Educating Minnesota

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.”