Why Our Children Fail

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.