Why Our Children Fail

In January, we showcased some of the public schools’ major successes: high academic achievement, immigrant integration, and nonpareil services for students with special needs. Paradoxically, those very strengths can undermine traditional classroom balance as public schools triage mainstreamed “special needs” kids, the “gifted and talented,” and those who show up for class utterly unprepared. With the meager crumbs left after budget cuts, teachers must attempt to provide a solid educational experience for the “normal” kids, who usually have no organized constituency other than their parents and the PTA.

Against this checkered backdrop, we present our rundown of the ten most serious problems facing the state’s K–12 public education system. We also present the “top ten” lists of three outside experts with extensive knowledge of and experience with Minnesota schools. (We asked four experts for contributions, but Minnesota Commissioner of Education Alice Seagren declined.) Our intent is to help readers identify and focus on the real problems that vex our schools instead of the familiar myths, half-truths, and misconceptions that hinder improvement and progress.

Many problems on the lists, you’ll notice, exist outside the school building—in our homes and neighborhoods, among local school boards, and in the state and nation’s capitals. The truth is, we can tinker with curricula all we want, but if a child lives in an unsupportive home and chaotic community and her school lacks the resources to shrink class size and provide enough instruction days to counter the external dysfunction, her teachers will swim upstream and the odds are strong that she will fail.

In April, we will present the experience, good and bad, of a public school parent and her children. In the series’ conclusion in May, we will suggest constructive responses to the problems enumerated below. We believe that much still can—and must—be done, and that the solutions require common sense as well as money.

1. Misguided expectations
The biggest problem is not dysfunctional schools, but dysfunctional families and communities. It is unfair and counterproductive to insist that our public school systems fix rising poverty rates, the loss of accessible, good-paying jobs, and self-destructive behaviors, such as drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, and gang violence—all major indicators of miserable school, and life, performance.

We have failed our schools—not vice versa. State and federal governments have made matters worse by ratcheting up accountability with draconian mandates and then failing to fully fund them. The case of twelve-year-old Sidney Mahkuk, who was found frozen to death in south Minneapolis last winter, her body full of illicit drugs, tragically illustrates our point. Contrary to the hand-wringing in the media, the culprit in Sidney’s short, brutal life was family and community breakdown, not a cold-hearted bureaucracy. Her family had spent nearly as much time at social service agencies as Sidney had in school. The sad fact is, there are way too many Sidneys for the schools to cope with, given the resources they currently have. Not to mention way too many gangs, guns, and drugs waiting outside the school doors, particularly in certain urban neighborhoods and, increasingly, around the state.

Washington Post columnist William Raspberry points approvingly to what William Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, has called his “favorite statistic”—“that finishing high school, reaching age twenty-one, and getting married before having the first child dramatically reduces the odds that the child will experience poverty.”

Community leaders and parents need the guts to talk to our kids about shunning drugs and gangs, finishing school, putting marriage and jobs before having children, and then raising their children in a stable home full of respect and responsibility.

2. Unstable families and communities
Who’s likely to get the better education? The child whose family moves five times a year, and who spends time in five different schools in five different districts with five different curricula? Or the child who spends the entire year in the same classrooms with the same teachers? That was easy, wasn’t it?

Now compare two Twin Cities school districts, Minneapolis and Edina. Minnesota has developed a crude means of measuring student movement—the Mobility Index. The lower the number, the more stable the school population. In the 1997–98 school year, Edina scored 5 on the index, while Minneapolis stood at 27.7. In 2003–04, the most recent year for which numbers are available, Edina’s index was 5.7 and Minneapolis’s 36.4. Given such disparities in student mobility, does anyone wonder why students in Edina score higher on standardized tests overall than students in Minneapolis?

Children from stable families in stable neighborhoods do better in school and in life. Common sense tells us that. Testing shows it. What should be equally obvious is that it’s harder to teach children who arrive late in the school year and/or leave early. Adding one new child to a classroom is easy. A class with 50 percent turnover, as can be found in some poorer neighborhoods where immigrants flood in and some families move from school to school, is a detriment to both teaching and learning. “The issues of school mobility for ‘unaccompanied’ youth are staggering,” says Tom Gray, Education for Homeless Children and Youth coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Education.

Midway through a recent school year, a Minneapolis fifth-grader who, according to his teacher, “could go either way” moved to St. Paul after his parents separated. For the rest of the school year, that teacher picked the boy up in St. Paul, brought him to school in Minneapolis, and then drove him home at the end of the day, enabling the child to finish the year in his original classroom.

Access to a consistent learning environment, where such heroics aren’t necessary, should be the top priority.

3. A broken finance system; No political courage to fix it
Gerald Christenson, Minnesota’s first finance commissioner and one of the state’s great public servants, died, at age seventy-five, in late November. Thirty-five years ago, Christenson was a key architect of the “Minnesota Miracle” that effectively “erased funding disparities between rich and poor school districts by shifting a large amount of education spending from property taxes to income, sales and other taxes,” according to his obituary in the Pioneer Press. Christenson lived long enough to see his nationally heralded brainchild fall into ruin.

In 2001, Governor Jesse Ventura tried again to shift the school finance burden—which had again become heavily dependent on wildly disparate property taxes—toward state revenues. But the legislature never enacted the broadened sales tax that would have provided a stable revenue stream versus the much more volatile income tax. That failure proved disastrous a few years ago when state income tax revenue plummeted, forcing whipsawed districts into deep layoffs.

Adding to the problem is the chronic shortfall of both state and federal funding, which creates a huge gap between what government demands of our students and the funds it supplies to do the job. How big is that funding gap? Governor Tim Pawlenty wisely impaneled experts to reform the state’s school funding system. But when the panel recommended identifying the cost for schools to meet state and federal requirements, the governor backed away.

Fortunately, a private education advocacy group stepped in. Using data assembled by the governor’s task force, it concluded that the shortfall is as much as $953 million annually. So now that the funding gap is finally on the table, what will the governor and the legislature do to close it?

The current improved revenue forecast should translate into some payback for the schools. But the damage from past fiscal instability has been done, and more damage will occur if this volatile system is not stabilized by a governor and legislature tough enough to face up to and solve the problem once and for all.

Minnesota’s precipitous fall from a nationally acknowledged A in education finance to, in our opinion, a barely passing grade should worry every parent, politician, and business leader in the state.

4. Obsessive racial number counting
The headline on a recent Minnesota Department of Education press release reads, “NAEP Data Shows Increased Achievement for Most Student Groups in Minnesota,” followed by the subhead, “Data also shows achievement gap still exists between black and white students.” A more accurate subhead would have read: “Achievement gap still exists between rich and poor students, stable and transient students, native English speakers and non-English speaking immigrants, and students with well-educated parents and those without.” Those are the true indicators of student performance. It’s not about race; it’s about class.

Minnesota has many racial and ethnic groups, some of them relatively new arrivals and poor, and the state today enthusiastically tracks each one. Unfortunately, state education officials and the media rarely talk turkey about what research shows matters most: parental income and education levels and family.

The era of court-ordered desegregation is essentially over. No matter what their color, parents don’t seem to mind that schools are nearly resegregated, provided education funding is equal to the seriousness of the task and directed at the right problems. Minnesotans should scrap the “racial achievement gap” used to pound the schools and inflame citizens of all races and focus on and solve the far more accurate “poverty achievement gap.”

5. Failing the “average” student
Minnesota’s public schools have outstanding programs for high-achieving students and those dealing with physical, mental, and emotional challenges. But ask any teacher what the presence of a seriously disruptive child does to the teaching environment in the classroom. While she chases such a child down the hall or attempts to calm him, she loses essential teaching time with other students. Minnesota teachers such as Lakeville South’s Lisa King know that teachers, even in our best public schools, “basically need to prepare four daily lesson plans for the range of abilities” in each of their classes.

Smaller classes are especially important in urban schools where English is often not the first language, many students come out of chaotic family situations, and many have significant learning disabilities. Mainstreaming challenging students is a huge improvement over the bad old days of flunking them or socially isolating them, but classes containing such children must be radically smaller so all students—including the quiet learner in the corner—get the educational attention they deserve.

The public must not forget that public schools, unlike their private school counterparts, are obliged to take and teach everyone.

6. No respect
Public school teachers can’t be blamed for feeling a bit like the late Rodney Dangerfield: They “don’t get no respect.” Not from students, parents, or public officials.

Growing student incivility takes its toll. “It’s not like when I started teaching,” says David Astin, a biology teacher who recently retired after twenty-eight years at Wayzata High School. “Then students were respectful because you were a teacher. That’s changed.” 

Meanwhile, there are two kinds of disrespectful parents. One is the overinvolved Mommy (or Daddy), who storms up to the teacher and slams down a report card because her (or his) third-grade progeny received a B, not an A. The other is the under- or uninvolved parent, who, because of lack of interest, energy, time, or language skills, rarely attends a conference and fails to supervise homework assignments.

Finally, there are the attack-dog and angling public officials. When Rod Paige, President Bush’s first secretary of education, called the National Education Association a “terrorist organization,” the official antiteacher rhetoric may have hit bottom. Many parents may not remember such scandalous statements, but every teacher does.

It’s bad enough that we don’t fully empower teachers to do their jobs—especially when, according to data compiled by Education Minnesota, the state’s largest teachers’ union, more than half the state’s public teachers annually spend $200 or more of their own money on supplies for ill-equipped students and classrooms. Let’s not dis them too.

7. Inflexible tenure and compensation tracks
Education Minnesota generally supports sound educational policy. But on the topic of seniority, the union remains too rigid.

After a consecutive three-year on-the-job probationary period in the same school district, public school teachers in Minnesota become tenured in the district. They can still be fired, but the termination process remains unreasonably difficult. Tenure has its virtues, providing freedom from political harassment and arbitrary school district decisions. But it can cripple the ability of a school staff to remain together in times of rising or falling enrollment, when teachers with the greatest seniority take precedence.

Among teachers, age is not necessarily preferable to youth—or vice versa. But there is an educational advantage in staff stability. We agree with the recent findings of the New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit program designed to develop outstanding new public school teachers, that the teacher-termination process must be made easier so a principal can keep a school’s teaching team together.

As for compensation, Governor Pawlenty’s experimental Q Comp program will provide extra teacher pay for measurably improved classroom results—a useful step in directing incentives toward real student learning. Q Comp is voluntary, but already Minneapolis, Hopkins, St. Francis, Mounds View, Fridley, Alexandria, LaCrescent–Hokah, and St. Cloud have signed on. What are other districts waiting for?

8. Innovation for its own sake
Charter schools. Vouchers. Language immersion. Montessori . . . . Well-intentioned teachers, parents, politicians, and interest groups all have ideas about how schools should be run and what options should be offered. But not all of their “solutions” have proven effective—either for the children or the educational goals of the community. And offering too many choices can be costly, both financially and in terms of parental confusion.

We waste valuable time debating ideological initiatives such as school vouchers—a concept rooted in the belief that competition produces better and less costly results, which may be true for business and technology, but hasn’t been proven true for education. Even public school choice—created to address mandated desegregation and to help keep middle-class students in city schools—has run amok, creating confounding first, second, and third “choices” for city parents and students, often at schools across town and involving ever higher busing costs.

Charter schools were created in Minnesota in 1991. There are now more than 125 across the state—serving more than 26,000 students—and they too may need reining in. Questions abound about their successes and failures, their costs versus benefits. The Minneapolis School Board is right to seek answers to these questions before agreeing to more charter schools in the city. The objective must not be to stifle innovation, but to make sure the successful are replicated, the failures closed, and that new charters are granted only on proven prospects for success.

Reformers often get what they want when they clamor long and hard enough. For the majority of students and parents, however, the results often leave much to be desired.

9. School boards in the middle
Manipulated by the legislature (where, constitutionally, the power over education in this state lies) and besieged by the often emotional demands of parents and self-proclaimed “community leaders,” local school board members deserve purple hearts for their service. Too often, however, boards buckle under the pressure. Witness, two years ago, the Minneapolis board’s disgraceful waffling on its decision to hire ideally qualified David Jennings as superintendent, which led to his withdrawal from consideration.

School boards are like hospital emergency rooms performing triage with limited resources. They need the fortitude to redirect the charge of their irate constituencies toward the puppetmasters in St. Paul.

10. A brainpower shortage in Washington
No Child Left Behind, the centerpiece of President Bush’s education program, would have produced howls of outrage from most Americans were it not the product of a self-proclaimed “compassionate conservative.” In addition to badly underfunding a program rightly targeting the poorest-performing students, NCLB draws conclusions and even threatens school closures based solely on the results of statewide tests. Recent data show that many states run dumbed-down tests to avoid federal sanctions. (Minnesota is one of the honorable exceptions to that practice.) Yet it’s hard to blame the states too much when they’re struggling to meet a federal mandate that almost guarantees failure.

Historically, federal education assistance targeting the poor has delivered beneficial results, as studies by the RAND Corporation and others have shown. But this unwisely structured, weakly funded mandate sucks resources out of the standard classroom. Washington must relax its requirements (a process belatedly under way) and fully fund their completion (sadly, not yet on the table). Until then, public school students will remain besieged by tests designed to grade their schools, but do nothing to improve student achievement, and the cacophony of criticism of “failing” public schools will remain misdirected.

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

Low Teacher Salaries, Kids Not Ready to Learn . . .  by Judy Schaubach Judy Schaubach is a Red Wing teacher on leave who serves as president of Education Minnesota, the state’s major teachers’ union, with more than 70,000 members. 1. Low educator salaries. Despite its national leadership in student outcomes, Minnesota ranks sixteenth nationally in average teacher salary ($46,906, which is $902 below the average) and twenty-first in average starting salary ($30,772—or $900 below the average). Recruiting and retaining good teachers is an ongoing concern. 2. Inadequate school funding. Minnesota’s widely touted increases in state education funding are misleading. Adjusted for inflation, state aid per pupil has actually been declining in recent years, leading to chronic budget cutting at the local level. The legislature cut funding for at-risk students two years ago. This year’s increase will not make up for years of underfunding. 3. Uncertain school funding. Schools never know what their funding will be from one biennium to the next. Minnesota has yet to precisely determine what it costs to educate a student—and then fund that amount—so each funding session turns out to be a number-crunching exercise. What’s missing is sustainable, equitable, and predictable funding. 4. Kids who aren’t ready to learn. Much of the so-called achievement gap could be solved with a greater investment in early childhood education and school-readiness programs. 5. Lack of parental involvement. Educators need parents to be partners in educating their students. Too often, educators feel as though they are on their own. 6. A perceived lack of public support and respect. Public survey data consistently show that Minnesotans support their schools and educators. But educators say they don’t feel that support or hear it often enough in their communities. 7. Large classes. Class size is increasing across the state, forcing educators to become people managers rather than teachers. 8. Teachers Don’t Have enough time to do the job right. Increased demands, testing, and paperwork keep educators from doing what they do best—teaching students. 9. An overemphasis on testing. Tests should be used to gauge and to help improve student learning. But to many educators, the current excessive emphasis on testing seems like a sledgehammer to punish kids and schools. 10. Lack of legislative accountability. Schools are penalized under federal law when student test scores don’t improve fast enough. But what happens to lawmakers who cut funding needed to educate those students?

Politics, Micromanagement, Feds in the Classroom . . . by David M. Jennings David Jennings knows the rigors and demands of public education from multiple perspectives. A former business executive, Republican state legislator and speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, chief operating officer of the Minneapolis Public Schools, and a candidate for Minneapolis district superintendent (before he withdrew from consideration following a community brouhaha), Jennings is currently superintendent of the Chaska school system. 1. A politicized department of education. Back in the day, the state department appointed the commissioner of education and served as a voice for the system—not as an advocate for the incumbent governor. When Governor Rudy Perpich wanted to make the commissioner a political appointee, I supported him in the legislature. That was a mistake. The partisan connection should be undone. 2. Endless micromanagement. Everyone who ever walked past a school thinks he knows how to run one. This is especially true of—and especially harmful in regard to—elected state and federal officials. Even when well intentioned, the madcap, mercurial, flavor-of-the-month frenzy caused by the whims of politicians is deadly for kids and schools. 3. Feds in the classroom. No single factor has been more destructive to the success of public education than the incursion of the federal government into the day-to-day operation of the schools. Now we have No Child Left Behind, by which the feds have created a one-size-fits-all monster that wreaks havoc in every classroom in the nation and especially in high-standards states like Minnesota. Send that federal money back! 4. Underfunded special ed and other mandates. At no time in the past thirty years has the federal government fully funded the mandates that accompany the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The result is a massive cross-subsidy of local funds to meet special ed requirements—taking money away from other equally valuable and, in many cases, mandated programs. Unfunded mandates are a bad idea. 5. Playing politics with immigrant students. Many students today are the children of recent immigrants. They have challenges of language and culture to overcome beyond those faced by other children. At some point, the hatemongers among us decided that immigration would make a nice little “wedge issue” on the campaign trail. The kids in our schools—all the kids in our schools—deserve better than that. 6. Weak prekindergarten efforts. The research is pretty clear: An achievement gap exists before kids get to school. Small investments in preparing kids for school pay huge dividends later on, and the interventions are a fraction of the cost of waiting until middle school or later. 7. Out-of-whack calendar. The current school calendar is a product of the nineteenth century. Let’s bring it forward one century, if not two. If we’re going to devote the amount of time we do now to testing, let’s design a calendar that allows more time for teaching. 8. Public Employment Labor Relations Act. PELRA, the state law governing the relationship between employees and employers in the public sector, is a product of the mid-twentieth century. It’s not quite as outdated as the school calendar, but it could use some work. 9. Outdated school district boundaries. The current boundaries defining Minnesota school districts defy meaningful explanation. If we truly want to focus resources in the classrooms and create workable economies of scale in a period of enrollment decline, we’d rethink those boundaries and consider making the districts conform to county lines. 10. The values debate. Most parents believe their children’s education should include components that reflect certain broadly held community values. Remove the extremes from the values discussion. Make sure such community values are incorporated in the curriculum and modeled in the classroom. Values do matter, so let’s stop arguing about them.

Not Enough Funding . . . by Sharon Erickson Ropes Sharon Erickson Ropes is a registered nurse, former Winona School Board member, mother of three grown children shepherded through public schools, and current president of the Minnesota Parent Teachers Association. Her list of problems arrived studded with supporting research and statistics—which readers can access in full at pta.org. 1. Inadequate funding for education and child-related programs. Just one example: Of ten mandated federal programs, not one is funded to meet the actual number of eligible children. 2. Not enough parental involvement. Evidence shows that parental involvement contributes to student achievement, better school attendance, improved homework completion, less violence and substance abuse, and higher graduation rates. But active fathers seem in especially short supply. The PTA supports a program called Watch DOGS—Dads of Great Students—which sends fathers into schools to help with activities and serve as role models. Unfortunately, our culture and business world still resist giving men time off to volunteer at school. 3. Lack of Modern technology. This is a no-brainer for long-term savings and efficiency, but expensive for local districts already struggling with rising property taxes. While state policymakers consider online testing, many schools are mired in ancient technology—some still running Apple IIs. 4. Classroom overcrowding. Students need attention to succeed. In larger classes, maintaining discipline takes teachers’ time away from instruction and makes mainstreaming students with disabilities more difficult. Overcrowding also limits the teaching of subjects—such as the sciences, music, and art—that require space and special materials. 5. Public funds diverted to alternative schools. Minnesota school districts and their taxpayers pay to transport private, parochial, and charter students to the schools of their choice. Tax dollars also subsidize private-school textbooks, nurses, and other resources, yet these other schools are not held to the same accountability standards as traditional public schools. 6. Inadequate before- and after-school care. Studies show that taxpayers save approximately $3 for every $1 spent on after-school programs. Based on reduced dropout rates and remedial education costs, long-term benefits include reduced crime and welfare costs and increased tax revenues generated by graduates. 7. Underfunded preschool and kindergarten programs. Across the country, more than 13 million children under age six are enrolled in some form of child care—all too often, unfortunately, not of the quality that encourages long-term learning. Schools can meet this need at a relatively modest cost. Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, and West Virginia are a few of the states that are far ahead of Minnesota on these issues. 8. No Child Left Behind rules on teacher quality. NCLB requires that by the 2005–06 academic year all teachers in core subject areas be “highly qualified” according to the law’s definition. But complying with these requirements does not help teachers in the classroom or give them the resources they need to improve student learning. 9.  Need for wellness policies in school. A raft of statistics shows that obesity and lack of exercise inhibit learning.  Childhood obesity is epidemic, as are deep cuts in school physical education programs.  Active children learn better. But where’s the school time and the local and state support? 10. Overstressed teachers. Survey after survey confirms that parents are highly satisfied with their teachers and local schools, yet public education seems to be a whipping boy. Resulting teacher stress is further fueled by cumbersome class sizes, student social issues, shortages of textbooks and other basic resources, institutional paperwork, and layoffs due to uncertain state budget projections.