[Mpls] School enrollment & accounting gimmicks

[Socialist2001 at cs.com]

As David Jennings has said, the district does a great job of educating and 
retaining a minority of students (including about half the white students and a 
large majority of the white middle-class students). In my opinion the district 
is also doing a poor job of educating and retaining a majority of students, 
including a very large majority of African-American students. When a student is 
not thriving academically and is having a negative experience in school, and 
the conditions at school don't change, the parent is pretty likely to pull 
that student out of the school system. They move to the burbs or send the kids to 
a suburban public schools, a charter school, a private school, or home-school 
them. That is what the current enrollment crisis is all about. 

Below I will outline what are, in my opinion, the district's most important 
systemic problems that could be fixed.

The district has an extraordinarily high teacher turnover rate. Despite 
layoffs within the past 3 years, nearly one-fourth of the districts teachers had 
been employed for less than 3 full years as of last spring. Excessive layoffs 
boost the turnover rate because some of the teachers who the district plans to 
recall get other jobs and must be replaced with new hires. I consider laying 
off about 33% of the teachers in anticipation of an 8% enrollment decline to be 
"excessive." The teacher tenure act allows the district to lay off teachers as 
necessary and does not allow teachers to hop from one district to another 
unless they give notice prior to April 1, which is before most districts start 
hiring for the next year, or the district agrees to release them from their 
contract. 

There has also been a high concentration of probationary teachers (hired 
within 3 full years) in high poverty, high minority schools. Due to the problem of 
teachers getting a job elsewhere and turning down offers of reemployment, the 
district has to scramble to hire new teachers at the last minute. The 
staffing situation is therefore extremely unstable in schools that teachers generally 
don't bid into. On the other hand, teachers generally need upwards of 10 
years experience to bid into some of the districts better schools. I believe those 
disparities in average levels of teacher expertise account for a very large 
part of the test score gap between schools. 

And the high concentration of inexperienced teachers in high poverty schools 
amounts to a huge subsidy for some of the district's better schools, where a 
teacher generally needs to be about half way up the district-wide seniority 
list (which is somewhere between 10 and 13 years). The starting pay for new 
teachers is about $33,000 per year plus benefits. A teacher with 10 years 
experience and a masters degree gets about $57,000 plus benefits.

And there is the tracking system. Most of the K-6 students are divided into 
separate classrooms within their grade level for reading instruction according 
to perceived ability. The students in the high ability groups learn reading 
skills that prepare them for gifted and talented programs. A very large majority 
of students in the low and medium ability reading groups fail to thrive 
academically, are not well equipped to do the reading required in other subjects. 

In my opinion, the district could rapidly close most of the gap without 
holding back the high achievers by refraining from laying off excessive numbers of 
teachers at the end of each year, by distributing probationary teachers evenly 
through the district's schools, and by phasing out the tracking system. But 
instead of entertaining the idea of fixing the schools, board members change 
the subject and complain about too many parents not doing their jobs properly, 
communities of color not valuing education, etc. 

-Doug Mann, King Field
Mann for school board
www.educationright.com
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