Seth Kirk might just be a lot like me:

Seth Kirk enrolled his elder child in a Minneapolis kindergarten five years ago. Then he went back to school, helping in his son’s classroom, getting active in school leadership and finally tackling district-level issues such as class size.

By last July Kirk was a frustrated man, pounding out a manifesto on his computer keyboard. The title: “Minneapolis Public Schools: A Sinking Ship.”

The online posting by the 42-year-old industrial process researcher speaks for many parents who are true to their own schools but are losing confidence in the district. And when you consider that Kirk is relatively happy with Armatage school, where he has a fifth-grader and a second-grader, you see how precarious things are for Minneapolis schools.

Indeed, the Kirk kids could join the exodus.

“I like to say that we have a one-year lease,” he said, anticipating his high-performing son’s transition to middle school next year. “I would bet very little money that we’re going to finish our public school career in Minneapolis.”

I, of course, have been there; I finally got the last of my kids out of the Saint Paul Public School this fall – and Saint Paul is “better” than Minneapolis (miles “better”), by any objective and most subjective measurements of school districts. The reasons are part of an ongoing series in this blog (which will, shortly, indeed be progressing).

The Minneapolis district’s enrollment is off by a quarter in the past six years, a victim of – critics often fail to note this – black flight: minority parents are leading the exodus from the public schools, to charter, private and suburban schools (using Minnesota’s open-enrollment law to put their kids in a district of their choice).

The article also notes the three most-cited problems, citing the most common “solutions”:

• Leadership. Like other urban districts, Minneapolis has relied on hiring new superintendents, electing new school board members or chasing silver bullets to fix things. Some critics say that a lack of stable leadership and focus keeps the district from following through on valid strategies it does pursue. Others suggest that the district is so straitjacketed — by such factors as contractual limits on how teachers can be assigned to schools — that no change in leaders will matter.

All this is true, as far as it goes. But the real problem is that Minneapolis is a one-party town – and that party is largely controlled by the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, a group with an institutional imperative to keep the current system untouched. A party that facilitates the election of chuzzlewits who may know nothing about schools, but are dogmatic racists, to the school board.

Changing the approach at Minneapolis’ public schools would require a huge political change in Minneapolis; this is as likely as Anna Nicole Smith winning a debate on speaker points.

• School readiness. A high proportion of Minneapolis students arrive at kindergarten without the preparation for learning that other children bring…Meanwhile, the most recent comprehensive report card on preschool readiness found some key indicators getting worse, not better.

Most of the “talk” is, of course, wrong; pre-school teaches very little except how to act like the system wants a child to act; if the system itself is the problem, then the “preparation” is just part of the disease.

• Achievement. Although poverty is the most consistent predictor of a student’s performance, as a group, low-income white students often outperform middle-class black students on standardized tests. Some point to the clustering of inexperienced teachers at many schools dominated by low-income, high-needs minority students or the small share of teachers of color.

Er – if poverty is “the most consistent predictor of a student’s performance”, then why do poor whites outperform middle-class black kids?  Or is poverty perhaps not a consistent predictor, but merely a politically-palatable excuse? 

 And given that black flight is the reason the MPS system is collapsing, one might ask – are the charter, private and suburban schools chock-full of teachers of color?  Are their teachers more “experienced” – and, indeed, is teacher experience an indicator of anything but resistance to burnout?

 Beyond that, is it possible the system itself has nothing to do with ‘achievement’ at all, but rather about perpetuating itself and the gravy train it provides for the union and the academic-industrial complex?

“Saving” the Minneapolis schools is going to come down to a simple horserace, between two forces:

1. Minneapolis’ ability to think outside the one-party-town box, and
2. the market, as parents with what P.J. O’Rourke calls “the common sense to give a sh*t” flee the broken system, taking the money assigned to their students with them.

The market, versus a 180 degree change in an ossified political system. Hm.

Where are you putting your money?

(Other than the money you pay in taxes, obviously…)

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 7:10 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.