My decision over the past holiday season to put off doing my “logic for leftybloggers” series – explaining some of the basic points of a logical argument, since a so very, very infinitesimally tiny share of them can actually manage one – is looking more and more shortsighted every day.

I may have to exhume the entire series from the trash can.

Today’s example:  Rob Levine, one of Kackel Dackel’s minions over at Cucking Stool.  Last week he wrote to regurgitate some of EdMinn’s carefully-selected chanting points over charter schools.  I responded.

That was probably my first mistake.

Over the weekend, he “responded“.  To the extent that name-calling and nothing more is a “response”, anyway.

I’ve been writing about charter schools for years. I’ve made a habit of field-dressing the various chanting points the anti-charter lobby – EdMinn and their various sock-puppet suipport groups, MN2020, the DFL and its’ pet alt-media – places out there.  I’ve seen it all.  And I’ve gotten all the usual responses; charter schools are for the 2010s what the Second Amendment was to the 1990s; the focus of a lot of disinformation, half-informed debate, politically-manipulated emotion, and just plain not-too-bright name-calling.

The mantra of education deformers…

“Deformers”.  Cute.

OK, he’s a leftyblogger; you have to handicap him a little name-calling, anyway.  If you read his piece (enh), you’ll see he’s not bashful about using it.

Well, that and the last refuge of weak debater, the “first person omnisicient”, “Karnak the Magnificent” school of reporting:

…is to find “what works” and replicate it. They are fixated on numbers and statistics about “education gaps,” “value-added measures,” test scores, and closing “low performing” schools.

Rob Levine thinks we – a good chunk of the 13% of Saint Paul parents who’ve left the system, and of the 25% in Minneapolis, the hundreds of thousands nationwide, and especially the thousands of Afro-American, H’mong and Latino families, the steep majority of charter parents in Saint Paul and Minneapolis – are “fixated” on Department of Ed statistics.

It’s pretty much crut, of course.  We – the Twin Cities’ overwhelmingly minority, disproportionally poor, but lopsidedly motivated parents who are the charter schools’ most devoted advocates – are there because our kids were getting an inadequate education in the public schools and we wanted better.  We exercised the thing that EdMinn and the rest of the status quorriors fear the most; our free, enlightened choice.

Now, why do you think we not only leave the public system, but stay in the charter system, devoting time, money, effort and our kids’ precious futures?

According to Levine, it’s apparently because we’re idiots.

We’ll come back to that, too.  First, let’s see if his debate technique improved since the last paragraph:

But what to do when the numbers don’t go their way? Honest advocates might admit their rhetorical opponents have a point and go from there. Mitch Berg has a different idea: distract with sophistry and denial and hope nobody notices that he’s made a fool of himself.

Levine, our “honest advocate”, apparently hasn’t gotten the memo; the “MITCH BERG HAS TEH SCR3AMING MELTDOWN OVER MY L33T CHARTER SCHOOL POST!” is so 2007, even among the smart leftybloggers.

Believing that endless repetition is the source of wisdom, he re-re-regurgitates his first post, again:

Case in point: Almost a year ago I cataloged the lengthening list of charter schools that have crashed and burned in Minnesota. I didn’t have to do much research for the post – the Minnesota DOE has a publicly available spreadsheet of all the charter schools that have been closed in the state with a brief reason for their closures.

My post also added as an addendum a Strib story about the the “state’s lowest-performing 32 schools.”

Levine certainly didn’t “have to” “do” much “research”; the anti-charter lobby circulates the numbers regularly.

You want “honest advocacy?”  Watch, Rob Levine, and see how it’s done.  Here’s a good place to start, since at last last he moves on to some numbers – sort of:

At the time I wrote:

Of those, 11 are charters. That means 11 of 154 charter schools are failing, a failure rate of seven percent. Twenty one of the failing 32 are regular public schools; there are 2,485 regular public schools in the state, giving a failure rate of less than one percent. So by the Minnesota DOE’s own numbers, charter schools in Minnesota are failing at a rate seven times greater than regular public schools.

And there’s one of the greatest misrepresentations there is about charter schools.

As I pointed out almost two years ago, comparing system-wide academic failure rates is like comparing apples and axles; Public schools can shunt kids that drag their curves off into the “Alternative Learning Center” (ALC) system.  (I pointed this out in my first response to Levine, who apparently thinks that repeating the same flawed “data” with a dollop of unearned condescension makes the data better).   At the same time, charters’ academic numbers are affected by the fact that charters are where parents go when the public schools have failed their kids – when years in the factory school system have sapped their interest in the whole “school” thing.  Charters – especially in the city, and on the Indian reservation charters outstate – are cleaining up all kinds of messes. My family (my daughter and of course my son) is only one story among many.

So by the Pawlenty-run Minnesota DOE’s own standards, fully seven percent of the state’s charter schools were among the worst 32 performing schools in the state; only one percent of regular public schools were cited in the 32. It’s really not hard to do the math. Mitch Berg knows that these statistics drive a stake into the heart of arguments for more charter schools, which is why he must try to find a way around them. But there is none.

“Mitch Berg knows…?”  Again with the “Omniscient First Person”.

Here’s what Mitch Berg really knows; if you compare all charter schools to all public schools, charter schools will come in below.

I also know that here in the city, it’s because a huge percentage of charter school parents are from populations that the regular public school system has a hard time serving adequately; the poor, the ESL student, the minority, the Native American, the immigrant – populations that suffer huge achievement gaps, even with nasty high dropout rates (which take those kids off the public schools’ books).  The public system rips its hair out trying to fix the achievement gap among black students.  H’mong boys are also difficult.  And so the public school fails at educating them.  And Latinos.  And ESL students.  And special ed.   And kids who just plain don’t learn well under the tradictional “sit your butt in the chair and learn what the curriculum planner tells you to learn, when she tells you to learn it” model of education.

Here’s what else I know – something Rob Levine is too disingenuous, or incurious, to find out for himself.  I know most of the specific schools in the Strib article Levine cites.  And I can Google:

• East High School – No school by that name is listed in the directory of state charter schools.  If it’s East Range Technical, in Eveleth, it’s a school that deals largely with high school kids that have had trouble in traditional schools.   Do you suppose Rob Levine knows this?
• Four Directions Charter School – a Minneapolis charter that serves the city’s Native American community.  Have you seen Minneapolis’ achievement gap for Native Americans?  The dropout rate?  I’m guessing Rob  Levine doesn’t.
• High School for Recording Arts, a St. Paul charter that tries to reach inner-city youth through music education.
• Hmong College Prep Academy High School, one of many schools serving the H’mong community; the public schools have an especially hard time with H’mong boys.
• New Spirit Primary School is a Frogtown primary school – just up the street from Maxfield elementary, where my daughter went to first grade (with an excellent teacher), and which is also on the “failing” list.
• New Visions Charter School, in Northeast Minneapolis, serves disabled kids.
• Riverway Secondary, a Winona school with a 70 percent poverty rate.
• Rochester Off-Campus Charter High – it’s an alternative charter for kids who’ve had one academic or personal crisis or another; among its listed “resources” is a crisis nursery.
• Transitions Senior High, located in Minneapolis’ down-market Phillips neighborhood, serves an extremely poor clientele.
• Unity Campus is a North Minneapolis charter that serves a very low-income clientele.
• Urban Academy Charter School is a Saint Paul charter that serves kids who’ve cratered in the public system.

So there you have it; the 11 charter schools on the state’s list are ones that serve students, and neighborhoods, and populations that the regular system fails at, too.  Look at the Strib article Levine referenced; practically every failing charter has a public-school neighbor, serving a similar population, that is also failing!

Of course, “look at the failing charters” is a cheap out for those who just know what they think even though they don’t bother to look at the issue all that hard.  Two years ago, I compared apples to apples, comparing charters with their neighboring public schools, weighted for low-income, Engish as a Second Language (ESL) and special ed.  In most  cases charters do just as well and, in many, cases, better (the embattled Tariq Ibn Ziyad Muslim charter, whose students are mostly poor and ESL, has among the best test scores in the state).   And the really good charters – like the dozen or so in the “Friends of Education” chain, serving both well-off and desperately poor clienteles – routinely clobber their public neighbors.

I got that through “research” – or, as Rob Levine calls it, “sophistry”, I guess.

Look – the point isn’t to get into endless whizzing matches with lesser bloggers like Levine.  He may be a perfectly fine human being.  I’m not sure if he has kids in school; he doesn’t write like someone who does, but I’ve been wrong before.

The point is, we parents who chose charter schools did it for a reason.  Rob Levine would have you believe that reason is “stupidity”.  Feel free to make that case to a room full of charter parents, if you’d like; you’ll more likely find that they are more involved than your typical roomful of public school parents.

Do some charters fail?  Of course; some of them spectacularly, and for nefarious reasons.  For some, that’s a law-enforcement matter.  As it should be.  Have some been complete frauds?  Sure – you put government money out there, and not everyone who shows up for a share is going to be honest.  They’re not the perfect solution;

Just the best one many of us can afford.

Do some charters struggle academically?  Of course.  And in some cases, it’s because the schools aren’t that good.  Just like some public schools are terrible; let me tell you about Saint Paul Central High School for a while (or, for that matter, Gordon Parks High – here, here, here or here, if you want to see your public school dollars at work).  Levine’s main point, to the extent that he makes one, is simply regurgitating the banal obvious, and then mocking people who don’t pat him on the head and say “thanks, Rob, that was a very special list of stuff everyone knows!  Have a cookie!”.

But if the  Minnesota Department of Education, and for that matter anyone on either side of the charter school question, want to get to some meaningful information, here’s what they should try; instead of measuring schools, they should measure individual students, comparing their public and charter school performances over a significant period of time.  Because given that charter schools take a large percentage of kids with whom the traditional public schools have failed, singly and as groups, and that charters don’t have the rug of the “Alternative Learning Centers” to sweep the kids they can’t reach under, it’s a given that charters, considered broadly, are going to suffer in aggregate numbers.  But aggregating individual students’ improvement (or deterioration, I suppose) over time would give you an actual accurate picture of what charters, or at least the majority that are good, are doing.  It’d help you find out why parents drive their kids from Prior Lake to attend Avalon, on University Avenue in Saint Paul, or from Forest Lake to go to General Vessey in Inver Grove Heights, or from White Bear to go to Nova Academy in Highland Park.

That would take effort, of course. Name-calling is much easier – and won’t get people razzing you at “Drinking Liberally“.  Some people would prefer to stick with the name-calling, the context-mangling, the regurgitation of statistics that can not possibly tell the real story.

Which of these is Rob Levine?

Hope springs eternal.

I’m more likely to get that third date with Scarlett Johannson, but that’s the nature of hope.

Yesterday, we noted that critics like Kay Hymowitz are noticing young men today are “angry”.  They attribute it to the usual dog’s breakfast of feminist conceits; the young men are a little misogynistic, a little bit childish, a little bit full of inchoate rage over “poliitcal correctness” and changing gender roles.

I pointed out that while those roles are certainly changing today, they are no more jarring to the male sensibility than they were at any time from the 1960’s through the 1980s; I might argue that after three generations of “women’s liberation” and the broad acceptance of what used to be “Feminism’s” goals, young men today aren’t suffering any culture shock that men didn’t have, and much worse, a few decades back.

And we noted a scholarship program for “white” (more than 25% caucasian) males, which the Southern Poverty Law Center will no doubt classify a “hate group” before long.

And at the beginning of it all, we noted that subcultures that are attacked, persecuted, segregated or singled out over the long haul tend to adapt to it, in ways that address immediate-term survival over long-term good.

Why are 20-30-something males ostensibly turning away from dating, mating, and our society’s “courtship ritual” as it’s evolved in recent decades, in a way that their older brothers, uncles and even fathers and grandfathers didn’t?

———-

Back when I was in fifth grade, I had my first male teacher.  Mr. Buchholtz was a big guy, a former football player who’d done a hitch in the Navy in Vietnam.  He was the first male teacher any of us had had.

And he did all sorts of things – showed us how to tackle, how to to do karate kicks, let us play “tackle pomp” and “cops and robbers” and “army”, complete with “guns” we made out of sticks, the whole line-up of things that might have mortified the women who’d taught us through fourth grade, had those women not come up through an educational system that let boys be boys.

And when I said let boys be boys, I meant “let them both exercise those “boy” traits – physicality, aggressiveness, spatial literacy – and learn to control them and use them appropriately.  You could play “cops and robbers”; you couldn’t accost Mary Jo Helmbarger with the toy gun and scare her.

Of course, the classroom itself was pretty well designed for girls, who develop verbally before boys do.  It all evened out.

And that was the system, thirty years ago.  Maybe even twenty-five years ago.

Mr. Bucholtz would be the subject of administrative discipline today, and most likely ostracized by his colleagues.

It was about twenty years ago that the theories of Harvard professor Carol Gilligan started to gain currency.  It was Gilligan’s theory that young girls suffered in school because boys, being more aggressive, were quicker to raise their hands and get attention; that young girls were neglected, and the neglect caused them to suffer – because the education system was just too masculine.  The theory – publicized in countless books by scholars, pop-psychologists and ideological feminists – was that boys’ innate aggression intimidated girls into being quiet and not getting their questions answered in class (among other charges), which in turn beat down young girls’ spirits, which was a form of systemic discrimination that had to be overcome.

And the educational academy reacted immediately.  Schools moved to start clamping down on “boy” things – aggressive play, games like “cops and robbers” and playground football and all the other ways boys have worked off their energy during recess since the dawn of the “sit your butt in the chair and learn what we tell you to learn” model of education.

Now, psychology has known for decades that if you make a person bottle up “who they are”, it’s going to cause psychological damage . It’s one of the reasons schools have bent over backwards, for example, to support gay students; because, they just know, if you make a person deny what they are for long enough, it’s going to cause damage.

Enlightened people would never think of demanding a gay student stop being gay.

But virtually overnight in pedagogical terms, it became the fashion to force boys to do just that; to bottle up who they were.   I’ve been noticing this for almost as long; I remember having this conversation when my stepson was in school, in the early nineties.  In one memorable conversation with a woman who was a teaching assistant at the University of London’s graduate educational psychology program back in 1998, I put that basic premise out there; her response, straight from the textbook of the day, was “yes, boys acting like boys is a pathology that gets in the way of good education”.  Direct quote.

Of course, Carol Gilligan was wrong. Christina Hoff-Summers, in The War On Boys, pointed out that Gilligan’s “research” was not only almost completely exempted from peer review, but Harvard wouldn’t release any of the raw data or methodology that led to her conclusions – which was, in those days before “man-made global warming”, considered pretty bad form.  Hoff-Summers pretty well shredded Gilligan, and the outcomes of the mania that had by this time swept the educational academy…

…but it was really too late.  School became a fairly dismal place for boys.  Especially the boys that couldn’t “go along to get along“.   Acting too much “like a boy” – being too aggressive, not channelling their energy into acceptable forms, which meant “being verbal, not physical” – could get a boy drugged into compliance.  Most outrageously, teachers started demanding  boys get drugged into compliance, and making the system make those demands stick.  In other words, raduates of the least academically-rigourous programs offered at most universities felt themselves empowered to act as practitioners in a field that took graduates of the most rigorous field, but one that even those practitioners know is still only vaguely understood.

Can you imagine what’d happen if science came up with a drug that could suppress a homosexual child’s identity?   The very fact that the idea had been researched would be condemned with vein-bulging fury, to say nothing of the actual act of producing and prescribing the drug.  And the furor would be right.

And yet our education system has been forcing half the student population to be something other than what evolution, brain chemistry and their physiology make them, and being drugged into submission and classified as “special ed”, and plopped onto the failure track  if they don’t go along.

And it’s having an effect.  The number of girls in college increased – from right around to slightly under half in the ’80’s, to closer to an estimated 60% of the population in the very near future.  It’s even more pronounced in the humanities and soft-sciences.   It’s gotten to the point that the mainstream media who trumpeted Gilligan’s “research” twenty years ago are fretting about the lack of men on campuses today.  If 12 years of school have been turned into an ugly ordeal, why should they stretch it out to sixteen years – even assuming that their drug-addled, special-ed sodden academic records allow them to get into a college.

So the question I’d like to ask Kay Hymowitz – the author of the book Manning Up that I went after yesterday – is “why are you asking why young men are shunning the dating life, when the real question is why do you expect young men who’ve had traditional masculine roles beaten down and treated as pathologies to be overcome  for their entire educational career and  young lives to suddenly turn into Prince Charming when they turn 22?”

As long as we actively suppress, and oppress, boys acting like boys – especially by way of learning how to be responsible boys, and thus responsible men, the way they always have – then Kay Hymowitz’ dating malaise is just the tip of the iceberg.

Nearly one Minneapolis public school family out of four has decettamped from the Minneapolis Public Schools, to either the suburbs (either relocating or merely sending kids to school there, under the state’s open enrollment law),  private or parochial schools, or in many cases charter schools.  In Saint Paul, it’s closer to one out of eight; either way, that’s a lot of parents who’ve decided that the public school system just doesn’t do the job for them.

I was one of them.  I pulled my kids out of the public system five years ago.  With one of my children, the big public high school just didn’t pack the gear.  With the other, it was more like child abuse.

The big statistic is this; in the inner city, charter school students in the inner city are very predominantly minority, poor, and speak English as a second language.  Their parents – like me, only black and H’mong and Latino, and with serious complaints about the achievement gap – are among the most passionate advocated for charter schools you can possibly find.

And they – we – having been voting with our feet.  And the Teachers Unions hate it when families get uppity.

The Teachers Union and the DFL (pardon the redundancy) appear to be starting one of their periodic orgies of attacking charter schools, and is apparently yelling “Jump”; Kackel Dackel at Cucking Stool, a dutiful leftyblogger, yells “off what?”:

“Charter schools are designed to boost student achievement” says the advertisement. That put me in mind of a post that Rob wrote last spring:

Charter schools crash and burn in Minnesota

(The link is to a Rob Levine piece that notes that, yes, some charter schools have closed ignominiously.  Some schools’ sponsors or administraitons got in over their heads.  Some did their best, but the rules are just plain tighter for charters.  And yes, when you put government money out there, some shylocks will find ways to take it; inner-city DFL political correctness certainly played a role; that is a story worth an entire article on its own.

According to Rob’s post (and statistics from the Minnesota Department of Education in it), charters fail at a rate seven times greater than public schools in Minnesota.

Which, if you think about it, is a really pointless statistic.  Charter schools can fail – and sometimes they do.  They have no safety net.  If they are badly-managed, they can close – as Bill Cooper’s “Friends of Education” did with one of their schools that didn’t pack the gear – or can be shut down by the Department of Education.  What happens when a district school, or an entire district is badly-managed?  They ram through a tax levy (and if the DFL gets its way, they won’t even have to ram it past voters) and fix things.  If the failure is academic, they waddle through the interminable “No Child Left Behind” system, with years on probation and, eventually, a “closing” that resembles a shell game more than a sheriff’s sale.  Public school districts can even declare bankruptcy, and reorganize (at exquisite taxpayer expense); if a charter school goes bankrupt, it’s done.

How about academic failure?  Public high schools are insulated from failure by the “Area Learning Center” system; kids who are dragging down the curve and who don’t drop out are shunted off the books to “ALCs”, where their grades don’t count against the school’s, and district’s, averages; they’re the district’s mulligans.  Charter schools – which, contrary to some lefty propaganda, don’t get to pick and choose their students – have to work with what they’ve got.  Before the Department of Education can shut things down, the parents often largely vote with their feet, again.

It’s easy for a charter school to fail.  It’s very, very hard for a public school to fail.

So who writes this propaganda? The website listed is publiccharters.org. Although its primary purpose seems to be lobbying, it’s a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit, with just under six million dollars in gross receipts for 2009. There is no information in the linked 990 identifying donors, and the website is likewise silent.

Worth looking into, don’t you think?

No, not really.  I mean, big whoop; non-profits set up a non-profit to publicize themselves.  (But do you know whose donors would be interesting to uncover? I digress)

But while Kackel Dackel is interesting in badgering those he disagrees with, and it’s never really all that interesting, he’s really left a big rhetorical clinker hanging out there; the implication that charters really don’t boost student achievement.  The Department of Education – and teachers-union flak groups, like “MN2020” – periodically publish “studies” showing that charter schools lag the public schools’ achievement.

These “studies” always, invariably, without exception fail to control for demographics; every single one compares apples with axles.  They also fail to control for motivation; many families go to charter schools after the public school system has nearly extinguished their kids’ interest in learning and given up on them.  Fortunately, I did that, at least in part – in response to one of MN2020’s endless, Teachers-Union-funded hit pieces, I compared apples to apples.  And then I did it again.

More in coming weeks, as the DFL/Unions/their pet non-profits/the leftyblog chanting party ramps up the attack.

Saint Paul at Fraters Libertas has the scoop:

Another formerly respected education professional disgraces himself.

Go and read.

And let the outrage out.

Arvada Colorado school adminstrators asked for the arrest of the 11 year old boy who drew the non-threatening “threatening” stick figures in class the other day…

…even though the boy had been told to do this by his therapists as an alternative to disrupting class – an alternative that was apparently working  fine.

Well, it was, anyway (I’m going to add the odd bit of emphasis):

Arvada Police are defending the way they handled the arrest of an 11-year-old boy.  The Arvada boy was arrested and hauled away in handcuffs from his home for drawing stick figures in school – something his therapist told him to do.

His parents say they understand what he did was inappropriate, but are outraged by the way Arvada Police handled the case…They say “Tim” is being treated for Attention Deficit Disorder and his therapist told him to draw pictures when he got upset, rather than disrupt the class. So that’s what he did.

Last October, he drew stick figures of himself with a gun, pointed at four other stick figures with the words “teachers must die.”

No, he was not a budding trenchcoat mafioso…:

The boy drew the pictures to let out angry emotions…He felt calmer and was throwing the picture away when the teacher saw it and sent him to the principal’s office.

The school was aware that the boy was in treatment, determined he was not a threat, notified his parents and sent him back to class.

But once your kids are in the hands of our school systems’ idiot administrators, you really can’t count on anything:

His mother, “Jane” was shocked when Arvada Police showed up at their home later that night.

She says she told her son to cooperate and tell the truth, but was horrified when they told her they were arresting him and then handcuffed him and hauled him away in a patrol car. His mother says she begged police to let her drive her son to the police department and to let her stay with him through the booking process but they refused.

They put him in a cell, took his mug shot and fingerprinted him. He says he thought he was going to jail and would never be able to go home again.

Anyone wanna guess the kid’s therapy bills for the next ten years?

At first school officials did not want to press charges, but changed their mind when police called them later that night. A juvenile assessment report shows he’s never been in legal trouble before and is at low risk to reoffend.

He’s charged with a third degree misdemeanor, interfering with staff and students at an educational facility. The system says it’s doing what’s in the best interest of the child. But Tim’s therapist says handcuffing an 11-year-old and putting him in a cell over something like this is “quite an overreaction” and does much more harm than good.

Do you think?

I have a little background with the comatose, unreasoning stupidity of the schools’ “zero tolerance” policies.  Good luck getting redress in the courts – the laws pretty well protect schools from any sort of accountability for their actions – the laws were written by Democrats in the pocket of the Teachers unions and the Administrators associations; also, they’re the freaking government.

Do you think a charter school, responsible to a board elected by the school’s parents and stakeholders, just might have come up with a solution that wouldn’t have embarassed a Soviet komissar?

It’s time to bring back public humiliation – stocks and pillories – for public officials who so utterly transgress the boundaries of sanity, decency and morality itself.

And if the Arvada, Colorado school board doesn’t fire every single party involved, and the voters don’t in turn erase every single member of that school board from any contact with children forever, and the people can stand for that sort of priggish idiocy from their police department, they deserve what they get.

I’m pretty sure “Tim” does not.

No punishment we can legally give is severe enough for these walking sacks of “human” pus.  If I were face to face with these scumbags, I would punch them.

Damn right I’m “vitriolic”.

Another Everyday Wonder Woman isn’t a “new” conservative blog – she’s been writing the blog for a few years now.  But Another Everyday is focusing on education these days.

And she knows a thing or two:

Most people have no idea how complicated and painful education funding is. Virtually every dollar that comes into a district has strings attached in the form of mandates, restrictions and requirements. Some administrators have estimated that the staff time needed to keep up with all the mandated reporting and submission requirements amounts to nearly half of every full time employee in a school district. If you wonder why the ratio of administrators to teachers is so high, this is one big reason.

For instance, did you know:

1. School districts are required by law to keep separate accounts for capital, food service, debt service, future retirement benefit exposure, and operating funds, and those funds may not be transferred from one fund to another, even if they are not needed in their area;

There’s a whole string of “didja knows” following – some of them I did, some I did not.  It’s a good primer on the problems in re-jiggering education funding under the current system.

Conclusion:

Simplfiying the budgeting and allocation process will allow school districts the ability to focus on their most important priorities, ease the contortions that legislators, staff members and the public have to go through to understand and administer the process, and might even save a little money to boot as districts spend less time searching for all the little scraps they can find to make up for general fund formula reductions.

There is, of course, a whole lot of material between the intro and the conclusion.  Read the whole thing.

It’s not often that I find anything to agree with over at Minnesota “Progressive” Project, Joe Bodell and Eric Pusey’s make-work project for bloggers with, let’s just say, opportunities for improvement.

But every so often, one sees the faintest glimmer of recognition; the idea that someone over there has a working pilot light.

First, it was Grace Kelly joining with pro-Second Amendment conservatives in supporting Bostrom for Ramsey County Sheriff.

And now, “Blue Collar Daughter” (who I don’t know, but judging by her handle would seem to be the style reporter) attacks the same Saint Paul School District “reorganization” proposal that, if you recall, I attacked last month.

When St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Valeria Silva posted the district’s new Strong Schools, Strong Communities plan on the SPPS website February 1st, the immediate reaction was strong parental and public outcry. While Silva defends the proposal as a pro-student, community-building endeavor:

We believe, the changes we are making will reconnect many students to the communities where they live – truly making the schools the heart of our community.

~Silva

in reality it is a budget-trimming maneuver that ends access to or slates closure of many district magnate and charter schools for students city-wide, as well as effectively ends true open enrollment options in St. Paul, particularly for students in low-income neighborhoods of the city (where “neighborhood school” performances tend to be low and choices limited).

BCD is correct.  While I’ve long held that “Neighborhood Schools” are a key part of reviving public education (because the evidence shows that, while class sizes matter little to student performance, school size has a big effect), Silva’s plan doesn’t really create them.   Rather, it does less busing of kids across the city to big-box schools, making them go to big-box schools closer to their home.

And it’s the big-box schools that are a huge part of the problem for urban school districts from coast to coast, especially Saint Paul.

BCD:

A top priority of the plan is to cut transportation outside narrowly-defined “neighborhood school zones,” leaving an island of poor students trapped at less-desirable schools near their housing. Silva and SPPS also hope to transplant quality schools from their current locations to alternative facilities where the highest percentage of enrolled students live-this often means pulling a high-quality charter or magnet school from the transportation zone of a low-income neighborhood thus making it inaccessible to students who tend to have less options for mobility.

BCD is partly wrong: the Saint Paul School Board doesn’t get to tell Charter schools where to go.  They have their own boards and superintendants.  It’s one of the reasons charter school parents love them; they are insulated from the madness and myopia of the Saint Paul district’s out-of-touch, DFL-and-union-controlled board.

But as to the school the SPPS does control?  BCD is correct; last Saturday on the Northern Alliance, we talked with Krysia Weidel, a Saint Paul parent from the East Side who’s looking at having to haul her kid all the way to Highland Park if they want to stay in “L’Etoil Du Nord”, the city’s very effective, successful French-immersion school.  One of the district’s precious few success stories, the school is currently located in the East Side’s Phalen neighborhood, but is largely attended by kids from Highland Park,  Merriam Park, and other, tonier parts of town where parents have the time and bandwidth to bone up on the latest educational theories.  (Disclosure:  I am a huge proponent of language-immersion education.  It works, and works well, across class and racial divides, not “merely” as a tony humanity, but at helping kids wire their brains, ironically, for science and math).

It makes sense, in a sense; it will save the district’s transportation office all kinds of money, putting the school in the heart of its prime attendance area.

MPR news put this question to its online readers today: Should cash-strapped schools end mandatory busing?, citing Chuck Marohn’s Strong Towns Blog, in which Marohn calls for the abolition of Minnesota’s mandatory busing statute. What Marohn doesn’t address is that public school busing is about much more than, as he calls it, “door to door” service and provisions for isolated rural farm kids. It’s also about providing equal opportunity to students across the educational spectrum, and granting true access to the pioneering Open Enrollment program that Minnesota schools trail-blazed.

And let’s be clear on this: the schools, as I understand, will still be open-enrollment.  Any parent can still enroll the kids in any of ’em; they’ll just have to transport them themselves.  Parents do it all the time; hundreds of Saint Paul parents have pulled their kids out of their assigned schools and bundle them off to charter schools (which don’t provide transportation) or even schools in other districts; many Saint Paul parents haul their kids to Roseville, Woodbury and Eagan.  And in turn, there are parents in Forest Lake, Elko and Prior Lake that haul their kids to charter schools and even a few of Saint Paul’s more successful district programs.

Which is not, in and of itself, unreasonable – unless you’re a parent who has to be at work early, or has kids going to schools all over town, or you don’t have a car, or one that’ll support that kind of commitment to transportation.

Which means, currently, that your only option is to go to the school that the District – and its sclerotic, terminally-irritating Placement Office – assigns your kids to.  And if you live in Frogtown, the lower East Side or the North End, it means a huge, crime-ridden warehouse school.

And here, at last, we get to the part where BCD and I part ways:

And if the heated debate at St. Paul school board meetings, the parental protest at work on local Facebook pages and community groups, or the crummy precedent of other U.S. school districts attempting the same sort of penny-pinching school shuffle are indicators, the answer is: No. We should not end mandatory busing. Find the cash to fund quality public education for everyone-in the classroom and on the bus.

There is absolutely nothing to prevent a school district from providing a quality education, and one at an affordable price.  And when I say “absolutely nothing”, I mean nothing but…:

1. …school districts’ mania for building huge factory schools,
2. the idiotic fixation with requiring kids to be kept in school until age 16, whatever the cost – not only in terms of education, but in perverting “special education” into a form of shadow juvenile justice system
3. Administrations – driven by the Teachers Union, via the DFL – and their hatred for charter schools, which largely already achieve the ideal of the neighborhood school – and do it on a budget, and
4. those same Administrators, and the Educational Academy and the other metastasizations of the Educational/Industrial complex – and their fixation with creating “equality” by jiggering the numbers of students in schools so that the headcounts by race all even up, rather than by addressing how to actually teach kids.

That the big, overpopulated factory school is a failure is obvious to anyone that’s not on the Saint Paul School Board; parents are voting with their feet.

The answer isn’t in where you bus kids.  It’s in what kind of school they walk into when they get there.

If we’d played a drinking game during Dayton’s State of the State message that involved taking a hit every time the Governor mentioned education, and killing the container whenever he mentioned Early Childhood Ed, then none of us would have made it back to work.

Matt Abe at North Star Liberty noticed this too (albeit maybe not in exactly the same terms).

The governor’s seven-point education plan is not content with dedicating one or two of these points to early childhood education, he embeds “ready for K” goals into five of them:

• Invest in Early Childhood and All-Day Kindergarten
• Target All-Day Kindergarten
• Expand existing K-12 system into a comprehensive pre-K-12 system
• Adopt pre-K – 3 reading standards
• Support early childhood teacher observation and development
• Reauthorize Statewide Early Childhood Advisory Council and reestablish Children’s Cabinet
• Charge Commissioner of Education with leadership of early childhood initiatives

Considering the state’s barely ten-month old kindergarten-readiness study, this obsession with pre-K seems odd.

The Minnesota School Readiness Study found that between 91 percent and 97 percent of Minnesota five-year-olds were In Process or Proficient in five developmental areas necessary for school success: physical development, the arts, personal and social development, language and literacy, and mathematical thinking. This compares to last year’s study with numbers between 87 percent and 96 percent. The increases are within the margin of error between the two years.

When you couple these findings with national empirical studies on Head Start and other preschool programs that show little if any benefit to pre-K programs, you may wonder why Governor Dayton is so bent on a significant expansion of government pre-K and all-day kindergarten.

But that “wonder” is purely rhetorical…:

Dayton’s myopic focus on pre-K and kindergarten to the exclusion of other education reforms such as streamlining the process for sponsors of successful charter schools to open new sites, and education tax credits is a missed opportunity for much-needed education reform for Minnesota students and families. Dayton’s omissions provide an excellent opportunity for the Republican majorities in the Legislature to display some leadership in state education policy initiatives.

The big worry:  If there’s an area where Republicans, especially some of the longer-serving ones, are vulnerable to getting browbeaten, it’s the broad subject of education.

And this is an area where the GOP’s strategy of handling the budget in many small component pieces is going to be important.  Telling a wobbly legislator “why do you hate children” is one thing; trying to browbeat a legislator into supporting, say, a specific program with real-life empirical consequences is a whole ‘nother thing.

Early Childhood Education is a particularly, cynically noxious fixation.  It just doesn’t work; we knew it twenty years ago, and we know it even more today.  The only thing is succeeds at…

…is putting new Education Minnesota members to work, with lifetime pensions.

Which is what it’s all about.

The Twin Cities’ grievance-based community is clutching its pearls and howling over the proposal by the Sleepy Eye superintendent’s proposal to cut budgets by going to a four-day school week:

A school superintendent in Sleepy Eye says the district needs to seriously consider converting to a four-day school week.

Superintendent John Cselovszki says the move would mean longer school days with more breaks. He says the shift would cut costs associated with busing, teacher substitutes, heating and cooling.

The Journal of New Ulm says Cselovszki made his comments Thursday at a Board of Education meeting.

Board member Ron Geiger acknowledged that a shorter school week could help the district avoid other budget cuts.

This, of course, is heresy to the educational-industrial complex – the teachers’ unions, the educational academy and so on.  Leaving aside the logistics issues – teachers seem to have come to enjoy having their days end by 3PM sharp – there are good financial reasons to cut the school week.

And Sleepy Eye being a small town, there’s a certain common-sense nature to their approach to solving those logistics issues:

Fellow board member Darla Remus worried that the change would create daycare issues for elementary students on Mondays when there was no school. Her colleague, Sheila Schmid, suggested that high school students could fill the daycare need.

The problem, of course, is that it’s accepted as a matter of faith by the current educational-industrial complex – along the lines of “smaller classes improve achievement” – that keeping kids’ butts in chairs longer is a key part of a good education.  By their logic, more hours equal better education.

Of course, like the “smaller classes” canard, it really just isn’t necessarily so:

As the four-day week unfolded in Hawaii members and institutions of the community stepped in the fill the vacuum. Parents sought activities, and students were flexible. New spaces opened up for young people to learn on Fridays. Museums and Rec Clubs offered Friday learning opportunities, some at little or no cost; others parent-run (parents rotated days off of work to manage supervision of student activities). Parents, wary of potential new costs for child care, welcomed the innovations.

New online learning options could be done during this time, from home, or a coffee shop, or a library, or a friend’s house. What different kinds of combinations can be found when inspired young people, parents seeking new options, and communities come together to pick up the slack? Imagine the potential to capture and accredit the value-added by these types of activities. What if post-secondary institutions began accepting the validation, by a reputable organization or company, for this type of out-of-school learning?

I believe there’s a strong case to be made that kids – some more than others, to be sure, because kids are more unique than most people – learn as much out of class as they do in, provided a decent support system at home (and let’s be honest, the kids without support at home are the ones that largely won’t be helped by cranking up the hours in chairs either).

And cutting the school week to four days, at its best, taps the ingenuity of parents and, best of all, kids to engage in the best kind of education there is – self-education.

Walter Russell Meade on why charter schools matter.

The big reason?  They are a market solution – the intellectual market, rather than the financial one:

This isn’t because they are a magic bullet solution to our education problems. The research surrounding the effectiveness of charter schools is controversial and politicized. Some schools work better than others — and that is likely to be the case going forward. However we organize our educational system there will be good schools and bad schools, good principals and bad ones, good teachers and bad. And no type of school can consistently overcome the consequences of parental negligence and demoralization. A majority of New Orleans students may be attending charter schools these days, but that is not going to turn the Crescent City into the Athens of the Delta overnight.

So I don’t say charter schools are on the cutting edge because they are going to turn our inner city kids into Singapore-style math whizzes anytime soon. But they are doing at least as well as the schools we have — and they are pointing the way to the kind of political and social transformation that can take us past the stagnant and dysfunctional world of Big Blue Bureaucracy into something more sustainable and more hopeful.

And this being a conservative blog, I can be forgiven for seeing a silver lining for conservatism:

The first thing they’ve done is to open the first serious debate among Blacks about the deficiencies in the blue social model. The weakness at the heart of blue politics today is not the divide between people who love government services and those who want the government to shrink. That reaction is a problem for the blues, but it doesn’t split the blue coalition. The widening gap, however, between the interests of the consumers of government services and the producers of those services has the potential to split Blue America down the middle.

And when he says “Blue America”, he means in part the bluest Americans – black Americans:

The charter school movement has exposed the fallacy in this argument to increasing numbers of Black parents by showing that the dysfunction in urban schools is not simply a problem of money. It is also a problem of incompetent teachers who can never be fired, of dysfunctional work rules that give senior teachers a viselike grip on choice assignments, it is a whole system that all too frequently puts children last.

Black parents who have seen charter schools at work like school choice more than Democrats. In New Jersey, Blacks like charter schools more than Republicans!

Here in Minnesota, they are certainly more committed to them than the GOP is.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Dave Thompson – longtime KSTP-AM talk show host, and now the State Senator for the Lakeville area – wanted to do what a good legislator does; he wanted to reach out to his constituents, even the ones that didn’t likely agree with him.

And so he tried to contact the Education Minnesota (teachers’ union) members in the Lakeville area.  Unfortunately, he tried to do it via the local teachers’ union.

It didn’t work well:

I sent the questions for pre-approval to your union representative, Mr. Don Sinner, in an attempt to work cooperatively. I had also hoped to use his “blast” e-mail list in order to save work for my Legislative Assistant. He refused to allow me to use the list, but gave me no indication he intended to sabotage the survey. We did the work necessary to send the survey to each of your e-mail addresses individually.

And so the emails went out to the teachers – to help their elected representative better represent them.

Right?

What do you think?  Thompson’s a Republican, and this is the Teachers Union:

It has come to my attention that Mr. Sinner sent you scripted responses, so that I will be unable to gain the information I seek. You do not need to send Mr. Sinner’s remarks, but I would very much like to hear from you.

As you may know, I am on the Senate Education Committee, and recently presented a significant piece of legislation to the Committee. I sent the survey to you because I have a sincere desire to understand the viewpoints of educators in my district. I value your judgment, and am frankly shocked that Mr. Sinner does not believe you should have the right to communicate directly with the people who represent you at the Capitol. He obviously does not have the confidence in your judgment and professionalism that I do.

Dave might look a bit naive with that statement – but I’m pretty sure he’s just being civil.  He knows as well as we do that the union has nothing to do with “professionalism”.  It’s about compliance, about turning teaching into a repeatable, factory-like process, and about wresting political power for teachers.

Here’s the email Sinner sent to his subjects (I’ll add emphasis):

The EML Executive Council on Monday Evening respectfully declined to forward this survey from Sen. Thompson to our members. They did however direct me to provide Sen. Thompson with the appropriate information which addresses each of his questions.

If Senator Thompson now chooses to send this survey directly to you, we would ask that you use this information to reply.

Stay Positive, Stay Professional, Stay United.

Because freedom is about unity!

I digress:

Sincerely,

Don Sinner

EM-Lakeville President

1) Do school teachers and administrators currently have the authority to effectively manage classroom behavior and expectations? Yes, there are no statutory issues here. The real problem is adequate, equitable, sustainable, and predictable funding which can provide the conditions necessary for teachers to effectively provide a quality education for all students.

2) Do you believe the current incentive system focusing only on “step and lanes” is the best option for school districts and teachers? Research shows, and most teachers agree, that as a teacher develops over time with effective professional development, they are more effective in the classroom and deserving of a commensurate pay increase. Research also shows that completion of relevant graduate degrees and/or National Board Certification also leads to higher student achievement.

This needs looking into.  I seem to recall that this is fragrant BS.  But I”ll have to check.

3) Do you think that entry-level teachers in different subject areas should all earn the same salary? Yes. there is best- practice research that shows the value of fine arts areas in improving not only the talents of the whole child, but also increasing achievement in the “core” subjects as well. This indicates that all teachers in all fields should be compensated on an equitable basis.

I’m seeing that “there is research” line a lot.  I need to fire off a letter to Mr. Sinner; I suspect that “research” came from reading EdMinn’s policy statement.

Because it’s certainly contradictory.  I nothing against arts and humanities teachers – it was music and German that really got me interested in learning and school, in junior high.  But if a district isn’t getting enough science and math teachers, the market would seem to tell one that the financial value of a math or science teacher is higher, and you need to pay more  for them.  The union, of course, wants the same rate for everyone, which is fiscally absurd.

4) Do you believe that the current two-variable approach (education and years teaching) to teacher salaries is a fair measure of the teacher’s value? The two-variable approach to compensating teachers is just one piece of a multifaceted approach to fairly compensating teachers. There should also be recognition for those who take on increased responsibilities in leadership roles, mentoring, and National Board Certification to name a few.

But the two variables are the big measuares, and Sinner is obfuscating.

5) Have students in your school benefited from the implementation of the “No Child Left Behind” law with its statewide standards, testing, and reporting?Yes and NO. Yes in that we are now focused on individual student data in making instructional decisions to meet their educational needs. No, because it has caused an unnecessary narrowing of curriculum which ignores the needs of the whole child. It has also caused a higher focus to be placed on facts rather than critical thinking skills and creative thinking. It has also caused an unnecessary diversion of limited resources into simply administering the mountain of testing that is required.

Dave and I may or may not agree on NCLB – I think it’s been a disaster, and for some of the same reasons Sinner cites.   The remedies, of course, are where we differ.

6) Is the current “needs based” funding formula equitable?Yes, there is a proper place for “needs based” funding. We must recognize the fact that not all students arrive at school ready to learn. We must provide the added resources to level the playing field for those students who come form a disadvantaged background such as poverty, no access to early childhood education, or english language learners.

This makes sense, if  you don’t read too far into it.

The problem is that the teachers union substitutes “resources” for “results”.  We’ve been pouring “resources” into all of those areas for decades; the unions’ results have fallen as fast as resources have risen.

7) Is there too much, too little, or the correct amount of federal government involvement in Minnesota’s education system? Too little in the fact that there is not full-funding of IDEA mandates. Too much in the area of NCLB and its’ punitive actions towards schools attempting to improve or in its’ model of measuring student growth.

“Give us the money, and don’t hold us accounable for spending or results”.

8) Do you support an increase in the compulsory school attendance age from 16 to 18? Yes, as long as there are options for students who progress quickly through the system to access PSEO, early graduation and options in a post-secondary institution.

This is just idiotic; it forces districts to fund educations for kids who are just taking up space, as well as forcing counties to waste money trying to chase them back into a classroom that, in some cases, they’re just not ready for, and in some cases never will be.  It’s a sad but true fact; there are kids that just aren’t temperamentally, mentally or socially tuned to classroom education.  There are many, many more that are cured of any interest in it by the hamfistedness of the “sit your ass in a chair and learn what we tell you” model of education.  Some of them will get an interest in it later in life.  Some will educate themselves.  Some won’t.  And keeping them jammed into seats in the classroom benefits nobody – not the kids who want out, not the kids who will be stuck in classrooms with a bunch of kids who are there because if they aren’t they’ll run afoul of their probation officer, and not the county taxpayers who have to pay for more county workers to chase the most difficult cases into the classroom (or into what passes for juvenile detention these days).

9) Should Early Childhood programs be given more attention, less attention, or be eliminated? Early Childhood needs to be funded equitably across the entire state to ensure all students enter school ready to learn. A plethora of research shows that the groundwork of early childhood and primary education (K-2) is necessary if children are to achieve at high levels throughout their academic careers. This research also shows that most students are unlikely to overcome a poor start.

There’s that “research” again.  There’s plenty of research that disagrees!

10) Should Early Childhood programs be given more attention, even if it means K-12 education funding grows at a decreased rate? The question is not whether ECFE funding should have a higher priority than K-12, it should be how can the state adequately fund both of these areas as well as Higher Ed. in order to support a vibrant economy and allow Minn. to compete in a 21st century global economy.

“Give us ALL the money we ask for, or the kids get it!”

11) Is teaching in Minnesota public schools a better or worse career than it was five years ago? Working with children is as rewarding as it always has been. However, due to the financial conditions and the “blame game”, teachers are no longer provided the necessary resources to effectively accomplish their goals, nor are they rewarded for positive outcomes. Can schools do better, yes, are they a categorical failure, no. Without adequate support of public education, we will lose our best and brightest teachers to other fields and ultimately our students will suffer.

“Pay us what we ask, and quit criticizing us!”

12) In an average Minnesota public school classroom, what should be an appropriate number of students?

Best-practice research shows:

15 in primary grades (K-2)

18 in intermediate grades (3-5)

20-25 at the secondary level (6-12) with no more than 28 before student achievement begins to decline.

Good luck, Dave.

Gary Miller – late of the great, lamented Truth Vs. The Machine, from which this blog’s “First Ringer” is a refugee, has switched hos oeuvre to Facebook, a medium whose Ambrose Bierce he very clearly is.

And Gary notes something that had flashed across my mind as I listened to the State of The Union:

…the President’s continued references to Sputnik as a way to inspire young people would be much more effective, if: 1. They still taught kids in publik skouls about Sputnik. 2. The country which launched Sputnik, the Soviet Union, still existed and hadn’t collapsed under the burden of a socialist command economy similar to one which the President hopes to implement here. Other than that, heck of a story.

Heh.

Another example of the absurdity of our idiot school system; a black woman, tired of her neighborhood’s wretched school system, tried to get her children a better education.

She was one of about 100 families investigated – but Kelley Williams-Bolar committed the greatest crime there is, in the eyes of soulless administrations; she fought back.

And now she’s in jail:

“It’s overwhelming. I’m exhausted,” she said. “I did this for them, so there it is. I did this for them.”

Williams-Bolar decided four years ago to send her daughters to a highly ranked school in neighboring Copley-Fairlawn School District.

But it wasn’t her Akron district of residence, so her children were ineligible to attend school there, even though her father lived within the district’s boundaries.

Ohio has an open enrollment policy – but it grants a lot of latitude to schools as to whether or not they (and their tax bases) will participate.

The school district accused Williams-Bolar of lying about her address, falsifying records and, when confronted, having her father file false court papers to get around the system.

Williams-Bolar said she did it to keep her children safe and that she lived part-time with her dad.

“When my home got broken into, I felt it was my duty to do something else,” Williams-Bolar said.

There’s a reason that black families are the most enthusiastic supporters of charter schools in Minneapolis and Saint Paul; schools in inner city neighborhoods are that bad.

And here’s a statement you can just hear coming out of the mouth of some DFL hamster, can’t you?

While her children are no longer attending schools in the Copley-Fairlawn District, school officials said she was cheating because her daughters received a quality education without paying taxes to fund it.

“Those dollars need to stay home with our students,” school district officials said.

Yep.  I hear it.

Some of my friends who are teachers, and also Republicans, have described a life a little like being a dissident in the Soviet Union, with samizdat greetings and everything short of secret handshakes.  I remember going to one teacher conference and having a teacher furtively tell me he or she was a fan of the NARN – “but please don’t tell anyone.  You understand, right?”

I did.

Of course, that was in the cha-cha days when the DFL controlled, or nearly controlled, the Legislature.

But now, appropriations come through the MNGOP’s majority – and Tom “Look For The Union Label” Dooher is trying to make nice:

From: President Dooher [mailto :[Redacted]@edmn.org]

Sent: Friday, January 21, 2011 5:03 PM

To: ‘[Redacted]@educationminnesota.org’

Cc: Governing Board [MN]

Subject: Republican members meeting Feb. 5

January 21, 2011

Dear local presidents,

Over the last two years, Education Minnesota has made efforts to involve Education Minnesota Republican members in legislative and political activities on behalf of public education.

Any GOP teachers in the audience: can we get a sniff-test on that statement?

It’s more important than ever for our Republican members to start building relationships with their legislators.

Is anyone but me thnking “I’ll just bet it is”.  Tom Dooher wasn’t banking on the DFL losing both chambers, was he?

Education Minnesota will hold a meeting of interested Republican members on Saturday, Feb. 5, from noon to 3 p.m. at the Education Minnesota headquarters in St. Paul. Education Minnesota will provide lunch and pay mileage for all members.

The agenda will cover:

1. The importance of Republican members’ involvement in education policy

2. Building relationships with legislators

3. Current education issues

4. Recruiting other Education Minnesota Republican members

And I loved this one:

5. Getting involved in the Republican party process

EdMinn has spent at least thirty years fighting the GOP at every turn.  They contributed heavily to Alliance For A Better Minnesota, which just spent an entire election cycle slandering Republicans.

The “involvement” they want, no doubt, is to do what they can to turn the GOP back into a party that Arne Carlson would recognize.

Education Minnesota political organizers and lobbyists will facilitate the meeting. Please take the time to contact politically active Republican members of your local and encourage them to attend. Interested members should RSVP to Jim Meyer, Education Minnesota political organizer, at [Redacted]@edmn.org or [phone number redacted] by Wednesday, Feb. 2. We need at least 15 participants to hold the meeting.

I wish it weren’t at the same time as the show.  I’d love to see if anyone shows up.  Even more, I’d love to see if any of the local presidents actually know any Republicans.

In solidarity,

Tom Dooher

President

In mockery,

Mitch Berg

Admiral.

One of the more noxious bits of effluvia from the last, DFL-controlled legislature was a bill tightening the restrictions to “authorize”, or sponsor, charter schools.

Because of this law, a whole lot of charter schools are on the bubble:

Two years ago, state lawmakers approved a new law that makes authorizers more accountable for the financial and academic performance of the schools they sponsor.

“I think the new law is great and it’s really going to strengthen and make more consistent the quality of authorizing,” said Cindy Moeller, the head of Student Achievement Minnesota, or SAM.

SAM is an approved charter school authorizer, and Moeller was at last week’s open house, pitching her organization as a possible charter school sponsor.

The law is a result of several waves of hysteria about charter school “financial performance” whipped up by a series of specious think-tank reports on the schools’ fiscal accountability.

I’ll digress to ask – if public school districts had to operate under the same rules and scrutiny as charters, how many do you suppose would survive?

[Minnesota Charter School Federation president Eugent] Piccolo does not expect all 64 schools currently in limbo to close — but some could. That’s why he’s lobbying state lawmakers to extend the current arrangement by a year, a move that would help schools like the St. Paul City School.

“The school’s been around for 13 years, I’d hate for it to close just because of a process,” noted Nancy Dana, superintendent of St. Paul City School. Her current sponsor, the St. Paul School District, is not reapplying.

It’s up to the state education department to approve new authorizers. David Hartman, supervisor of the Minnesota Department of Education’s charter school division, said schools are right to be anxious. But he’s confident the outcome will be positive.

And that’s going to be worth watching; Mark Dayton’s Education Commissioner Brenda Casselius is, near as I can tell, no friend to charter schools.  Charter school advocates will have to watch and see if there’s any slowdown in the approvals for authorizers.

Superintendent Silva S released her plan for overhauling te Saint Paul schools yesterday.  And all I can say is, I’m glad my kids are done with the SPPS.

The plan involves some ideas that are, frankly, perfectly good and drawn from common sense:

The decades-old option for St. Paul parents to bus their children to virtually any school in the city would be largely dismantled as part of a three-year plan laid out Tuesday by Superintendent Valeria Silva that also pledges cost-savings, higher student achievement and greater consistency among schools.

Saint Paul switched to a school-choice system back in the eighties, in the wake of an epochal federal lawsuit against the Kansas City schools that required the district to offer the same choices to every student that were available in the wealthiest district – a requirement that was translated into a plethora of magnet programs, and massive busing to get students to the programs.

The plan has its ups and downs:

Neighborhood Schools:  I’ve advocated for neighborhood schools – small, geographic schools located near where the kids live – for a long time.

The plan gets the “Geography” part, more or less.  But the keys to making small neighborhood schools work are

• They’ve gotta be small
• They have to be places parents feel good sending the kids.

The problem is, a lot of these “neighborhood” schools will be the same big warehouses we have today, only drawing their students from a different blotch on a map.

The Good Effort After Bad?: Among my biggest concerns: reading between the lines of Silva’s statements, it looks as if she’s looking to focus her efforts on improving district test scores.  Speaking of the magnet system, Silva notes…:

…it works well for the high-achievers, she said, while offering virtually no benefit to low-income students and students of color and thus not making a dent in the “significant achievement gap in St. Paul Public Schools.”

And so the high achiever is going to have to plunk down into a seat and plod along until their less-school-oriented classmates decide to catch up?

This is, of course, one of the great dangers of the factory-model public school system; the idea that you have a one-size-fits-all “model” of education that has to work for every student.  But that’s a separate discussion, one we’ve had before.

And one we’ll have again soon – because it’s  another of the “features” of Silva’s plan:

The Home Office:  Silva wants the school’s programs to be more…alike:

Overall, Silva pledged to implement more centralized control over the way material is taught in classrooms and money is used by schools, as a way to ensure a consistent experience from school to school.

The devil is in the details with this one; at its worst, it means that the city’s teachers are going to be even more driven by centralized curriculum planners than they are now.

Magnets:  It seems to be a big rollback of the idea of the Magnet school.  Conservatives bag on the magnet schools, largely for the wrong reasons.  It’s a simple fact that not every kid is wired to respond to the same program.  Different peoples’ brains – and kids are people, let’s remember – respond to different subjects.  Every brain is different- and trying to force them all to be the same just makes the different-enough ones that don’t have the support or compulsion to “make it” check out of the idea of “education”, sometimes for years, sometimes for the rest of their lives.  Speaking for myself, junior high was a complete wasteland except for languages and music. Some kids’ brains get cranked up by working with their hands, some by science, some by reading, some by just getting outside and running, for crying out loud.  The one-size-fits-all cookie cutter school is a good way to make sure most of the kids we just describe think of school as a gruelling duty to plod through (at best).

Unfortunately, in my experience the Saint Paul schools didn’t do magnets especially well.  Most of the  magnets did double duty as “neighborhood” schools; the “magnet” program in art or science had to also account for not a few kids who weren’t there to learn art or science!

One of Silva’s motivations is to reverse the slide of students and families from the district schools; while the district is losing students slower than Minneapols, it’s still lost 1/8 of its enrollment in recent years.

We’ll see.ite.

You won’t hear me say this much, but Keri Miller had a good show this morning on MPR.

The subject was edumacation,  specifically education reform.  Miller – who, like most former TV people, is a taste I’ve just not acquired on the radio – was interviewing Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and  John Richard Schrock, a bio prof and and director of biology education at Emporia State University.

At a casual listen, Petrilli was doing the usual party line – China is kicking our butts at education, and we need serious reforms, most of which involve pouring more money into the system (and I’ll freely cop to the fact that I may be shorting his side of the discussion).

Shrock was more interesting.  He noted that America has traditionally had some significant advantages over the rest of the world, at least when it comes to secondary and higher education.  While it’s become a chanting point that China, India and Europe teach three times as much science as the US, Shrock notes that most of that education, especially in China, has been traditionally focused on rote memorization – on “teaching to the test” – while the US’ more freeform system traditionally fosters critical thinking and creativity.   Metric:  The US, for all of the caterwauling about our system’s shortcomings, has over 200 Nobel Prizes in the sciences (for which one must actually do something useful, unlike the Peace Prize).  China: 0.

So far.

Shock also notes, however, that as the US system moves more and more toward rote memorization and “teaching to the test”, the Chinese are working on copying the part of our system that actually does work – the critical thinking, the questioning, the creativity.

There was some good food for thought.  To sum it up:

Quit the caterwauling about class sizes: Class sizes in the US have shrunk steadily over the past 30 years.  They are lower than at any point in the history of compulsory education.  They are smaller than in any of our competitor nations. But., Shrock notes, the US system has systematically chosen “quantity over quality” – his words; we’ve thrown a lot of teachers into the classrooms, but given them an exceedingly low bar to try to surmount.  More on that in a bit.

Teaching Sucks: I’m not going to bag on teachers; most of my family, myself included, have been teachers of some kind at one point or another.  Many of them do a great job.  But I remember even when I was in college, looking at the outlook for a career in education, and thinking “Um, no”.  It wasn’t the money – for all of the right’s caterwauling about inflated teacher salaries, teaching in most of the country doesn’t pay quite as well as someone with the same credentials gets in the private sector, although the benefits usually help make up for it.  It was the fact that even then, 25 and more years ago, the establishment was turning teaching into a commodity job.  Shrock noted that in many countries – Finland, Japan, China, India – teaching is a prestigious job; it happens to pay relatively well compared to rest of the regional job market (although Shrock also notes that in Finland in particular, the socialized economy limits prospects in the private sector), but it’s really a matter of respect.  In these places, teachers actually get to teach.

The philosophy of reducing class sizes, and creating lots and lots of teachers to fill those rooms, is of dubious benefit to students; it does, however, make teachers unions a much more powerful constituency.

Shrock also notes that if we in the US were less concerned about throwing teachers into classrooms to reduce class sizes, we could make some headway on making teaching – and the results we get from our schools – suck less.  If we had the same class sizes we did 30 years ago (and, I suspect, the same relative number of administrators), we could pay good teachers $100K a year – and they could actually earn it. But in the US, while we throw a lot of teachers at the problem, we hamstring the good ones with a cornucopia of niggling distractions; the US system is clogged with unfunded mandates that suck time away from actual learning; those mandates are accompanied by rafts of administrators – one for every teacher, now, up from something like 1:9 forty years ago – whose edicts and mandates and general flailing about really contributes nothing to teaching (and that’s without even looking at the travesty of the Star Superintendent system in major urban schools).

It’s not for nothing that you see so many excellent teachers leaving the big, unionized district schools to go to work for charter, private and parochial schools; frequently for less money, but for jobs in systems where they get to teach, rather than spend their days yelling “off what” when tier after tier of administration says “jump”.

And, most of all…:

Teaching To The Test Is Killing Us: Here’s an utterly bipartisan set of foulups.  With the advent of No Child Left Behind, American education became “accountable” – to a series of more or less arbitrary numbers, derived by an even more arbitrary process.  Schools can lose their funding, and teachers their jobs, based on students’ performance on a series of cookie-cutter, one size fits all standardized tests – which, I suggest, are the absolute worst way to measure learning across a broad population of students. And no, I don’t have a better way, but neither can I think of a worse way;  it’s caused American education, in the past ten or so years, to morph into the thing which it theretofore was not; a system that pushes rote memorization; a system that de-emphasizes critical thinking (worse than it already is in some of our more blighted districts), and that punishes creativity, both in students and in teachers.

Is it a wonder some teachers leave the field – to go into customer service?

The show is worth a listen, when it finally comes out on podcast.  Mark your calendars, I actually recommended a Keri Miller show.

When looking at spin from the left over this next few months – which will involve an epic battle between responsible, austere, adult GOP legislators and a profligate, irresponsible, spending-addicted, passive-aggressive, grossly-dysfunctional DFL governor and legislative minority – look for the following checklist items:

1. Opposing [a spending proposal] will harm the children (or the elderly, the vulnerable): The examples of this “harm” will frequently be non-sequiturs.
2. Opposing [the spending initiative] will be an epic catastrophe: Notwithstanding any data or history to the contrary.
3. Opposing [a spending initiative] is a sign of immaturity (or mental illness, depravity)

:  You’re a bad, bad person.

Dave Mindeman of mnpACT runs through the checklist; the subject du jour is education, but the same template will be repeated for every other subject – LGA, MNCare, high-speed rail, nursing homes, whatever. 

Dave’s not had the best fall, of course:

I haven’t posted much lately as I evaluate looking into the new year. It has been a pretty depressing evaluation in regards to policy issues, which, again, are going to be difficult to make progress in.

My top priorities have been education and transportation….and frankly, both look to be losers in the coming legislative session.

 Oddly enough, education and transportation are among my top priorities – and they look to be winners in the coming session.   But there’s some cognitive dissonance involved, I suspect.

I am especially disheartened by this news story regarding my local school district, ISD – 196 (Rosemount-Apple Valley – Burnsville). It is a situation that is apparently becoming all too common.

As Republicans continue to preach the idea that we are overspending and budget bloated, wouldn’t you think that a high priority like education would at least be meeting its budget needs?

Check off #1, up above. 

What are the “budget needs?”  And how do we know if those “needs” are being met? 

District 196’s enrollment was 27,954 in 2008 – which was off -1.9% since 2003; the average American school district grew by 1.6%, and the average district in Minnesota shrank an average of 3%, a number that hides huge disparities in growth; the Minneapolis Public Schools shrank 22.6%, while exurban districts like Elk River, Prior Lake, Saint Michael and New Prague grew in the 20-30% range. 

District 196 employed 1,720 teachers in 2008, which was down -1.4% from 2003.  That’s at odds with growth in teacher numbers nationwide (up 4%, 2.5 times as fast as student numbers grew)) and Minnesota (up .3%, even as the number of students dropped).   The district spends $9,611 per student; of that, 90% – $8,646 – goes to teacher compensation, which is in line with national and state averages ($8,366 and $8,381, respectively, which are 81% and 82% of the respective per-pupil costs), figures which rose by 32-34% over the five year period, versus national and state average increase in the 22-28% range (the stats are all here;  . 

The district spends at the state average, and their budget grew considerably faster than state averages, even as the teaching staff shrank by a lower margin than the general enrollment, and the amounts spent per student rose by considerably faster than the national averages.

And yet, says the Pioneer Press, “parents” are “footing the bill for teachers“. 

What concerns me the most about this article is that ISD 196 is not a poor district by any means. And by all accounts, it is one of the best managed Districts in the state. Yet, they are resorting to outside funding by parents. Isn’t there something amiss here?

What is even more disheartening about this is that if an affluent district like 196 is doing this, where are the poorer districts going to turn?

To we, the taxpayers, of course.  Minneapolis and Saint Paul spend a solid 30% more per student than the Rosemount district, to the tune of $12,000-$13,000 per student; their changes in per-student spending on overall budgets and teacher compensation is commensurate with Rosemount’s, well into the 20-30% range.

If we think we are having difficulty with the achievement gap now, how much worse will it be in the future if this funding problem continues?

Check off #2.  The only link between per-student spending and the “achivement gap” – and I’ll admit it may be a specious one, but numbers are numbers – is an inverse one; the higher Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s districts spending goes, the worse the achievement gap gets, while the solutions that do work seem to have little to do with spending – or the public school system, for that matter.

Are tax cuts that important? Are we willing to risk the educational future of the next generation because we think we need to pocket more money? Do you really think that last November’s election said that?

The election said “it’s time to look at these questions empirically, rather than through the ideological “throw more money at the problem” lens that the DFL uses”.  So yes and no. 

Oh, yeah – check off #3:

Somewhere, somehow, we have to come to terms with the idea that we have to pay for things. We have been dumping responsibility for our problems on future debt. And then the same people who do the dumping complain about the debt.

It is frustrating and an endless circular argument.

The “Greatest Generation” has given rise to the “Dead Beat Generation”. We pay for nothing…we aspire for nothing.

We have become shiftless leaches that will leave our children with a legacy of mediocrity.

“Give us what we want or your are an awful person who wants our children to starve”.

Look, Tom Dooher wants your money, and he’s saying something not far removed from the caricature in the previous line. 

Against that, the facts are that spending doesn’t correlate with achievement – anywhere – and that spending on education, like all government spending, is disproportionally focused on labor and pension costs.  Labor costs, thanks to the Teachers Union stranglehold on district compensation policies, has little to do with achievement; pensions have even less.

But the unthinking, unreasoning approach is “we have to pay for things”, the unspoken message being that we, the taxpayers, must not examine what it is we are paying for. 

So is it a surprise that the “spend at any cost” school of thought works through the checklist, arriving inevitably at the conclusion that questioning The Machine is a sign of some sort of depravity?

Take a  number.

More and more young people are failing physically and academically. Who’s to blame and whatever shall we do?

It’s been well-documented that many high school grads are now too fat to meet the U.S. military’s physical requirements. Now it turns out that many of those same kids may be too dumb.

Hmm. Can they vote?

The nonprofit Education Trust released a first-ever report this week showing that more than one in five young people don’t meet the minimum standard required for Army enlistment.

Nonprofit? Nothing against the Education Trust, but that means benevolent, non-partisan and unbiased, right?

Among minority candidates the ineligibility rates are higher: 29 percent. In Minnesota, the disparity for black applicants was even more startling: 40 percent were found to be ineligible. Among Hispanics in Minnesota the rate was 20 percent, but among whites, it was 14.1 percent.

Who’s to blame? How can we fix this? Can we commission a bureaucracy and empower it with generous funding to tackle this issue or might there be a way to skip all that and draw a self-serving conclusion via a first-ever report and save the trouble?

This is more a distressing indictment of the U.S. education system than it is a testament to today’s Cheeto-eating, Xbox-playing youth, say the authors of the report.

…ignore the Cheetos and the Xbox, folks. Those are what we call outlying data points…they lie outside our predetermined conclusion.

It strips away that illusion that the military can be an easy landing ground for those not bound for college, and it suggests that national security is at stake.

Whoa! What?! National Security?!!

(!!!)

Well then, by all means we must move forward will all due alacrity and resolve!

By that of course I mean we must increase funding to education, create a National Department of Parenting, appoint Michelle Obama as its head, and tax the rich to pay for it for surely they are culpable for this.

“Our schools have to be upping their game if we are going to supply the military with the kind of folks they are going to need 15 years in the future”

“The welfare and security of our nation is one and the same as the welfare of our young people,” said Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs and communications for Education Trust.

Thank you. Without this first-ever report in hand, we might have thought this alarming issue was a distressing indictment of American parents, who by their absence, abuse or worse yet, their apathy, have raised a generation of fat, dumb kids.

It’s good to know they’re off the hook and our wiser, more educated overseers are eager to absorb yet another personal responsibility.

Today a grateful nation (or about 50% of it) commends you for your tireless service in the interest of an ever growing and burdensome federal government.

I just have to ask…why?

The Minnesota School Board Association is advising school districts across the state to expand their harassment and violence policy to specify several more groups, including gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) students.

What does it matter for what a student is being “bullied?”

Shouldn’t they add even more groups then?

Short. Tall. Fat. Skinny. Bespectacled.

I was teased for being a “carrot top” in elementary school. Shouldn’t “Individuals with Red or Auburn Hair” be added in case teasing escalates to bullying?

If A Conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an “extremist?”

Over this past eight years or so, the Minnesota DFL has deprived the word “extremist” of all meaning.

“Blue Man In A Red District” writes about Glenn Gruenhagen, who won a close race in House District 25A over DFL apparatchik Mick McGuire.

Blue, not unpredictably, refers to Gruenhagen as “extreme“. 

But what does that mean?

How extreme is Gruenhagen?
At a statewide school board association meeting Gruenhagen pushed his extremist agenda.
Resolutions:

Let’s run through the list of “extreme” resolutions and their vote totals from the “State School Board Association” – of whom more later:

Stop labeling and drugging students – 2 for; 103 against.  The empowerment of teachers to make sweeping mental health and behavioral judgments with a power that borders on a medical diagnosis – with none of the expertise or experience or judgment required to make those “diagnoses” – has been an unmitigated disaster for a generation of children, especially boys.  Especially mine.  Anyone who voted against that resolution can rot in hell. 

Emphasize rote learning – 2 for; 130 against: Not sure what Blue means by this; he doesn’t favor us with a link to any original context.  Most of us agree “Rote Learning” – regurgitating factoids on command – is a Bad Thing.  But students today are woefully deficient in some just plain basic facts; I learned the multiplication tables by “rote” – as in, endless hours of drills in fourth grade; my kids did not.   Are they better off for having to find a calculator to find that 9 times 7 is 63?

Implement phonics reading – 8 for; 94 against. It seems to work for many kids.  So sue us.

Teach principles of patriotism – 13 for; 88 against.  THE HORROR.  Seriously –  would it kill kids to know that there’s a reason most of the world wants (or wanted, until 2008) to come to the US?  The changes we wrought and the good we brought to this world?  It’d spawn fewer little DFL drones, but other than that, what’d be the problem?

Oh, wait.

Implement abstinence – 7 for; 95 against.  Wouldn’t wanna stop encouraging teenage effing pregnancy, would we?

Separate classes by gender – 16 for; 86 against. Never mind that it works.  There are not a few charter, and even public, programs that get excellent results by separating the genders.  It’s a politically inconvenient truth that boys and girls are differnet.  They learn differently.  Girls are verbal and social; boys, spatial and competitive.  Both genders do better when they learn in environments that play to those strengths.   The only reasons not to separate genders, indeed, are the inconvenience of teaching teachers who came up through the feminized education academy to deal with boys as boys, and the PC imperative.

Teach fallacies of macro evolution – 7 for; 100 against. That’s one of those extreeeeeemly broad subjects where, again, context might be useful.  Does it mean “teach creationism?”  Or does it mean “show them that the scientific method really has nothing to say about philosophy”, and “science still has no idea how life as we know it really originated”?  We dont’ know.  Is it because the original resolution really was the single line “Teach fallacies of macroevolution”, or was it because Blue didn’t bother to favor us with the original context? 

It’d be fun to know.

All children are gifted – 12 for; 89 against.  Again, not sure about specifics.  Clearly, all children are not “gifted”.  But all children have some “gift” or another.  The public schools aren’t interested in “gifts” that go much beyond “sitting on ones seat and doing homework really really well”, other than tolerating a well-regulated interest in music or art or sports.  The kid whose “gift” is mechanics?   Cooking?  Raising his/her siblings while the parents are at work, and doing it really really well?  Not as much.

Blue:

At his best, 14% of school board association members supported his proposals. And this guy is going to get things done for Greater Minnesota?

Looking at the eight “extreme” resolutions, I’d almost respond “I wonder who the real extremists are…”

…until I remember that in Saint Paul, the monolithic politburo that is the Saint Paul School Board probably would have voted a straight ticket against all of those – and most Minnesotans on the street would have supported five or six without breaking a sweat.

If you’re not an EdMinn/SEIU/DFL drone, your mainstream is what they call “extreme”.

As we noted during our first look at the Dayton Dust Bowl – the budget “plan” that, if implemented, will turn Minnesota into a cold California or a blonder Greece – Dayton proposes cutting 25% from the state’s “lease aid” provided to charter schools.

The cut was one of the elements that carried over, verbatim, to Dust Bowl 2.0.

As I’ve reported in the past, this cut is going to gut charter schools – whose primary customers are inner-city families of color, immigrants and poor families who, nonetheless, want a decent education for their kids, along with not feeling patronized and talked down to by the city school districts that, by any objective measure, do a terrible job with their kids.

The Dayton campaign has been quietly spreading the word among charter school advocates that Dayton’s cuts really aren’t going to affect charter school operations all that bad, really, honest.

It’s a lie.

And over the next week, I’m going to be reporting on some of my conversations with charter school administrators and advocates to show you exactly how badly Dayton is lying, and what the consequences will be for the children and their families who quite rightly view their charters as their educational lifeboat.

Stay tuned.

To: All Inner-City Parents with kids in the Minneapolis or St. Paul School Districts

From: Mitch Berg, who’s been there, pretty much.

Re: An Invitation

All,

I’m Mitch Berg.  I live in Saint Paul.  A few years back, I pulled my kids out of the St. Paul Schools, and went into the charter system.

And when I got into the charter school system, I was astounded at what I saw; in Saint Paul, the vast majority of the families were black, latino or asian.  Many were recent immigrants.   And they were among the most passionate advocates for school choice I’ve ever met.  Because they – you – are not stupid.  You can see that your school districts have among the worst “achievement gaps” in the nation between your kids and white kids.  You know that our educational-industrial complex’s boasting about the quality of our school system rings hollow along Plymouth Avenue, and down Rice Street.

Most of the parents I met, like most of you that I’m writing to now, naturally, voted DFL.  Not a few of them spat tacks at the mention of Republican politicians.

And it was fascinating, watching the cognitive dissonance when I mentioned to them that in May of 2007, when the DFL proposed a bill that would cap the number of charter schools in Minnesota, the DFL voted an almost-straight ticket in favor of capping charter schools (six of them broke with the party, only one of them from the metro). The GOP voted as a straight ticket against the cap, which was defeated by the skinniest of margins.

Let me re-emphasize that, all you parents out there: the DFL voted to cut off your kids’ lifeline, the charter schools that you all quite rightly judge to be your kids’ best shot at a quality education.

Today, the NAACP urged parents like you to pull your kids out of the Minneapolis Public Schools. But they did it for all the wrong reasons:

The Minneapolis branch of the NAACP on Wednesday urged parents to consider pulling their children out of the Minneapolis School District in response to Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s recommendation to close North High School.

I understand – North is, to some people, a center and rallying point for that troubled community.

And to the administration?  Well, it’s part of their meal ticket:

The accusations were an affront to Johnson, who grew up in segregated Selma, Ala. “We have the responsibility of providing a high quality education to our students regardless of where they live,” Johnson wrote in a statement to the Star Tribune. “All of our students deserve educational opportunities that will prepare them to be global citizens. I am committed to providing them with those opportunities.”

Parents – if someone, a salesman or a boss or a teacher, spoke that kind of empty gobbledygook to your face, you’d laugh at them and walk away, wouldn’t you?

The woman said nothing!

Look – closing North High should be a cause for celebration; North High, with its atrocious achievement and yawning achievement gap and by-the-numbers mediocrity that fully lived out what George W. Bush called “the racism of low expectations”, was just a cog in a machine that devalued your children just as surely as any plantation owner ever would have 160 years ago; a symbol of an education establishment that exploits your children no less cynically than any drug kingpin. Oh, their intentions may be more benign than Simon LeGree’s and Plukey Duke’s, but when it comes to the education your children got at North – at any Minneapolis Public School, or Saint Paul for that matter, look me in the eye and tell me that the intentions made a stitch of difference?

[Minneapolis NAACP President Booker] Hodges issued a statement calling for parents “who value their children’s education or future [to] seriously consider other options for educating their children.”

And I – a cracker descended from North Woods rock farmers, myself – will stand up and yell “Amen”.  Hodges is right.

Now is the time to free your children from the Minneapolis Schools’ racism of low, or no, expectations.

Of course, the Minneapolis School Board and the Minneapolis Public Schools are only the tip of the iceberg, just as they are in Saint Paul.   The problem is that the cities’ school districts are controlled by people who owe their livelihoods and futures to the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, and the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party, first and foremost.

Not to you.

Not to your children.

And they are counting on you – the African-American parents, the Latino families, the H’mong clans who votes for them by imposing margins in every election, year in and year out – to remain ignorant of the fact that for all of the DFL’s yammering about education spending, it is the GOP that supports your right to choose where your kids go to school.  It is the GOP that supports initiatives like School Choice, Charter Schools and, in many states, Vouchers to give you, the motivated, dedicated parents that I see and know from my time as a charter school parent, the power and tools – to say nothing of economic freedom – to make those choices and make them stick.

You can say “he’s just talking politics”.  And you’re right – this is about politics.  But politics control your childrens’ education just as surely as their teachers’ qualifications do.

So look at the record.  The DFL – the Democrats, the people you have been voting for since time immemorial – are actively supported by those who are harming your children.

You want hope, for your children, for real?  It’s time for change.

Andrew Miller, guestblogging at MinnPost as well as at his own Miller Stop, ponders the future of North Minneapolis now that the Minneapolis School Board plans to shut down North High:

North Side is across the river from where I live and it’s an area I generally avoid. It’s the city’s crime center — have a look at this map of shots fired — and a less than ideal place to move your family or send your kids to school. That has to change. Great cities don’t let entire neighborhoods die.

Should North shut down, what will replace it?

In Waiting for “Superman” — yeah, I know, another tired reference — director Davis Guggenheim illustrates how a struggling school harms the overall health of a neighborhood.

The movie makes an interesting premise – but ignores an equally interesting one.  Do bad schools kill neighborhoods?  Or do schools reflect their neighborhoods?

Students at North continue to show the lowest math and science proficiency in the city. In 2010, just eight percent of juniors were proficient in math while four percent of the student body was proficient in science.

How do things improve for these students when their school shuts down? Where do they go?

I realize lots of people get nostalgic about their old schools.  Even utter failures like North.

But just as the New Orleans city schools took the rebuilding from Katrina as a cue to try to fix their school system – which, to be fair, may not have been as bad district-wide as North is – perhaps it’s time for the Minneapolis Public Schools to try something new.

Eventually, the city must destroy and rebuild the North Side. Maybe that starts with closing the doors at North and exploring innovative solutions to educate and mobilize North Side youth.

Where will they go?  Probably to one of the other Minneapolis schools – huge, anonymous factory schools.

We’ll talk “innovative solutions” below.

Maybe we need to take some of the tax dollars spent on crime enforcement and invest in neighborhood programs to keep today’s youth from being tomorrow’s felons. Maybe the school district needs to realize you can’t go $10 million over plan on a project many deemed frivolous in the first place.

The North Side has been at a crossroads for years and it’s beyond me how cozier digs for the Minneapolis School District leads to better education for area youth.

It’s beyond anyone who pays attention to how education really works.  But it does reflect Mark Dayton’s education plan; throw more money at the status quo, where administration trumps teaching every time.

North High School is the story of a community in peril and a community in need of action.

Right.  But the “ac  tion” is what’s important.

This’d be a great opportunity for Minneapolis to try to try a different tack than the one that’s failed most urban school districts.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Don’t Build A Big School: Replace North with several smaller, neighborhood schools, each with a principal, an assistant, a secretary, eight teachers and 200 kids.  A school where the principal and every teacher knows every kid by name.
• Tell The Union to Go Pound Sand and turn the more successful charter school operators loose in North Minneapolis.  Create a “Charter School Zone”, similar to New Orleans.  Turn the whole system on the North Side over to people with new, better ideas.  This will, necessarily, lead to the smaller schools I call for above.

None of these will ever happen, of course.   School boards love big factory schools, which they see as monuments to their own wisdom and perspecacity. Charters scare the unions. The existing system keeps big superintendents in their big salaries.

But think about what we could do?

Mark Dayton’s latest ad claims that, while Minnesota schools have “failed”, that “Mark Dayton was a teacher”, and that he “knows what needs to be done” to fix education.

Does he, then?

By that, do they mean teachers should only show up 1/3 of time when they’re teaching, and quit in the middle of the year?

Or do they mean the state should push the same kind of alternative licensure that put Dayton in the classroom in the first place.

Or do they just mean that we taxpayers should just shut up and give them all the money the union demands via the DFL?

Since I just went to school in North Dakota – a state that spends much less per student, and gets better results – I need this explained to me.