In a November 8 article in the Star Tribune, author Emily Johns writes,
Minnesota educators think the state has a good chance to receive a chunk of some $4.35 billion in grants that the Obama administration plans to give to states to promote school innovation.
Wait. What? Our educators think we have a good chance? They must be reading a different version of the administrations “Race to the Top” language than I am.
Through this new competitive program called Race to the Top, the US Department of Education has set aside more than $4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for education. But Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has made it clear that not everyone is going to get a share of that $4 billion. In fact, that’s the whole idea. Only states that take a bold stand and make true educational reforms are going to get any money at all.
The only reforms that Minnesota has made since the government dangled this money in front of us (which we now know is somewhere between $60-175 million), is we’ve reformed the way we love ourselves: we now think we’re better than ever, despite making almost no changes at all!
Minnesota is convinced that we do a pretty good job at educating our kids. That’s true – if you’re white, middle-class, and attend a suburban school district. Where we fall short is in so many other categories: minority students, students from low-income communities, students receiving special education supports… the list goes on. In fact, Minnesota has the second biggest academic achievement gap in the country (more on this in future posts).
And we think the government is going to reward us for that??
Secretary Duncan is asking states to be bold. To “think big and push hard on the kinds of reforms that we know will create fundamental change…” Minnesota, however, is planning on submitting an application that simply highlights what we’ve always done (things like the governors “Q Comp” program, in which more than 95% of teachers in this state were considered worthy of a performance-based incentive, or our standards that have been in place for years, or our strong charter school laws). Sure, all those things are great (perhaps with the exception of the “Q Comp” program – are you telling me that we have this many great teachers, and still our black kids do worse in Minnesota than black kids do in Alabama?), but they aren’t the types of changes the administration is talking about.
In fact, they aren’t changes at all. As Dan Weisberg, VP of policy and general counsel for The New Teacher Project, says, “The big picture is that Minnesota has a good story to tell in many areas about the efforts it’s made thus far on education reform.” Really? I must have missed something.
Mr. Wesiberg’s organization actually released a report in August that showed several glaring deficiencies in Minnesota’s reform movement, most notably in the way that we produce, retain, and evaluate great teachers and leaders. The US Chamber backed those findings up with a Report Card that gave Minnesota an “F” on the scale of alternative hiring, giving the state a “C” overall for staff hiring and evaluation. In fact, the report card, which was designed to measure state’s strengths on education innovation and reform, gave Minnesota mostly “B’s” and “C’s,” not the “all A’s” report that so many in the state think is our due.
It’s time for our state leaders to actually get some political courage and “make the tough choices that are right for kids” as Duncan said in a speech at the 2009 Governors Education Symposium. If Minnesota wants any piece of this $4 billion pie, we need to agree that our state needs a TRUE alternative route to teacher certification, and new ways to evaluate the teachers who are already in the classroom.
The state teacher's union, Education Minnesota would love for us to continue patting ourselves on the back and saying how great we already are (they benefit from sticking with the status quo). That, however, won’t get us any money through the “Race to the Top” fund, and it certainly won’t help our students who are on the wrong side of the achievement gap, falling further behind every day.
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