The Achievement Gap

Address by Dr. William Green, Retiring Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent

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

Debate on Education Funding: Alternatives for K-12 Education

February 22
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Augsburg College: Hoversten Chapel, Foss Center

The Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning at Augsburg College is sponsoring a debate on K-12 education funding with Reps. Pat Garofalo, (R) Chair, Education Finance Committee, and Steve Simon (DFL), State Finance Committee.  

Panel respondents include Bill Green, Nan Skelton, and Peter Swanson with closing comments by former Rep. Martin Sabo.  Reception will follow the panel.  

A Crisis in Our Community: Closing the Five Education Gaps

This report, from the Headwaters Foundation's African American Leadership Forum, cites the DFL Education Foundation's Achievement Gap Committee in a few places.  

The report summary: 

The State of Minnesota is facing a crisis requiring the declaration of a "State of Emergency."  Paraphrasing the 1968 Kerner Commission Report, the United States is  "moving toward two societies, one black, and one white--separate and unequal."  Unfortunately, in Minnesota we have achieved that ignominious distinction in education.  We have created two Minnesotas.  In one, children get a great education at their local public schools, and in the other, children enter our schools behind, fall further behind as they advance, and drop out of school with alarming regularity.  This report outlines five gaps in educational achievement for African American children and a plan for how we can close those gaps.

Click here to download the report

What did Cincinnati Public Schools do to close the high-school graduation gap?

Recently Elizabeth Holtzapple, Cincinnati Public Schools' director of research, evaluation and testing, told me that the district's public schools increased overall high school graduation rates to 81.9 percent in 2010. That is up from 51 percent in 2000. She also reported the district also has eliminated the graduation gap between white and African-American students.

This is what Brenda Cassellius, Minnesota's commissioner of education, described as possible during a recent meeting. She praised educators, working together overall several years with the right strategies, as "able to overcome achievement gaps."

...read more...

Summer Update

NOTE 
We won't be sponsoring more speakers until next Fall, but in the meantime we want to keep the issue of the achievement gap in the front of people's minds.  

We are working to establish a repository of information about local initiatives aimed at improving outcomes for our children.  We have secured from the University Center for Urban and Regional Affairs an intern to help organize information already collected through the efforts of Scott Russell, a journalist and member of our group, and Dennis Schapiro, former member of the MPS school board.  This repository will be placed on a  website available to the Twin Cities community. 

In March co-convener Don Fraser spoke to Minneapolis Rotary about the work of our Committee.  After reciting the preliminary findings on how progress to improve student outcomes might be made, he suggested that the primary barrier to improved outcomes by MPS may be its culture.  Cultures are extraordinarily difficult to change, but Fraser found hope in the new emphasis in MPS on the use of data to assist professional teacher teams in their work.  An increasing reliance on data to support continuous improvement may represent a path toward a changed culture.  Drawing on local businesses that have successfully used quality management could help, and the implementation of the STRIVE program advocated by the African-American Leadership Forum will also encourage the successful implementation of quality management. 

A copy of Fraser's Rotary talk is below:

      I am honored to speak to the Minneapolis Rotary.  I remember from my mayoral days that it was two business owners, members of the St. Louis Park Rotary Club, who met in the early 90's with school Superintendent Carl Holstrom to push for a community-wide initiative to help in the healthy development of the children in St. Louis Park. Checking recently I found that the Children First initiative  is alive and well today and continues to win national recognition, thanks to Rotary. 

      Today I will speak about the Committee on the Achievement Gap, why it was formed, what it has learned, and the conclusions it has reached. 

      Four years ago I persuaded the Board of the DFL Education Foundation to create a committee to look at the achievement gap.  The Foundation is a small 501©3 that looks at public policy issues.  The Board agreed to form a committee to look at what was happening with our schools.

      Why was this important?   From the time I was mayor I was aware of the discrepancy in outcomes among Minneapolis students.  A lack of success in school outcomes is associated with children coming from poor, often minority or immigrant families. So this new Committee planned to look at possible remedies for this disparity in outcomes for children in our schools.

      What has the committee done?  Using an email list of 1000 we have met more than 40 times over the last four years - mostly in monthly bag lunch meetings.  We meet at the University Lutheran Church of Hope near the University campus in Minneapolis.  Several years ago Grant Abbott, Executive Secretary of the St. Paul Area Council of Churches, became a co-convener of our meetings, and recently we began to meet also in St. Paul at the Hope Presbyterian Church on Summit Avenue,

      Participants in our meetings have included legislators, a former governor (Al Quie), city, county and school staff, college and university faculty, and citizens actively concerned with the schools.  About 50 people show up for each meeting.

      When we began, we already had the benefit of work done by Ready4K, an organization focused on early childhood development.   Ready4K was making the case for investing in early childhood.   Art Rolnick was on the board of Ready4 and promoting investment in early childhood as a sound public investment.  This encouraged several business initiatives on early childhood including the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation that recently suggested ways to support quality early childhood education for at-risk children.

      We already knew from their work that brain development occurs early in children, that investments in prenatal care, home visiting, and parent education make for healthier children.  We knew of the work of several University of Kansas child psychologists that how parents and caregivers talk- or don't talk - to very young children has a significant effect on the child's I.Q., literacy and academic success later in life.

      And we were aware of the results when children - especially at-risk children - are enrolled in quality pre-school programs.   Three projects - the  Carolina Abecedarian Project,   the Child-Parent Centers in Chicago, and the HighScope Perry Preschool Program in Ypsilanti, Michigan showed that children enrolled in these programs stayed in school longer, earned more money as adults, and in at least one of the studies, were less likely to commit crimes. But we were also aware that after a child has entered the k-12 system, what happens in school also makes a difference. 

      Here are some of the general  conclusions reached after looking at what happens in school: 

      - schools do better with strong leadership more able to choose their own  teachers. 

      -so do schools that vigorously pursue connections with the parents.

      -also helping are longer school hours, and using school uniforms.. 

Also we learned that a major difference is made when teachers work as a close-knit team, and the team takes responsibility for the progress of all students, This includes monitoring individual students' progress closely -  and continuously - with prompt help for any student falling behind.

      In sum, we discovered that in effective schools there is a consistent, rigorous commitment to all students.

     The concept of teachers working together as a team to improve student outcomes has been described in several recent studies.  The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future reported that teachers who are in “engaged, school-embedded professional learning teams” hold themselves to a “higher standard, improve their practice, and lift student achievement”.

     Karen Chenoweth, who writes for the Education Trust, spent six years visiting high performing schools with significant populations of children living in poverty and children of color.   She reported that although teachers in these schools work hard, they find their work invigorating because they are successful. “And they are successful”, she says, “because their schools are organized with care to ensure that they do everything right, from discipline to curriculum”.  

     She went on to say that “it is, however, unquestionably complicated work.  To ensure that just about all their students learn to high standards, school need to do everything  right, which means they cannot afford to be sloppy about a single thing, from how teachers speak to children to how they organize their instruction.”

      We already have in the Twin Cities charter schools that produce good results for at-risk children.  In addition to giving parents a choice, charter schools have provided important evidence that at-risk children can be educated.  National studies suggest that in the aggregate charter schools don't do much better than the district schools, but because some do, they help inform us as to what is possible.  Last year, Al Fan, a former General Mills manager, organized Charter School Partners to improve charter schools in Minnesota.

      Several more new organizations are working on these school issues.    MinnCAN was recently launched with some foundation support to provide a forum for helping our schools.  It emulates a Connecticut organization called ConnCAN, and is headed by a talented, former St. Paul School Board member who was also education adviser to Mayor Chris Coleman.

      Recently an Ohio organization called STRIVE made a presentation at the University of Minnesota describing measures taken in Cincinnati to improve the schools.  Their efforts came on top of some excellent work in Cincinnati by our own Joe Nathan who runs an organization called Center for School Change.  If a Minnesota model of STRIVE takes root, it will be because of the active support from the African-American Leadership Forum.  STRIVE emphasizes working to promote data-driven decision-making through a coordinated strategy of continuous improvement collaboratives  working with United Way in Cincinnati, and providing training and technical assistance through the Strive Six Sigma continuous improvement process. 

      A model that our district schools might consider emulating is the Montgomery County School System in Maryland.  Their student body is now 37% white compared to Minneapolis with 32%. They have 144,000 students in 200 schools.  Their graduation rate is 90%   In contrast, Minneapolis has a graduation rate of 73%.

      The Montgomery Schools have an office of school performance which monitors individual school performance using the quality management tools of the Baldrige-guided school improvement process intended to build capacity of school leaders.  The U.S. Department of Commerce recently named Montgomery County Public Schools one of seven recipients of an award recognizing performance excellence among American organizations.

      Montgomery County Public Schools are committed to Baldridge as its model for continuous improvement and continues to use methodologies such as Six Sigma to help evaluate and refine key learning and support processes.

      The use of quality management principles is found in other school districts, but not in the Twin Cities.  The discipline and the values in quality management along with the concept of continuous improvement fit the school mission.   Moreover, since quality management assigns an important role to employees, it helps achieve the collaborative culture that improves outcomes.

      How important is quality management?  A friend of mine who ran a substantial company in the Twin Cities told me that because they were facing increased competition from abroad, had they not adopted quality management principles and practices they would probably be out of business today .

      What about our Minneapolis schools? I believe that the Minneapolis public schools are currently headed in the right direction.  But they face a formidable challenge  -  how to change the existing patterns of managing and teaching in schools - especially those with many at-risk children.  How does the central office change the long established culture in those schools?

      Several weeks ago I spent time with one of St. Paul's most successful principals.  He took over a failing school where he was free to pick his own staff.   He kept 30% of the existing staff, and the other 70% were new - so new, in fact, that they had not taught anywhere in the system prior to joining his school.  This eased his challenge to rework the culture in that school.

      What's needed is strong leadership in the schools.  How else is the culture going to be changed?  Already in most schools the responsibilities of the principal are changing.   Instead of managing the building, ``the principal is becoming an instructional leader.   As an instructional leader the principal visits the classrooms and meets with the teachers to set the tone for the entire school.  Finding and training strong principals is one of our most urgent tasks.  Principals have to be capable of creating a collaborative, highly functioning teacher group that works together and reflects a mutual commitment that no child will fail.  With the principal becoming more important than ever, more training and higher pay may be in order.

      The Minneapolis schools are currently embarked on changing the culture in their schools by bringing the concept of “focused instruction” to all of its schools.  This is clearly moving in the right direction.   Focused instruction means continuous monitoring, the extensive use of data, and collaboration by the teachers.  This fits with what we have learned.  But to reach this goal an extraordinary effort will be needed by both the school administration and the school board.  Will this effort succeed? Will they be able to change the culture in those schools that work with many of our at-risk students?  If school staff regard this as simply one more initiative layered onto existing practices, I fear that the hoped for progress will fall short.  So I am rooting for both the school administration and the school board to take on this challenge with the enthusiasm and determination that will lead to success.

      In closing I want to mention two more examples of folks helping out in our community- this time with the health of our children : The Phillips Eye Institute working with the  Minneapolis schools has provided vision screening and follow-up care without cost to the families of children in the schools. They have provided vision screening services for all kindergarten, first, third, fifth and most sixth grade students in 43 schools and this year will reach over 12,500 students. A child who can't see to read will not learn.

      A pediatrician based at the University - his name is Amos Deinard - has focused unremitting attention on the dental needs of poor children.  His most recent campaign is to encourage painting fluoride varnish on the teeth of very young children to prevent early decay whenever they are at a health clinic for other purposes. Attention to children's health is important to their educational achievement.

      We are in a caring community.  Minneapolis voters supported the last three public referenda that raised property taxes for our schools - even though most families have no children in our schools.  With this kind of community- with so many caring folks - I have great hope for the future of our schools and our children.        

Thank you.

 

Striving to Close the Gap

On February 8th the U of M and the African American Leadership Forum heard representatives of STRIVE from Cincinnati present a model to close the achievement gap.

Watch the presentation here and the followup conversation here.

A Report from the Committee

From Chairman Don Fraser:

We are entering the fourth year of meetings on the Achievement Gap.  In early February I appeared before the Minnesota State Senate Committee on Education, and provided a list of our meetings beginning in April 2007. That list is reproduced below.  Asked about possible legislative initiatives, I suggested providing financial assistance to school districts to take advantage of more intensive training of principals.  I also suggested a higher certification for those principals along with an increase in pay. Also provided was the statement we circulated earlier this year about what was needed.

Our transfer of fiscal sponsorship to the St. Paul Area Council of Churches is moving ahead, with more meetings in St. Paul, all led by Grant Abbott, Executive Director of the St. Paul Area Council.

Finally, I wanted to share this video on infant mental health, by Dr. Terrie Rose, who presented to the Achievement Gap Committee in April 2009.

 

Meetings of the Committee on the Achievement Gap
February 2011 Al Fan  Charter School Partners (reminder coming next week)
January 2011 St. Paul School Foundation - tutoring
January 2011 Duane Benson
December 2010 Pam Costain
October 2010  Keith Dixon (Duluth)
September 2010  Lynn Nordgren
June 2010  Green - retiring
May 2010  Heistad – Mpls data over 3 years
April 2010  Strategic Learning Initiatives
March 2010  Northside Achievement Zone
February 2010  Brooklyn Center 286
November 2009  Seed Academy & Harvest Prep
October 2009  Teacher-led schools
June 2009  Beyond the Achievement Gap Where it’s working
May 2009  School segregation and institutional disparities
April 2009  Infant Mental Health
March 2009  Way to Grow
March 2009  Empowerment
February 2009  Kolderie and Johnson – New Schools
February 2009  Jeremiah Program
January 2009 Les Fujitake  Bloomington Schools
January 2009  MN Reading Corps
December 2008  Greiling and Eilers
November 2008  Teach for America
October 2008  Questions and topics for discussion
October 2008  Peter Hutchinson – Bush Fdtn
October 2008  Loring and Lyndale Principals
May 2008  YES Prep in Houston
April 2008  St. Paul Achievement Plus
April 2008  Head Start Henn County
February 2008  Northside Initiative
January 2008  Minnesota Prtincipals Academy
December 2007  Scott Miller- Arizona U – on the gap
October 2007  Teacher Prof Practice in Milwaukee
September 2007  Dr. Arthur Reynolds on closing the gap
September 2007  Joe Nathan  5 strategies
August 2007  Principal Katherine Page – Col Hts
July 2007   Myron Orfield – Inst Race & Poverty
June 2007  Dr. Hernandez  Ldr of Pueblo School
May 2007   Dr. David Heistad – Eval of Mpls Schools
April 2007  Bob Wedl  PK-3 schools

Committee on the Achievement Gap expands to include St. Paul

Earlier this week, this blog carried a post about MinnCAN, a new education advocacy group with powerful backers and coffers relatively flush with foundation money to be spent influencing Minnesota policy.

Cue sounds of sabers rattling.

Today, meet a group that has been influencing education policy for years with an annual budget of about $1,500, two volunteer co-conveners and the self-explanatory, un-focus-group-tested name Committee on the Achievement Gap.

Cue the crinkling of brown lunch bags. 

For years, the group has been meeting one, sometimes two Fridays a month in a church in southeast Minneapolis to hear from a roster of speakers who are infallibly fascinating. Typically 50-60 people show up toting their own sandwiches; conveners provide water and coffee.

Participants are asked to RSVP by e-mail, and some actually do, the conveners report. The number who don’t and come anyway is usually offset by the number who do and fail to show.

If that sounds decidedly modest, know that one of the co-conveners is former Minneapolis Mayor and Minnesota Rep. Don Fraser, who maintains an e-mail list of about 1,000 people who care about closing the achievement gap — or who should.

Read more at Minnpost.com

Speech by Pam Costain, Executive Director of Achieve MPS

“Do we really as a community understand the seriousness of the achievement gap for kids’ futures and the future of our state?” Pam Costain, executive director of AchieveMpls, opened her presentation to the Achievement Gap Committee on December 17th, 2010, with this question. To another well attended gathering of over 50 people including former and newly elected MPS Board members, Pam discussed the district’s challenges when she was elected to the Minneapolis Public School Board in 2006, what she learned during her almost 4 years on the board, her appraisal of board accomplishments and the critical issues that remain.

After Don Fraser’s introduction that she was giving her “board exit interview,” Pam took aim at the continued existence of the achievement gap in MPS. “Why, if we know how bad the situation is right now for children of color in our urban core and throughout the state, have we made little progress closing the education gap? Do we really believe as a community that ALL children can learn at the highest level and be prepared to go to college? What would our education system look like if we put the needs of children at the center of all of our decision-making?”

The Context of the Minneapolis Public Schools
MPS students are bright, capable and deserving of an excellent education that meets their needs, Pam said. While most MPS students are really poor, middle class families continue to stay despite their ability to leave. The district must provide an excellent education for every child while eliminating the achievement gap between white students and students of color. When Pam joined the board in 2006 they were faced with the loss of 18,000 children in ten years (almost 1/3 of enrollment) and the necessity of closing schools in economically vulnerable neighborhoods reeling from the mortgage foreclosure crisis and unemployment. One in 10 MPS students were homeless or in highly mobile families meaning that they moved monthly, 65% lived in very poor families, and 16% received Special Education services because the district’s top-notch Special Education programming attracts children with severe learning problems from the entire metro area.

In addition to rapidly declining enrollment and the dilemma of excess capacity in neighborhood schools, the shocks to the MPS system included drastic cuts in state revenue, a failed superintendency in 2007 and the loss of key allies.

In the midst of these challenging circumstances, the 2008 MPS referendum provided hope and confirmed that the Minneapolis community cared about educating all children. Even though 80% of voters had no children in the schools and the profile of the predominantly white, affluent voters didn’t match the ethnically diverse, mostly low-income MPS student population, the referendum passed with a 71% majority. The accomplishments MPS has made since 2007, Pam told listeners, must be seen in light of the community’s concern for children, the support for the public schools, and understanding of the link between the health of our public schools and the health of our city and its economy.

MPS Board’s Commitment to Educational Equity
Pam is proud of the MPS board’s commitment to educational equity and to overcoming the achievement gap. “We are not going to decide in 7th grade which kids will go to college.” Challenging a pervasive culture of low expectations, the board’s strategic plan started with the commitment to ensure that “every child is college ready.” To achieve this goal, the administration and board focused on the central role of principals’ leadership and the quality of teaching. They tackled some critical long term problems as a result of their willingness to examine their “dirty laundry:” a curriculum audit highlighted deficiencies throughout the district, programs for English Language Learners were inadequate, and no consistent, system-wide evaluation of principals had been conducted.

Changing School Options
The board’s commitment to equity includes quality schools in every part of town and equity across the system. The Changing School Options initiative redrew school boundaries to create a clearer, simpler, more equitable system of school options to save money while maintaining choice and educational coherence. The board also embraced new models of district sponsored charters and teacher-led schools.

Negotiations with the Teachers Union
Over the past several decades, the district ceded control in negotiating teacher contracts to the teachers’ union. The 220-page teachers contract is silent on management’s rights. The board opened negotiations with the teachers union and sought more management flexibility in meeting children’s educational needs.
 
Early Childhood Education Partnerships 
Young children’s development from 0 – 5 is the first critical phase of their education The achievement gap starts with unequal access to the learning experiences that prepare young children for success in school. MPS argued strongly for state investments in parenting support and to increasing low-income families’ access to quality early care and education in both public and private programs. Much more work needs to be done to strengthen MPS partnerships with child care, Head Start and other early education providers to enhance children’s learning 0-5 and align early childhood programs with K-12 expectations.  

Lessons Learned from the School Board Experience
The over-riding lesson of Pam’s MPS board experience is that while governance is hard because of conflicting demands and claims on resources, governing a public education system is uniquely challenging.  School board decisions have intensely personal impact for what’s most precious to parents – their kids. From the most affluent parents to the poorest, all have a claim on the MPS for their child. It’s challenging to communicate with parents and the public about the whole system.

The inherent weaknesses of school boards, especially in large districts, include the lack of time, part-time pay ($14,000/year in MPS) for a full-time job, no administrative support or staff, enormously complicated issues with an extreme learning curve, elected members with varying levels of experience and mis-matches for the skills and expertise needed by the board. 

No Easy Answers for Public Education Reform
Changing a large legacy public institution like the MPS is enormously complicated. Urban districts are at the intersection of race, class, segregation, disability, and lack of resources. Public school districts are dealing with public perceptions of what’s happening vs. the reality.
Every child is important. Opening ourselves to this is difficult even for the most liberal among us.  

Critical Issues Facing MPS
MPS cannot tolerate different educational outcomes for the haves and the have nots any longer. Our challenge is to build a district where every child’s educational needs are met.

Second, while teachers are NOT the problem OR the enemy, a system that is not organized to serve ALL children is the problem. Teachers’ contracts must be negotiated to balance management’s needs for serving all children as well as supporting effective teaching.

Charter schools are here to stay. The debate about the role of charters must shift from support to whether or not they’re getting the job done and providing a quality education.

The most critical issue facing the district is the role of the community in decision-making.  The biggest critique of MPS is that we don’t know how to talk with, communicate to, and organize with parents, staff and the community. The district needs to take a long term community organizing approach, dedicating consistent staff and resources to ongoing dialogue with all the community stakeholders including parents, staff, local business leaders, policy makers and the media.

Finally, MPS needs healing, but we also need success. The changes we’ve made must begin to narrow the achievement gap and our success communicated to the community.


AchieveMpls Partnership with MPS
The job of educating every child in Minneapolis is too big and too complex for the schools alone.
AchieveMpls believes that “a quality, equitable public education system is crucial to our community’s viability. AchieveMpls is a critical and strategic non-profit partner designated by the Minneapolis Public Schools to ensure students are prepared for school, work and life.”  Achieve MPS provides a bridge between the institution and the public, creating a synergy to help both understand and support each other.
www.achievempls.org


Q & A With the Audience

What help is out there for MPS board governance?
The MPS board is a member of the Council of Great City Schools which has been helpful in looking at data, curriculum and training issues.  But they haven’t really tackled the issue of board governance.

From a former MPS board member: Could “Minnesota Nice” be part of the problem? 

MPS culture of “exceptions” makes it almost impossible for the administration to build momentum for a change.  The MPS administration isn’t directive even when the evidence from other cities and school districts demonstrates that the same curriculum, for example, can provide cohesion and marshal district resources behind a strategy that works. Even though MPS students are highly mobile and kids get lost when curriculum isn’t consistent across grade levels, exceptions to curriculum are consistent. Teachers love to be successful with kids and to help them build kids’ success. The administration needs to change the culture of “exceptions” and build teacher buy-in for using the same curriculum.
 
Also, if really ALL our kids were succeeding, that could be pretty scary for some people. Could there be a subconscious fear that “those kids” will compete with “our kids?”


Why change the options for school choice?

The board wrestled with retaining choice and also managing choice due to costs (e.g., busing) and limiting choice so that we can marshal our resources for educating every child. The former choice system wasn’t equitable and the board needed to ensure that all kids get an excellent education.


Most (90%) of charter schools in Minneapolis are ethnically similar. Why did MPS fail to develop better services for ELL students in neighborhood schools that have a more diverse student population?

Mistakes were made in providing ELL programming. This isn’t an excuse but it’s just to say that it’s very challenging for a large, diverse system to change quickly to provide education for specific populations like ELL and to involve the families. MPS must do better and yet I feel I must support Charter schools that are able to perform and get results.


Should MPS administration institute a labor/management council to maintain a better relationship with the teachers union?

MPS had too close a relationship with the teachers union for the past 25 years. The union essentially ran the district with little push back from the board or the administration. Going forward, we need a better balance between teachers and management to better focus on children’s education needs. 

Report Highlights Achievement Gap

From Minnpost.com...

A new national report draws attention yet again to the wide divide between blacks and whites in school achievement, this time spotlighting the difference in high school graduation rates for black males versus white males here and around the country.

"Yes We Can: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males" goes so far as to charge that American schools and communities are "systematically failing black males,'' though there are bright exceptions.

Read more...

After you get a sense of the challenge, read the memo from Don Fraser about the lessons we've learned from three years of work on the Achievement Gap committee.

Memo from Don Fraser, co-convener of the Committee on the Achievement Gap

Our group has heard from school leaders in Minnesota and other states – who report success in narrowing or closing the learning gap.  These include both charter and public schools.

Many schools are not making significant progress.  The Committee has sought to understand why.  Last December we met to identify some tentative conclusions:

Children who arrive at school from a home culture supportive of education, and/or have had a quality pre-school program, are more likely to succeed in school. Surrounding the school with a community of support helps.

But in-school factors that result in a positive difference include:

• schools with strong leadership more able to choose  teachers,
• longer school hours.
• vigorously pursuing connections with parents
• use of school uniforms
• teachers work as a close-knit team taking responsibility for the progress of all students,
• students’ progress is closely and continuously monitored with prompt action for a student falling behind.

In sum, in effective schools there is a consistent, rigorous commitment to all students.

The concept of teachers working together has been described in several recent studies.  The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future reported that teachers who are in “engaged, school-embedded professional learning teams” hold themselves to a “higher standard, improve their practice, and lift student achievement”.

Karen Chenoweth who writes for the Education Trust spent the last six years identifying and visiting high performing schools with significant populations of children living in poverty and children of color.   She reports that although teachers in these schools work hard, they find their work invigorating because they are successful. “And they are successful because their schools are organized with care to ensure that they do everything right, from discipline to curriculum”.

She goes on to say that “it is, however, unquestionably complicated work.  To ensure that just about all their students learn to high standards, school need to do everything  right, which means they cannot afford to be sloppy about a single thing, from how teachers speak to children to how they organize their instruction.”

And note this statement: “This is one of the major differences schools that mostly serve low-income children face as compared with schools that mostly serve middle-class students.  Middle-class schools can tolerate some sloppiness and still look pretty good on most ordinary measures of success.  Middle-class parents are more likely to have the time, energy, and resources to support their children academically, socially, and emotionally, and that support can often compensate for shortcomings in their schools, from inconsistent discipline policies to wishy-washy curricula.  But schools that serve children who live in poverty or isolation can’t afford to be sloppy about anything.  Every single thing must be done with thought, care, and precision.”

We now know what works.  How do we make it happen?