Educating Minnesota

What if Minnesota’s schools, taking a page from the best international competition, were open five additional weeks a year? What if the public school day approximated the work day? What if poor kids received the support they needed to arrive at kindergarten competitive with kids from affluent families? What if doing all of the above would cost Minnesota taxpayers no more, relatively speaking, than it cost your parents to educate you?

Minnesota public schools are the best in the nation, but the challenge our system, its students, and its graduates face today is not national—it’s international. Our stiffest competition comes from Asia, where the public schools churn out masses of learners far more technically literate than most of our best. Meanwhile, students from our poorest families face a host of crippling problems outside of school that our public schools are expected to fix. 

But we believe that our schools—properly configured, financed, and equipped—can do a great deal to significantly improve both the achievement of individual students, regardless of their background and environment, and our competitive prospects in the world. We believe that by thoroughly modernizing Minnesota’s public education system, our students will be well equipped to compete in our brave new world.

Here, then, is what we’d change, why we’d change it, what the changes would cost us, and where we’d get the money to pay for them. This would be, by no means, either a quick or complete fix, but it would be a significant start toward radical improvement.

1. Expand the School Year
How’s this for a radical idea? Let’s actually listen to what experienced school administrators say will improve student prospects. Last winter the Minnesota Association of School Administrators formally proposed adding five more weeks of instruction to the school calendar. It’s about time. The Minnesota academic year, at 173 to 177 days, badly lags behind that of our toughest international competitors (see chart on the next page), whose students routinely outperform our students on international tests. Minnesota’s school year also lags behind the U.S. average.

While Americans, who pioneered free public education, have rested on their laurels, many other countries have eclipsed us since World War II in educational intensity. While our academic calendar still follows the ancient rhythm of an agricultural economy, many other nations follow a modern business calendar. It’s time we start to catch up. 

Adding “only” twenty-five instruction days to the school year amounts to a whopping 1.68 additional learning years to a K–12 “career.” In other words, a high school graduate of a 200-day annual system would have completed the learning-day equivalent of a second-semester college sophomore in today’s system. This increased number of school days alone would erase much of the disparity in educational performance between our students and those of other countries.

A longer instruction year will also reduce the well-documented “learning loss” that occurs during our long summer vacations. That lengthy break, by the way, takes the greatest toll on students from poor families. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that low-income and middle-class kids in Baltimore had “essentially no disparity . . . in achievement gains . . . while they are in school.” But, said sociologist Karl Alexander, “while poor children . . . keep pace during the school year, that does not mean they are performing at the same level at year’s end. To the contrary . . . they lag far behind . . . for two reasons: First, they start school already behind, a deficit that their good school-year gains do not erase; second, they lose ground relative to higher socioeconomic-status children during the summer months, when they are cut off from the school’s resources.” It would seem, in other words, that one of the most important steps we could take toward more equitable achievement in public education would be to lengthen the school year.

Bear in mind that the school calendar has changed over the years; in 1890, the average length of the school year in the United States was 135 days. It’s also worth remembering that Minnesota, long one of the nation’s leading education innovators, was poised to increase the school year to 190 days as recently as 1989—only to retreat in the face of pressure from the resort industry eager to preserve the traditional summer vacation (and maintain a steady supply of youthful labor) and the teachers’ unions fearing the extra funding would not be sustained. Sadly, the push for more instruction days has since been diverted into debates about cheaper and unproved reforms—such as publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools—that waste precious time and energy. (Yet another attempt to lengthen the year went nowhere this legislative session.)

Economist Lester Thurow once said, “The standard American response to proposals for a longer school year is to argue that Americans should learn to more efficiently use the current 180 days before they worry about adding more days. Such a response is to get the whole problem backwards. Instead of starting with what is easy to do—work longer and harder—Americans start with what is very difficult to do—work smarter. The argument is also a form of implicit American arrogance. Americans think that they can learn in 180 days what the rest of the world takes 220 to 240 days to learn.” 

Minnesotans didn’t act on the problem fifteen years ago. Now we can’t afford not to. Let’s be clear. Teachers must be paid for their extra service, which would increase dramatically to 230 days per year (including thirty nonteaching days for professional development), according to the school administrators’ proposal. In addition to returning instruction time stolen by increased student testing and other mandates, the additional compensation would make teachers’ salaries more competitive with those of private-sector professionals, which, over time, would surely mean that stronger candidates would be attracted to the field. The state would not have to pay more for teacher benefits, because they are already calculated on an annual basis.

Only the legislature can provide the additional funds required to expand the school year. Also, capital investment in air-conditioning and other building adjustments may be required. But there are other options—such as project-based learning off campus or online—that can help meet such challenges. We aren’t suggesting any particular instructional solution. We are insisting that more learning time is essential if we are to improve public education results.

Cost: $800 million annually for the extra teaching time, when fully phased in over five years, according to the school administrators. That includes lengthening the teacher year to 230 days.

2. Lengthen the School Day
The current school day assumes that a parent is at home when the child returns in the early afternoon and is greeted with milk and cookies on the kitchen table so the little scholar can do her homework. But, like summers of baling hay, such a scenario is ancient history in most households. Today, 70 percent of Minnesota women (the highest percentage in the nation) work outside the home. Instead of baking cookies, Mom is making money, and both parents—if both parents are present in the household—are wondering where to park the child before and after school. Wherever it is, parents usually pay a hefty price for it. 

So here’s another radical idea: Keep the kids of working parents at school all day while allowing their nonemployed counterparts to pick their kids up early if they choose.

Harold Stevenson, the late University of Michigan developmental psychologist, studied both the American and Asian school day and discovered that the latter makes a lot more educational, not to say common, sense. Why? First, in most Asian schools, there’s a fifteen-minute recess after every class so students can stretch their legs and proceed to the next class refreshed and ready to learn. Asian schools also give kids a full hour or more for lunch. Lunch break in most American schools is twenty-three to twenty-eight minutes, which supposedly includes time to eat, play, and move from and to class. The situation is worst in our junior and senior high schools, where students eat and run back to class with barely enough time for a rest-room stop, much less a break for the mind and some exercise for the body. That’s bad for them and bad for learning.

Furthermore, let’s take a page from the fancy boarding schools: Following afternoon sports or other extracurricular activities, let’s add a late-afternoon study hall staffed by volunteers so students can complete their homework before they go home. Then, when they get home, they can enjoy their families and the TV, computer, or Xbox that now pulls them away from unfinished schoolwork.

Another idea for an enhanced school day: Make students responsible for the routine cleaning of their school grounds and facilities—another common Asian practice. There’s nothing quite like cleaning a restroom to concentrate the mind and exercise the body while building a sense of responsibility for the space around you.

Cost: No new expenditures would be required to add more study time and lunch and break times, though volunteers would have to be recruited to monitor the late-day study halls and cleanup activity. Afternoon buses would sensibly run two hours later on a schedule that more closely mimics a parent’s workday.

3. Increase Resources for Schools With Large Numbers of Poor and Immigrant Students

Remember the kids in your class who sat in the back of the room, said little, and then disappeared from class before graduation day? They still exist, though nowadays we track them like hungry lions to make sure they stay in school, and we threaten to penalize their school if it fails to teach them. That strategy might be acceptable if schools were given adequate resources and encouraged to be creative in finding ways to help such kids succeed instead of just prolonging their academic failure.

Most kids in public schools do just fine. But an alarming number don’t—and many of them come from poor or immigrant families, have learning difficulties, and are in one way or another ill equipped to learn by conventional methods. The ridiculously large class sizes common in many schools today only make the individualized attention required for those students to learn harder to achieve—and that’s bad for everyone. Duane Benson, former head of the Minnesota Business Partnership, says that employers complain that too many students are not prepared for the world of work. Nor are they ready for college. According to Benson, who serves on the board of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System, one-third of college freshmen require some remediation.

Carolyn Light Bell is a veteran teacher who has been substitute teaching this year at Tuttle Community School, a neat and clean K–8 facility in southeast Minneapolis. Eighty-three percent of Tuttle’s students live in poverty and some are recent immigrants who have been here only a few months. “I am humbled by the breadth of the crisis,” Bell says. “Too many kids flood the classrooms, [and] too few adults can address their social and emotional needs. Academic needs are lost. Those who are ready and willing are outnumbered and out-shouted. . . . Educators are worn to a thread by extraordinary demands.”

I visited her classroom; she’s right. One kid sitting quietly alone had arrived a few months earlier from Somalia. I asked the kids how many had no after-school program to go to or adult at home after school. Half the class raised their hands. Financial aid wasn’t the only resource in short supply. When I asked the school’s social worker what was needed, he replied, “More adult bodies.” He contrasted his experience as a parent raising three children in an affluent suburb with his work experience at Tuttle. “In Eden Prairie, staff resources are abundant compared with Minneapolis, which operates with a skeleton crew,” he said. “In Eden Prairie, there are additional licensed staff members, paraprofessionals, and volunteers in each of the schools, while here at Tuttle, none of the four middle school teachers is even full-time.” 

Schools serving the growing numbers of poor, immigrant, and special-needs kids require more money and “adult bodies” to provide the creative, flexible, more individualized programs for which those schools are begging.

Cost: $150 million annually to reduce class size to allow for more individualized attention. Additional resources must be added for poor students.

4. Fully Fund Prekindergarten 
“Only half of Minnesota’s children enter kindergarten fully prepared to learn,” says Todd Otis, president of Ready 4 K, a St. Paul–based advocacy group. We say that’s twice as many as the state can afford.

A fully funded ready-for-kindergarten program would immeasurably help Minnesota students prepare for global competition. Economist Arthur Rolnik of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has used results from cost-benefit studies to show that high-quality preschool programs are sound public investments, with returns to the public of up to 12 percent and combined returns to the public and individual families of 16 percent. Updated findings from a forty-year Michigan study demonstrate even greater returns of 16 and 18 percent, respectively. Even earlier interventions, such as the Nurse– Family Partnership that sends nurses to needy families prior to a child’s birth, show highly promising, cost-effective results.

Early learning makes good economic sense. Families realize better life outcomes, and society benefits from the reduced cost of social services. “Every kid who arrives at school not ready, maybe not even knowing his own name, places a burden on the teacher, who becomes much more efficient if all kids are ready,” Rolnik says. “And that student is more likely to hold a job and not brush up against the very expensive criminal justice system.”

Minnesota lags behind—badly behind—when it comes to prekindergarten education. Several states considered much more progressive—Oklahoma, Kansas, and Kentucky, for example—have already fully funded prekindergarten education or are close to it, because their legislatures and citizens are determined to close the competitive gap. 

Rolnik proposes a prenatal mentor and two-year scholarship for every three- and four-year-old in at-risk families, so the child can attend a high-quality preschool program and also receive a suite of other, already funded services, such as basic health care and family counseling. “If you are looking for the best way to help K–12 education, this will beat any other program you can put on the table,” he says. 

Duane Benson, who has just signed on to run the new Minnesota Early Learning Foundation, agrees. He has thought about this issue from several perspectives—as a parent, a state legislator (and Republican majority leader), and, for fourteen years, leader of the Business Partnership. “It’s a basic economic question,” he says. “Our future is bound to our ability to educate our young people.”

Cost: An additional $185 million per year in state tax dollars would be a major step forward, according to Ready 4 K. “Right now, the state commitment for early care and education is $145 million per year—less than 1 percent of the overall budget,” says Otis. “If we move to just 2 percent, the state would have about $330 million per year to improve access for all families to high-quality early care and childhood programming. This would raise the numbers of children fully ready to succeed in the classroom and in life.”

5. Go Wireless—Now
The Chinese invented paper 3,000 years ago and revolutionized learning. Americans invented Internet technologies twenty-five years ago and helped revolutionize communication. Now, with wireless technology, schools should move quickly to incorporate interactive education, individualized instruction, and project-based learning without reliance on expensive paper textbooks.  

In addition, smaller schools can offer a broader curriculum at little cost—Advanced Placement Latin and other languages, for example—by connecting interested students with the rapidly growing array of online curricula.

In the past, computers were often oversold as classroom aids. But today most schools lag behind the kids, many of whom are “Google-ized” members of peer-to-peer networks and other online communities, creators of their own sites (blogs), and techno-savvy entertainment gurus. It’s time for the schools to catch up.

Cost: Minimal, with significant downstream savings, plus much improved flexibility and customized education possibilities.

6. Consolidate School Districts
Last year, Governor Tim Pawlenty proposed capping administration costs at 30 percent of a school district’s budget, which he figured would add $112 million to instructional funds. But that kind of rigid percentage-based governance is anathema to serious education reformers. Individual schools should be free to decide if they need a new teacher or a social worker. The governor and legislature, in the meantime, should look hard at the big-picture ways to streamline impractical district configurations to create more effective learning and efficient school spending.

Consider the money taxpayers could put into classrooms and other improvements if we consolidated the current forty-six separate school districts in the seven-county metro area into one. With only one superintendent, the new “superdistrict” could save or re-allocate the hefty salaries of forty-five former superintendents and free up the sizable amounts spent on their former staffs, PR departments, and many other redundant support services.

Cost: Our best guess is an annual savings of about $22 million. Plus this bonus: More rational school boundaries would create big savings in transportation costs.

7. Embrace Wise Alternatives and Innovations
Notice that we do not recommend a particular curriculum or style of school. That’s up to individual school districts, principals, parents, and students. The standard school configuration seems to work well for most Minnesota families. Others are happy with homeschooling or alternative or charter schools.

High school “career academies” and specialty math-science high schools are promising innovations to add to the mix. So are additional high-quality charter schools and postsecondary options that allow qualified high school students to take college courses. Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School calls such programs “disruptive innovations” that can pioneer next-generation schools.

A couple of our local charter schools would seem to be especially worth emulation.

Harvest Preparatory School, in North Minneapolis, has a student population that’s 99 percent African American and a student poverty rate of nearly 80 percent. Sponsored by the Minneapolis Public Schools, Harvest was singled out by the Urban League two years ago, when 87 percent of its students scored at or above grade level in math and 96 percent did so in English, “surpass[ing] the average performance of students of any race/ethnicity throughout Minnesota in 2002-03.”

How does Harvest Prep do it? For openers, says Eric Mahmoud, who, with his wife, Ella, runs the school, “we got real efficient with time.” Harvest Prep is in session seven and a half hours a day (versus the conventional six), which, over the course of a year, provides almost half a year of additional learning time. Four out of five Harvest Prep students, moreover, get an extra hour of instruction after regular hours every day. Add to that a stable and dedicated staff—most of whom have been at the school for five years or more—and you have what the Mahmouds call a “culture of achievement.”

Meanwhile, Minnesota New Country School produces results so strong that even the Japanese would like to replicate it. The more than 110 students in grades seven through twelve—almost a third of whom have special education needs—usually spend four days a week in class, though many will often spend weeks at a time on off-campus research projects. (One of those projects, on deformed frogs found in polluted ponds nearby, generated scientific interest and headlines worldwide.)

New Country kids begin school before Labor Day and continue until the middle of the following June. During the summer, the school building remains open and available to students as needed. There are no regular classes on Fridays and students get a week off after every five weeks. The school day ends at 3:35 p.m., but students may stay until 5:30. Each student has a computer, and all students are responsible for keeping the building clean. There are no janitors and no football team. The staff-to-student ratio is 1:18.

The kids do “fine” on the state’s required basic skills tests, says New Country adviser Dee Grover–Thomas, but the project-based curriculum puts at least as much emphasis on such practical skills as goal-setting, time management, decision-making, task completion, teamwork, and communication.

A few schools modeled on New Country are scheduled to open in, of all places, Japan, a country far better than ours at producing technically literate students. The Japanese understand that in order to turn out a more creative population, their schools have to be more creative as well—and where better to look than America and, more specifically, Minnesota? Americans, after all, invented the iPod—and Minnesotans conceived of the charter school.

We most emphatically do not recommend private school vouchers as an alternative to current public school funding. In fact, we believe it’s time to put the voucher concept away for good. Never mind the anecdotal evidence that private schools educate kids better than their public counterparts. According to the latest federal study of math outcomes of private and public schools, when data is controlled for socioeconomic factors, public schools are in fact more effective. Siphoning public money away from the public schools is financially and educationally counterproductive. Let private schools thrive as they always have—without state funds and interference.

The Bottom Line
Today, we Minnesotans are paying less to educate our children, based on a percentage of family income, than our parents paid to educate us. How can we not contribute at least as much as our parents did? Yes, the costs are large in the aggregate, but for individual families they are small, and the gains—for kids and for the state—are gargantuan. This investment is about creating citizens of the future rather than throwbacks to the past.

The additional roughly $1 billion we’re recommending in new tax revenue per year will buy real change by improving the state’s national and international competitiveness. A 14 percent increase in the number of instruction days, a more productive and family-friendly school day, additional well-qualified teachers, technologically up-to-date facilities—all solid, research-backed improvements—will increase the state’s international competitiveness and give our students and families a brighter future.

We believe that nearly half of that total—$472 million—should be derived from a small across-the-board progressive income tax rate increase from the current rates of 5.35, 7.05, and 7.7 percent to 5.4, 7.7, and 8.7 percent. We suggest that the balance—$516 million—come by way of extending the state sales tax to clothing. The former will not push Minnesota further into the income tax stratosphere, but it will provide the kind of long-term benefits that have propelled the state into a personal-income leadership position among the states. The sales tax on clothing, though regressive, is standard in most states and would allow us to capture revenue from tourists shopping at the Mall of America and elsewhere, just as Floridians and Arizonans tax visiting Minnesotans.

The bottom line will be results. 

 James P. Lenfestey is a former Star Tribune editorial writer. Marcia Appel is a Mpls.St.Paul Magazine contributing editor.