is “sick to her stomach” about the confusion around MPS’s future plans, and worries that “changes could be coming fast, without information or outreach” before families and staff can fully grasp the impact. (This may be on purpose.)

Her fears were not soothed at the April 30 MPS Committee of the Whole meeting she attended with other Emerson community members.

At the meeting, district officials formally presented the comprehensive redesign plan to Minneapolis school board members. Kielsmeier-Cook was also there, and both she and Anaya say it was their first time at such a meeting, where the public is welcome to attend but cannot ask questions or otherwise participate. (Members of the public can sign up for the public comment period at regular school board meetings.)

They sat amongst staff and families from other immersion schools, including the Anwatin Middle School program, and were surprised to find that interpreters were not immediately available. Kielsmeier-Cook says that district staff seemed “caught off guard” and unprepared for the public to attend, and expressed concern that a Spanish language presentation regarding the plan was being held the same night, in a different location.

“That means families were separated out, and didn’t get to hear directly from board members, including their questions about the district’s proposal,” Kielsmeier-Cook remarked.

The April 30 meeting was paused after interpreters were requested. (Interpreters are apparently not typically present at Committee of the Whole meetings.) Spanish speakers were initially asked to retreat to the cafeteria for translation assistance, but eventually came back to the main board room, according to several witnesses. Some attendees were reportedly asking for Somali language services as well.

At the April 30 meeting, which can be viewed here, school board chair Nelson Inz listed the upcoming community meetings concerning the district proposal. Those meetings are largely scheduled for May, and the board is scheduled to consider a revised plan in June, with a final vote expected to come in August. This makes sense, strategically, as public opposition or engagement with the plan is likely to wane over the summer.

By the time school starts in September, the board may have already cast a final vote regarding the proposal.

The Cheesebrow Effect

Graff and his senior administrative team put the comprehensive design together with guidance from Dennis Cheesebrow, an outside consultant whose firm, TeamWorks International, has worked with many area churches and school districts. In 2010, Cheesebrow helped the St. Paul Public Schools draft a new strategic plan called Strong Schools, Strong Communities.

That plan, now seemingly defunct, holds echoes of Cheesebrow’s current work for Minneapolis, with similar language around the need for “clear pathways” from elementary through high school, a move away from “pockets of excellence” towards more uniform outcomes, and a preference for neighborhood schools rather than magnets or other, more transportation dependent models.

Cheesebrow’s plan for the St. Paul Public Schools was not well-received by all, according to a 2015 mention in the Star Tribune:

St. Paul is in the third year of a Strong Schools, Strong Communities restructuring that put renewed emphasis on neighborhood schools as the heart of the community. St. Paul’s NAACP chapter since has claimed that the district is becoming more segregated.

Similarly, changes wrought by the Strong Schools, Strong Communities plan included putting students with special education needs into mainstream classrooms as well as an emphasis on “achievement, alignment, and sustainability.” These elements are front and center in Minneapolis’s current plan, too, and probably say less about Cheesebrow’s unique reach and more about the current austerity model for public education in the United States.

A recent Star Tribune profile of the district’s chief financial officer, Ibrahima Diop, is striking in the way it records his embrace of a “scarcity model.”

“I’m operating from a place of scarcity,” Diop said. “I cannot go out and generate more revenue, but one thing I can do is to make sure our limited resources are well managed.”

A careful study could be done, though, regarding the impact of Cheesebrow’s plan for the St. Paul schools. Boosting enrollment was one goal, yet story after story continues to document the decline in numbers in St. Paul, as more and more families exercise choice–often in racially and economically isolated schools–while the district continues to struggle.

Minneapolis public school parents and staff members may want to question whether the district’s current, Cheesebrow-crafted plans are truly designed to improve academic outcomes for all students in the name of racial equity, as is claimed. That didn’t happen in St. Paul, and we should all be cautious about equating the push for equity and equal programming (as the plan promises) with what is perhaps the true goal of acclimating to austerity measures.

A discussion of the academic components of the plan is scheduled for the May 14 Minneapolis school board meeting. An overview of all upcoming public meetings regarding the plan can be found on the district’s website.

Coordinated Uniqueness Comes for the Minneapolis Public Schools

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July 2, 2018

Magnet schools may soon give way to “coordinated uniqueness” in the Minneapolis Public Schools, according to a presentation at the school board’s June 26 Committee of the Whole meeting.

“Coordinated uniqueness” is an awkward bit of doublespeak crafted by local organizational consultant, Dennis Cheesebrow. Cheesebrow has been hired by MPS to help the district prepare a new strategic plan, intended to address questions about the district’s “footprint,” as well as its market share and future program offerings. The plan is in the formation stage and will be presented to the public for review later in the fall.

New Emphasis on Core Programming, Predictability

The impetus behind Cheesebrow’s coordinated uniqueness framework appears to be a coming move to dissolve magnet school programming in MPS. In lieu of magnet school options, the emerging Cheesebrow proposal would be to create two or three community schools in every attendance zone throughout the district. These schools would all have the same baseline of core staff and programming, with the option of adding district-coordinated, unique offerings at each school site. (Further details about what this might look like will reportedly be coming in August and September.)

To be clear, neither Cheesebrow nor Superintendent Ed Graff have publicly declared that magnet schools should no longer exist. Instead, a narrative is being stitched together that strongly suggests a preference for more community schools with tighter busing zones and quarter-mile walk areas. The goal is to not only reduce busing and make it more efficient, but also, in Cheesebrow’s view, to use transportation as a way to draw families to the district.

In his estimation, families will be attracted by a system built around safety, consistency, predictability and sustainability. Not so much environmental sustainability, but sustainability of programming and expectations. If a school would like to develop some sort of unique program dimensions, Cheesebrow said, the district should first be prepared to support it for the next five or ten years. Busing is apparently considered a draw in this scenario because it would be used in a more contained manner, with students picked up and dropped off along shorter bus routes.

Many families do appear to choose schools according to start times and bus routes, as evidenced by the public comment period at several recent school board meetings. Most district students currently get bused away from the school closest to them (at a rate of 76 percent, according to Cheesebrow) and very few walk to school. Limiting attendance zones and promoting “walkable” schools might help pivot transportation resources to high needs populations, such as homeless and highly mobile or special education students. 

Assert District Interest First

Cheesebrow explained his theories from some interesting vantage points (including his apparent conclusion that magnet schools do not help with desegregation). He espoused, for example, a belief in unwavering district decision-making. Don’t be swayed by the presence of individual or group concerns, he advised board members. There has to be instead a “fundamental shift in strategy” that will assert the district’s commitment to its own vision, whatever that ends up being.

MPS should work on emphasizing protocol, clarity and systems, Cheesebrow said. It should also choose to stick to “district interest” over any one group or individual’s interests, in an effort to worry less about public approval and more about forward momentum. This will probably sound shocking to those that want more community say in how the district is being run, but it may seem comforting to those who’ve grown weary of the sight of raucous school board meetings.

Superintendent Graff backed up Cheesebrow’s idea that the district should follow a more unified, “non-negotiable” stance when it comes to implementing change. In response to questioning from citywide rep, Rebecca Gagnon, Graff acknowledged that, as it stands, there is no “clearly articulated” look at what is currently being provided in MPS sites, primarily at the elementary school level. He spoke of being in agreement with Cheesebrow, though, that “confidence, predictability, security, planning,” and so on, would “help build market share and infrastructure.”

More Central Office Authority?

But the cart may be coming a bit before the horse. Gagnon’s further questioning of Graff seemed to reveal that he, too, would like a clearer picture of what is currently available in all schools, and whether or not what is available fits with his vision of what all schools should, predictably, be able to provide–even in the face of shifting budgets. (At this meeting, he did not spell out what his must-haves are for district schools.)

Be careful, Gagnon warned. If MPS, through Cheesebrow, is talking about the need for “equitable programming” without knowing first whether or not such a thing already exists, then the public may be lead to believe that it does not exist. Further, Gagnon worried aloud that the developing Cheesebrow-Graff plan for the district is being built around Davis Center decision-making, to the exclusion of site-based, community preferences. What followed was a very telling exchange between Gagnon and Graff.

Gagnon: “The thing I hear from this, once again, is Davis not as a support center, but as a top-down decision-maker. I don’t hear autonomy in schools, I don’t hear self-governed, I don’t see full-service schools, I don’t hear community partnership schools. I don’t hear site governance anywhere in any of this. I hear ‘Davis is going to make a decision, the board’s going to make a decision, and we’re going to preserve as much as possible of…how do you say…coordinated uniqueness,’ and we’re going to tell you what that is.”

Gagnon continued on, saying she would “prefer Davis as a support center that answers the call” from school and community leaders, based on what they have identified as needs and priorities for their site. In this view, Gagnon said,  “communities are governing the schools and driving decisions,” with the Davis Center standing back.

Graff was nonplussed, however, and said that what Gagnon sees in the plan is “probably intentional.” 

Graff: “What you’ve described is what we currently have. And, as a Superintendent, if that is the direction the board wants to continue down, where we have schools as the decision-makers, and offering up what they feel is needed, and our job is to make photo copies, then I think we need to have a serious conversation because I didn’t come here to offer my guidance and support of what is needed in the schools. I’m really trying to make sure there is a level of accountability.”

Graff said he wasn’t talking about taking away day-to-day decisions from principals, but rather relieving them of having to plan budgets, lead community conversations, guide professional development, and so on. He said he knows of no other district where the central office hangs back and “makes copies” while schools operate nearly independently and “still yield results that everyone can stand up and feel good about.” 

Does Anyone Remember 2014?

This is a seismic shift in thinking for a Minneapolis Public Schools superintendent. Just four years ago, under the tenure of Bernadeia Johnson, MPS moved to embrace the Community Partnership Schools model and its promise that “schools are the unit of change.” Although largely driven by outside, market-based reform interests, this model offered a tempting escape from other MPS initiatives (also embraced by Johnson), including the specious “Focused Instruction” that sought to standardize teaching practices.

Johnson greatly expanded her administrative team in 2014, adding in, among other things, a newly created associate superintendent of magnets position. This was held by Lucilla Davila, a former Windom Immersion School principal who has had a controversial run as a top administrator. Tellingly, Davila’s name–and her position–were not included in Graff’s recent restructuring of his administrative team. He has shrunk the associate superintendent ranks down to three and an overseer of magnet schools is not among them. Davila has instead been reassigned as principal of Folwell Arts Magnet.

Graff has not supported the Community Partnership Schools plan, which, prior to his tenure, resulted in a handful of MPS sites, including Southwest High School and Bancroft Elementary, being allowed to set their own calendars and pursue more flexible programming. Parents at Southwest, for example, were surprised to learn recently that they would not be allowed to independently select a new principal for their school, although that had been the expectation under their “partnership” school status.

And where do magnet schools fit into this? At the June 26 meeting, school board chair Nelson Inz, said assuredly that magnet schools will continue to exist in MPS. But it isn’t clear how. If the goal is to move towards greater uniformity, in order to perhaps strip off the layers of chaos that have contaminated MPS, will Graff continue to support magnets? Magnets have struggled to remain relevant in the standards and accountability era, with its emphasis on test scores, benchmark assessments and panic around “failing” schools, students, teachers and administrators.

Any magnet, whether it is focused on project-based learning (Open schools), Montessori methods, the arts or language immersion, can easily wither under the glare of standardized testing and external accountability measures. Add in capricious district-level enrollment priorities and ongoing patterns of white flight that offer stability and success to certain, sought-after schools (including magnets), and the picture gets quite complicated. (These factors also can and do undermine traditional public schools, too, of course.)

The Tyranny of Choice

To Graff’s point, he was hired as an outsider, not a likely enabler of the dreaded “status quo.” He inherited Johnson’s plans, and therefore a district that has magnet schools (a holdover from the 1970s, when court-ordered desegregation plans reigned); a handful of Community Partnership Schools; a mishmash of inner-district school choice options propped up through expensive and complicated busing routes; half-empty buildings in some neighborhoods and impossibly over-filled schools elsewhere.

There are language immersion schools, IB schools, community schools, schools struggling to survive amid shifting bus routes and priorities, schools that are shrinking as new programs, plans and priorities take root. There are several charter schools opening this fall, including two in northeast Minneapolis–a neighborhood with a long history of white flight, where Edison High School stays open largely by importing students from north Minneapolis, perhaps to the detriment of North and Henry High Schools.

Mini History Lesson From the 1970s

As Judge Larson’s findings later indicated, the district oversized
Bethune Elementary School with the knowledge that most of
the children from the predominately black near north side of the
city would go to Bethune rather than “spilling over into neighboring
schools with larger majority enrollments.”33 The driving force behind
the district’s decisions regarding school size and attendance boundaries was “public pressure not to integrate.

…Principal George McDonough told the court that 50% of Bethune’s
students were minority students because of an increasing minority
population in the Bethune attendance area in north-central Minneapolis.
McDonough also cited increasing parochial school enrollment among white students in the northeast Minneapolis area, the area from which the district sought to attract majority students to attend Bethune.

–from Booker v. Special School District No. 1: A History of School Desegregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cheryl W. Heilman

Magnets: Drowning in a Sea of Competing Choice Programs?

Magnets once thrived in Minneapolis, particularly in the late 1970s and early 80’s, when schools such as North High, with its strong Summatech program, actually did draw students from across the city and even the suburbs. 

But that was before charter schools and the Choice is Yours program, which allows MPS students to be bused to neighboring districts. There is also the Expanded Choice Program within MPS, which was created during another recent bout of shifting priorities and strategic planning. This program promises students stuck in “low-performing schools” in high poverty neighborhoods the chance to attend schools like Lake Harriet Upper and Lower School in southwest Minneapolis, where test scores are high and staffing turnover has historically been low. 

These days, if a school’s standardized test scores are high, people think the school’s staff is effective. If a school’s standardized test scores are low, they see the school’s staff as ineffective. In either case, because educational quality is being measured by the wrong yardstick, those evaluations are apt to be in error.

—Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality. W. James Popham, 1999.

We have never adequately addressed the issue of the growing number of students and families who live in poverty and have instead positioned busing kids to “high performing schools” as the best escape route. If Graff can somehow shift the conversation to ensuring quality programming, stable staffing and equitable funding in all Minneapolis neighborhoods, then perhaps the coming changes will be worth it.

But there is no indication yet that quality programming is on tap here. How will we measure success beyond standardized testing and the endless adherence to benchmark assessments and packaged curriculum? So far, there has been no vision for what this might look like. It may be tough for families to think about giving up magnet schools or a bus to an immersion program across town if there is no compelling, child development-centered vision for education in MPS. Right now, the driving forces seem to be Cheesebrow and Graff’s preference for “reducing variability” and ensuring predictability, consistency, and well-functioning systems, as well as a continued devotion to “data-driven cycles of instruction.”

As Graff said during the June 26 meeting, we need a comprehensive look at what our programming priorities and values are. But, right now, that seems like an afterthought, since Cheesebrow’s restructuring proposal is well under way, and there is no community engagement plan in place yet.

We must invest in all public schools, rather than pitting them against one another. Our schools should anchor our communities, build partnerships with parents, residents and community institutions, and provide wrap-around services to address obstacles that often prevent children in poverty from reaching their academic potential. We must nurture the whole student, not narrow the curriculum by imposing high stakes standardized testing that forces teaching to the test. Our curricula must include critical thinking, the arts and music, while encouraging creativity.

—“Public education needs more than school choice.” David Hecker, The Detroit News. 2017

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