From Pipestone to Minneapolis: Schools Need New Approaches
Too Many Students Are Poorly Served by Status Quo Policies
At first glance, there doesn’t appear the public school districts serving Pipestone and Minneapolis have much in common. The enrollment in Minneapolis public schools, 28,000, is about three times the entire Pipestone County population of 9,400 .
Scratch a bit deeper, though, and the similar challenges of school districts in a very rural county and the urban core reflect the need for a complete overhaul of the state’s education policies.
Both districts are losing enrollment to a declining birth rate and competition from charter and private schools, home schooling and Minnesota’s open enrollment policy that allows students from one district to enroll in another district. Pipestone had 1,100 students last year, a 14% decline from its high water mark in the 2003-04 school year. Minneapolis schools are seeing an even more rapid decline having lost 17% of their students in the last five years.
Because the state provides districts with most of their funds and allocates money on a per pupil basis, the loss of every student has an enormous impact on the schools. “Each time the student count drops by one, (Pipestone Area School District) loses $9,178.62 in state funding,” school district business manager Jacque Kennedy told the Pipestone County Star. The district projects a deficit for this school year of about $477,000 in a general fund budget of about $16.5 million.
Minneapolis is among the many districts around the state that face even more daunting problems. The one-time federal Covid dollars expire next September, forcing many districts to rely on local tax support or cut staff and programs. Minneapolis projects a budget gap of more than $90 million next year. An already-challenging budget challenge becomes a crisis.
Pipestone and Minneapolis compare in another way: academic challenges. According to the latest Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment test scores, only 35% of Pipestone students are proficient in math and about 43% meet the proficiency standard in reading. Minneapolis scores are similar: 35% proficiency in reading, 41% in math.
The two districts tell the tale of the state: too many students in Minnesota schools today are not succeeding. Only about half of students who took the annual MCA tests last spring were proficient in reading and only 45% were proficient in math. Among minority students, the scores are even worse. Among Black students, for example, proficiency rates are 31% in reading and 21% in math. (Students in grades 3-8 and 10 take the reading tests, the math assessment is for students in grades 3-8 and 11).
The scores aren’t simply a reflection of Covid’s impact on education. Minnesota students as a whole weren’t performing all that well before Covid. Only 59% of students being tested were proficient in reading and 55% in math in 2018-19. Better than 2023, to be sure, but should we be satisfied when more than 4-in-10 students are less than proficient in the two core subjects?
The tests aren’t perfect assessment tools, but the scores are leading indicators of a public school system that is graduating too many students without the tools needed to be successful adults. This isn’t to blame teachers or schools. It also isn’t an effort to cast blame on all public schools (some Minnesota public schools compete favorably with the best in the country) or to set the stage for vouchers or other schemes to divert more tax dollars to private schools.
Instead, it is an urgent call for comprehensive education reform. As the Pipestone and Minneapolis school districts underscore, the current system isn’t serving students in large urban districts any better than those in smaller rural districts.
Three reforms are urgent, starting with how students are taught. Smaller class sizes are less important than smarter classrooms.
As a candidate for statewide office in 2010, I proposed that maybe, just maybe, the solution to better academic outcomes wasn’t classrooms with fewer students, but smarter classrooms in which teaching could be tailored to the needs, learning styles and pace of each student.
It wasn’t a well-received proposal by the academic establishment 13 years ago. Today, though, there is growing awareness that technology could bring the same transformational reforms to education that it has delivered in industries from manufacturing to medicine.
Three Minnesota education experts, former Minnesota Education Commissioner Robert Wedl, Belgrade-Brooten-Elrosa Sept. Patrick Walsh, and Lucy Payne, assistant professor of teacher education, University of St. Thomas, recently wrote in a Minneapolis StarTribune opinion article, “Artificial intelligence will personalize schooling and learning in ways that are hard to comprehend. Students already recognize this, but schools and policymakers lag behind.”
Transforming classrooms goes beyond smart tablets and online learning programs. Technology can move teaching from educating a classroom to teaching individuals based on their personal strengths and learning styles. As the education experts wrote in their opinion article, “Our current education system was not designed to help everyone. We have the same standards for all, the same levels of expected proficiency for all and the same models of schooling for all. While we know each student is different, magically most everyone graduates on the same day from these same standards and expectations.”
Investing in technology and the professional skills to use it wisely will take state resources. Individual school districts simply don’t have the funds to do what is needed.
That gets us to the second reform: State funding of public education should depend less on the number of students and more on delivering better outcomes for everyone.
With a shrinking population of school-age kids, funding schools on a per-pupil basis is a guarantee of mediocrity. For starters, how will districts attract and retain the best teachers with less money to spend?The fixed costs of a classroom with 25 students are just as high as those for a class of 24.
The state needs to fund quality not enrollment. Minnesota legislators increased the state’s education spending by more than $2 billion during the past session, but invested mostly in shoring up the status quo.
Instead, policymakers should fund a new model of education. Every child in a Minnesota public school should be assured of having access to the best instruction in every subject. In some areas, this may lead the state to be the sponsor of high-quality virtual learning programs that teach and engage students. In all areas, it will require the state to provide the funds to attract and retain the best trained and most skilled teachers and support staff. And, as noted above, the state needs to lead the way with dollars and expertise to transition from classrooms that treat every student alike to ones that have the technology and teacher training to give each student a curriculum that meets state standards through individualized learning.
All these reforms require money for outcomes, not just butts in seats.
The third reform: Education reform goes beyond classrooms.
Improving education outcomes requires a comprehensive approach. Problems facing schools from Pipestone to Minneapolis are many, they are complicated and they start far outside school buildings. For starters, huge numbers of school-age kids aren’t even showing up for class. About 30% of Minnesota K-12 students missed 10% of their school days last year; that’s twice the pre-pandemic rate in 2019. In some districts, the fall-off is even worse. In Minneapolis Public Schools, only 46% of students made it to classes regularly; an alarming decline from the 2019 rate of 79%. Teachers can’t teach kids who aren’t attending classes.
Disengaged parents, inadequate housing, poor nutrition and students’ concerns for their safety will undermine the success of even the best-funded, state-of-the-art schools. Numerous credible studies have shown that students attend class more frequently and perform better when they are in stable housing. Economically-pressed families are better able to support and supervise their kids when wages are supplemented through policies like the Working Families Tax Credit. And, students who are hungry are poor learners.
Minnesota legislators addressed these and other community issues in the last legislative session. The task now is to hold new investments accountable to meaningful criteria and for policymakers to show the willingness to change programs that aren’t working.
Policymakers need to engage communities in understanding that the classrooms of yesterday aren’t meeting tomorrow’s needs. Public schools need to be reimagined in ways that treat every student as an individual. Schools need the technology and expert personnel to make sure students aren’t just graduating, they are leaving high school with the skills they will need to lead successful lives.
The technology and resources are there. The open question is whether the political will and public commitment are equal to the task of preparing our children for the future.
I now realize I received an education tailored to my needs. I’m guessing at least some of my classmates didn’t. They got lumped together with everyone else. I was lucky. Tom is right.
Tom, how much of this could be attributed to political considerations being higher priority than educational outcomes? By that I mean to what degree does electoral politics affect the ways in which education is delivered? This applies to everything from school boards to the White House. How can we possibly expect different outcomes when the decisions around funding, curriculum, testing, standards, content, hours, transportation, and almost everything else are being made by people who seek to be elected as opposed to people with professional training and experience in education?