Retiring superintendent Dr. William Green addressed a packed house of over 60 people at the June 25th, 2010 lunch meeting of the Achievement Gap Committee.
Dr. Green: When I began my tenure as superintendent, the Minneapolis Public School Board staked out three strategic goals: Reconnect, Refocus, and Restructure. We started with Reconnect.” We realized that we had to focus first on repairing relationships that had ruptured over time within the District and the larger community. We had to re-establish relationships with our stakeholder community of teachers, principals, parents, administration so that we could focus on the 2nd issue: Refocus on the business of educating kids. As in a family where the adults are arguing and fighting, the kids are forgotten. The adults’ focus on money, relationships, and power meant there wasn’t a lot of focus on the kids. We decided we had to refocus on the educational needs of kids.
The MPS Board’s third priority was to Restructure. The district had gone from fiscally accommodating 40,000+ kids to only 33,000 kids. “The unused space was expensive and the expense wasn’t directed towards educating kids. We needed to “right size” the district. That was our term for closing schools and taking a close look at local programs to determine whether they were sustainable. We had to make hard decisions about how we could move kids from one part of the district to the next.”
We’ve done all three things: Reconnecting, Refocusing, and Restructuring, to varying degrees of success. The 2008 MPS Referendum is an example of how successful we were at reconnecting with our stakeholders. Minneapolis educates children in poverty. That’s the community we live in. Also, in 2006, 38% of our children went home to immigrant families – and the percentage is higher now. The students Minneapolis educates look less and less like the average homeowner who’ll be carrying the burden and over 80% of households with Minneapolis voters don’t have kids in school – in any school. And it was those homeowners in Minneapolis who said we have to do it. Instead of doing what homeowners in other districts were doing, saying “those aren’t my kids, I can’t afford it, am I going to have enough, am I going to increase my property taxes for kids I don’t know?” In Minneapolis, they chose the kids. That’s the community we live in. Minneapolis homeowners said we’re going to tax ourselves because those kids are our kids. That’s that only way I can interpret it. No other community in history did what the Minneapolis voters did. Given the context of the times, you’ve got to consider the level of heroism.
With the Restructuring piece we wanted to do this with the community as opposed to at the community or to the community. Closing buildings and discontinuing programs leads to all sorts of drama. It’s a lot easier to do it behind closed doors. They tried to do it behind closed doors 5-6 years ago and that didn’t work. We decided to do it the hard way and have as many meetings as it took with the community to integrate employees and to make whatever adjustments we needed to make to accommodate the reality of the district’s needs and the families’ needs and the kids’ needs and the teachers’ needs. Difficult to do, but we did that, which says a lot about the board and the administration.
We held a number of public meetings and it was the parents, let me say that again, it was the parents who insured the level of discourse to get things done. That is critical to understanding the relationships we have. Parents provided an environment that ensured a quality of discourse in dealing with very difficult, explosive, incendiary issues. It was the major strides we made in Reconnecting first that allowed a level of civility to address Refocusing and Restructuring.
Restructuring is an ongoing issue. Right sizing the district to meet the educational needs of the kids is an imprecise science. We never really know, despite all of the planning, how many kids are going to show up. And even more important, how many kids are actually going to stay. Critical to understanding that last point is that there are almost as many non-educational factors that determine where families send their kids that are outside the control of the District. Nevertheless, this was a leadership group that was willing to make the hard decisions.
I’d like to spend a little more time on the Refocusing piece. To reiterate, the critical point is to focus on the educational needs of kids. It’s no secret that Minneapolis Public Schools does a superb job with some kids and not a good job with other kids. We all know the data. We all know the sense of urgency that’s existed since I took this job. There is an achievement gap, a problem with educational parity. For the first time in a long time, one of the things we did was told principals what we expected from them. We had not, as an institution, sustained clarity about what was expected of them and held them accountable. We turned the focus on education with a structured academic team whose job was working with principals, walking the hallways, observing classrooms, asking teachers “What do you think about your principal?” These teams paid close attention to the quality of instruction and collected evaluation data at the same time.
Improving outcomes and teacher accountability is like solving peace in the Middle East because there are injured people on both sides. We have good people on both sides of the teacher accountability issue. What has made the ability to refocus challenging is that education is unlike any other area I know. In education there are all kinds of good ideas and solutions. So the question is how do we select one good idea against another good idea? In the work of planning and governance, decisions on what direction to pursue are judged against other ideas that, on the surface, seem just as good.
We needed to think, not about the convenient thing, but about how to select something that we can sustain over a long period of time. One challenge of public education, and there are many, is the public sentiment that “we want you to fix it and we want you to fix it now.” There’s a moral imperative to that statement because we’re not talking about Toyota, or even the oil crisis, as traumatic as that is. We’re talking about children who will be impacted long term for what they don’t receive. So there’s a real sense of urgency, and yet no system can change suddenly.
Another thing we have to consider is how are we can work over time to change while minimizing people getting a sense of skepticism or cynicism. How do we define milestones of success so that people can see progress, which is the best way to see movement.
And best of all, how do we get the people who are doing the work to carry that work forward without being forced to? How does the new way of doing things, the reform work become their work, as opposed to reform being placed on them? It’s like walking a tight rope. On the one hand, while we’re building and healing our relationships with teachers and principals, on the other, we have to be prepared to create the environment where they have to be vulnerable in order to do better. We necessarily have to tell them, you gotta do better.
It is just a matter of time before the principal is confronted with the very unfortunate choice: Do I fight a battle at which I’m outnumbered, or do I just recede for the sake of peace in my building. Now all of this is done in discipline, just below the radar. Change is rancorous. Change makes noise. Change upsets people. In the delicate balance of the world we live in, we necessarily have to be worried about the rancor, finding the middle ground in doing that which requires change, in all its consequences, and not doing anything only because we want to keep things peaceful. That delicate balance is where we are as a school district.
That may seem far a field from instruction. But one of the things I’ve learned is how intricate everything is. Stability is a double-edged sword. It is both desired and a reason why nothing happens. So, if that’s a problem, what’s the alternative? And here’s where the work exists for the community. It’s forming the relationships, educating ourselves on the issues.
Gary Eichten asked me, “How is it that what you’re saying should be taken any more seriously than anybody else” I said that it’s important for us to be able to talk about gains, it’s important for us to talk about the ground we are making, but what is just as critical is that we get out from behind the closed doors and engage people.
I think the community loses patience with the district quicker when it feels that nothing is really going on, all they see is problems. To do this business requires outreach. It requires a focus and commitment to the work of teaching kids, but it also requires communication and ways of engaging our stakeholders. We can’t only say we’re frustrated with the federal government and with the state, because they are part of the process. I used to be frustrated with gang activity on the North Side, at complacency among teachers and racism and all the stuff that still separates people because of race and class. OK, that said and done, how do you connect with a kid? We’re all on the edge, in a period of uncertainty when fear has fertile ground. How do we work through our own fear, our own uncertainly, our own bias to stay connected? I do believe that this is a system worth working for and defending. I believe this is a system that can succeed. We want teachers to teach with their doors open. We want principals to share their issues with other principals, with principals feeling that they can talk with each other. It is doing the difficult work of continuing to have dialogue and to see the other person throughout the dialogue.
Questions from the Audience and Dr. Green’s Answers
Q: Could you define the role of the teachers’ unions?
Dr. Green: It is key, at least to me, to not demagogue, to not attack the institution of unions or of teachers unions. Teachers need to be protected from capricious or unfair principals. We also need unions to provide reasonable balance in negotiations. I happen to think it’s healthier for the system to have a healthy balance. Our job is to persuade to our side of things.
Any institution or person with too much power inevitably misuses it. Over the course of time in the business of doing anything public, like taking care of the public’s children, there are forces that seduce, that cause us to cut corners. The best intended people can want to be expeditious, to get past the problem. When you give yourself license to do that, things are sacrificed. Unfortunately, sometimes the corners are the rights of people or just the dignity of people who work in the building. So where’s the middle ground? It’s reaching people, making the strong argument, continuing the discourse, and hoping that reasonable minds can come together.
Q: I came to hear your thoughts about the tensions around some of the important changes that we have to make.
Dr. Green: This is one of the most diverse districts around for the size of our student population. About 1/6 of our kids are homeless. That makes us unique. If we were to create a separate school district just for our English Language Learner population, that district would be the 22nd largest of the state’s 320 districts. The legislature’s and the federal government’s policies tend to be created in a vacuum and sometimes reactively. For example, the legislature told districts like Minneapolis that to be fiscally responsible they had to have a reserve, so we created a reserve. Now that the state’s short on money, they take our reserve and say, “We’ll pay you back.” I don’t know how a Congressperson or a legislator makes those decisions but it helps if the right people are in the room during that discussion. The same applies to any policy, regulation, law, first listen and then be prepared to calibrate it, be prepared to make alterations, keep the communications open, and get some assessment of whether this is actually dealing with the problem. That’s a different way for us to work. Usually, the decision has been made and we move on to something else. But I think the way we make decisions is so critical to any kind of integrity.
We were recently directed by the state agency to get rid of a principal who had started in the school just two years before. The parents in this particular community found in this principal someone they could relate to but the state wanted her to be moved because she didn’t turn the school around fast enough. But we didn’t pull this principal. We as policy makers and administrators have to build into the way we make our decisions time to talk with the people and communities affected and to be prepared to make modifications.
Question: Should we be turning over schools or assessing individual children?
Dr. Green: We have to do both. In order to see how effective that teacher is or the professional development for that school, we have to assess individual kids and assess the results in classrooms and school buildings. To know how we’re doing we have to assess how children are doing. I don’t agree that it’s either/or. One thing I think should be either/or is that testing needs to be de-emphasized or changed from something that creates stigma for a building to one that allows teachers to re-calibrate their teaching styles to meet the need. Let’s get the results early enough in the year so that I can see the results and whether what I’m doing is really connecting.
We need every teacher in the district to believe that every child can learn. We have to have educators who feel that way. Testing gives us some smoke. Where there’s smoke, there may be fire. It’s a way of alerting us, but it requires us to use testing in a different way. We can’t forget about what’s happening with individual kids and with the building.
One of the criticisms with No Child Left Behind is that the quality of education in the building is completely distorted if a handful of children in a large student population are either not in attendance or don’t pass the test. I think what we need is accurate assessment, not a way to assume that people in the profession aren’t serious about the success of kids. I’ve been in buildings where principals could show me the weekly progress of their students in one whole grade and have weekly conversations with the teachers to encourage them to learn from each other. It could be about a particular kid or about a particular model that seems to be working or not working. Given enough room and the right support, we can have both.
I would add that sometimes the chemistry in the building itself is problematic. Not necessarily the individual staff but the chemistry among them. Which is why we fresh start. We have to consider that sometimes systems themselves can get in the way.
Question: Do you have some insights about what I’d call the ecology of success for students? From your experience are there certain factors that are most important as you look back?
Dr Green: I don’t think the traditional method meets the needs of all the kids, looking at the achievement gap. So what’s the alternative? We need to have a laser focus on the belief that every child can learn. If you don’t have that, then nothing else matters. Number 1. Number 2: the teachers have to be able to teach. They have to be permitted to teach, they have to be protected to teach. That means you have to have an administrator in the building who takes care of all the administrative garbage and helps resolve conflicts. An experienced teacher told me that the best teaching experience she’d had was in a school on the North side where the teachers were a supportive team and the principal allowed them to teach. This principal encouraged them, supported them and reminded them that this is the most important profession you can do. Charter school, self-governing school, traditional K-12 or a pre-K-12 situation, it depends. Success can occur in all of those settings. It comes down to the people, the focus, the commitment, and the stability and the capacity to support that stability.
Also, agreeing to the definition of success so that there’s buy-in.
When teachers feel under attack, there’s something wrong with the community. I taught a seminar on Minneapolis at the turn of the century. One of the books we used was the novel Boat of Longing by O. E. Rolvaag. In a scene from the book we see Minneapolis at the turn of the last century through the eyes of a recently arrived Norwegian immigrant. What struck me was what he saw as he walked down the hall of his tenement house. He saw kids playing and they were of all races, including African American children. His tenement itself was a Tower of Babel. That’s the term he used. In that one image he created a sense of what Minneapolis is. A place with the potential of creating a melting pot where everybody assumes responsibility for the kids. I think we need to create a community with that ecology. Once a child enters school he needs to see the value placed on him by the whole neighborhood.
Q: I’m curious about the success of Southwest High School. What were the factors?
Dr. Green: There are a lot of factors. The superficial factors are that you have a larger concentration of middle class kids there with a lot of parent engagement. You also have a strong, experienced teacher corps, excellent course offerings, a great principal, and it’s a corner of the city where you really have to want to live there, and they have a legacy that has a way of setting a certain expectation. All those factors are in place, and we in the district made policies or acted against policies that sustained the success of Southwest at the expense of other schools. You have to have that symbiotic relationship to have one or two schools be better than other schools in the system. Those are some of the factors.
Q: What are the plans for getting more parents involved in children’s education?
Dr. Green: There are several different levels of parent involvement. Some parents want to be involved on the school level. In order to have the participation of those particular parents we have to tell principals that they’ll be evaluated on how welcoming their school is, the degree of “welcomeness.” This doesn’t just apply to the principal but to the staff, clerical people, and people parents will meet when they walk across the threshold. How open are teachers to inviting parents into this process or at least with communicating with them to know what’s really going on? Some of our principals have gone way beyond the norm by actually going door-to-door in the neighborhoods and introducing themselves. Some teachers have gone to the students’ homes. Some teachers recognize that they can’t only call a parent about a problem with their kid. These teachers make a point to call the parent when the kid does something good. They provide information and connection to build a rapport with the parents.
Another part of parent engagement is in governance with site councils and PTAs. The District/Parent Advisory Committee is my reality check. We get feedback from them on the direction we’re heading and on issues prior to going to the board in most cases. This is also where district-wide leadership comes from but w e haven’t been able to sustain membership fro parents of color, from immigrant groups, so we created a collaborative for the ELL communities. Parent groups in the Somali, Latino, Hmong and Laotian communities meet and then come together quarterly to learn from each other and give us input. We also support a series of workshops to help parents learn how to be better advocates for their kids.
Q: Parents and the district have to work in partnership. We need to reach those parents, whoever they are, by whatever means necessary. There’s no excuse. We need to work in partnership and some of us need a little help along the way.
Dr Green’s reply: You’re absolutely right. I just want to add in consideration of parents who may want to be more active but for whatever reasons, can’t, or don’t. My experience with Minneapolis Public Schools began when I was a room parent in a school on the Northside for four years. I was the only parent in the class. I was talking with a dad about his child and the dad wouldn’t come in to the building. He met me for coffee at a drugstore and was really interested in talking about his kid and what he was learning. But this is a guy who didn’t speak standard English, he wore kind of rough clothes, and he had a hard time entering an institution that certified him as a failure. It is hard for many of our parents to talk with a teacher who wears better clothes, has more education and has power over them and their child. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable for a parent to feel inhibited about that. I’m black; I know what it is to be dealing with subtle racism, with classism. I myself may be a doctor but the person sees in you someone they can relate to. They’ll come because they can relate to you. We have to do everything to reach out to them.
Q: How are we doing on the pre-K front and what do you think we need to be doing?
Dr. Green: More of what we’re doing. We’re just beginning to put money where our mouth is. We still have a lot of work to do on that. The preschool world in Minneapolis is a tricky world. With all of the institutions that are working with preschools, some are working together but it’s a tricky thing to navigate.
I wish I knew about ECFE when I was on parental leave with my kids. It gets lonely when you’re caring for preschoolers and there’s no one to explain things. When I started visiting ECFE as a board member I was told that it was hard to get African American parents and Latino parents involved. This is what’s inspiring about Jeffrey Canada’s work in Harlem. He talks about the difficulty, the challenge of connecting with parents whose instinct is to feel insulted: “You’re telling me that I don’t know how to raise my kid?” For a number of our families, that is the discussion we need to have if we’re going to get them to come into the program, come into the classroom. Once we’ve got them there, I have seen parents so engaged it’s like “where has this been all my life?” It’s not only about learning about their child, but it’s learning about their child with other people who are also learning about their child. It’s about creating community.
You know all the data about the importance of early childhood. But the child isn’t going to get there unless the parent takes them. The parent has their own baggage that we have to address to get them to be a part of it. We’re not as far along as we should be but it’s a part of our strategic plan and it’s part of our budget. We are trying to reach out to organizations and knit together coalitions. Once we tell parents what to look for, we’re raising the bar and we’ve got to continue to provide these kinds of experiences for kids.
Q: Does MPS have any interest in the model John Simmons is using in Chicago to reduce the achievement gap – or a similar model?
Dr. Green: Yes, part of our strategic plan that was enacted in 2007 included the creation of an office of new schools. This structure seeks out other programs that are having success. It sets up a process by which ideas are vetted and if they are approved, we will be putting them into place. I know that Simmons’s program is of interest and I fully expect that there will be more connections with them.
Q: To connect and engage with hard to reach parents, do you look towards offering the kind of comprehensive, wrap around services included in the Harlem Children’s Zone?
Dr. Green: I think it’s a direction in which we should go. The mobility of our families is a huge barrier. Kids and families are moving for all kinds of reasons. It’s a different kind of challenge than we had ten years ago.
Transcribed by Nancy Johnson
Early Childhood Policy Consultant
nancy@tripark.org