Imagine a state that adopts a state constitutional amendment that ties student rights to an education to their test scores. Would anyone be so dumb as to imagine that the test scores of students of different races would change because of a constitutional amendment? Remember that Minnesota was the first state to pass a charter law, promising to close the academic gaps. That was in 1992. Thirty years later, the state’s Big Thinkers are still grasping at straws.
. About EDUCATION EXPERTS AND SCHOLARS: PROPOSED MINNESOTA CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT THREATENS STUDENTS’ RIGHTSFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEToday, prominent experts on constitutional law and education sent a letter to Minnesota legislators voicing significant concerns that a proposal to amend the Minnesota Constitution would undermine and weaken students’ right to public education. In January 2020, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve proposed to eliminate the current guarantee of a free public education in the Minnesota State Constitution and replace it with language to make education “a fundamental right” to “quality schools” to be “measured against uniform achievement standards set forth by the state.” Proponents of the change contend that this new language would reduce gaps in achievement between Minnesota’s white students and students of color. A proposed bill to amend the constitution, H.F. 874, was introduced in the Minnesota House of Representatives on February 8. In their letter, nationally known constitutional scholars and education law experts outline the negative effects the proposed amendment would have on Minnesota students’ right to public education. The letter explains that while “efforts to strengthen education rights” are welcomed, current Minnesota law already recognizes the rights contained in the amendment. The letter points out that the proposed amendment adds new language that may well undermine existing constitutional protections. Most notably, the amendment explicitly links the right to education to state achievement standards, a focus that “may encourage courts to measure rights through the narrow lens of tested academic achievement,” according to the scholars and experts. In addition, the proposed amendment would eliminate core obligations imposed by the Minnesota Constitution on the state legislature to establish and maintain a statewide system of public schools. These include the requirement that the school system be “general and uniform” and “thorough and efficient.” The letter notes that, in 2018, the Minnesota Supreme Court interpreted this language as prohibiting schools segregated by race, a ruling that is considered “one of the most unqualified restrictions on school segregation that can be found in American law.” The scholars and experts underscore that the proposed amendment could endanger this crucial decision advancing racial justice. The letter concludes that “the Federal Reserve’s proposed amendment to the Minnesota education clause threatens to reduce, rather than increase, the rights of Minnesota students.” Signatories include professors from Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Rutgers, the University of the District of Columbia, University of Colorado, University of North Carolina, University of South Carolina, Michigan State University, West Virginia University, Loyola University New Orleans, and the directors of several national civil rights organizations. Press Contact:Sharon Krengel Policy and Outreach Director Education Law Center 60 Park Place, Suite 300 Newark, NJ 07102 973-624-1815, ext. 24 skrengel@edlawcenter.org Share on Twitter |
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ah, that bastion of educational expertise, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, proposes to fix K-12 education. (They call their interest in education “community involvement”. ) To be fair, Minneapolis School Board should regulate financial policy.
😀 !
The development isn’t a surprise.
In 2020, SCOTUS exempted religious schools from civil rights employment law.
In 2020, the Minnesota Catholic Conference advised Bishop Hebda that he had the right to prohibit his priests from voting in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the religious right, ALEC, the Heritage Foundation and the conservative religious National Council on Policy described the purpose of parallel school systems. Weyrich was funded by the Koch’s.
Weyrich and Leonard Leo, a leader in the Federalist Society, share a belief in conservative religion.
Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA wrote in Newsweek, May 2020, “I’m an evangelical fighting for the Catholic school system.” Kirk wrote, “Secular culture and higher taxes are both rooted in collectivism” which is at odds with the “Christian values of personal accountability, freedom and, God’s truth over that of the state’s”.
Here’s ed reforms “contribution” to Ohio public school students and families in the pandemic:
https://fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/commentary/reply-anti-testers
A demand all our kids get tested.
They don’t use our schools, work in our schools or support our schools, but they set policy for our schools.
Ridiculous. Let’s think about hiring some state lawmakers who do their own thinking and their own work. If we wanted the ed reform lobby to run public schools we would privatize them.
Should public school policy be set by people who actually value public schools and public school students? Don’t they deserve that? Why is the charter/voucher lobby setting policy for the public schools they work to abolish? How has that worked out for public school students?
The straw that will break democracy’s back, this.
This month, the Emerson Collective (Clinton neoliberals funded by Laurene Powell Jobs) hired Joe Kennedy. Last year, Pelosi backed Kennedy in his failed primary attempt to replace progressive incumbent, Ed Markey. Pelosi’s endorsement was an especially egregious decision because the Dem. establishment political machine blackballed PR firms that worked on the campaigns of other challengers to Democratic incumbents.
So that could mean that kids with special needs or ELL students could lose their rights to an education because they don’t get high test scores?
That’s unconscionable.
I’m a retired Minnesota educator, but continue to work 1 day per week at school. A former student and recent co-worker was recently elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives from our district and I’m in regular e-mail communication with him. I am waiting to hear back from him on my recommendation that he form a coalition of former educators from both parties to advocate for public education and students in public education. I said he may have the ear of our governor since Tim Walz is also a former public school educator. I’ve been following this blog since its inception and treasure the few seconds I had to visit with this blog’s owner when I got my copy of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” signed at the MEA convention. Thank you, Diane, for directing me to this blog. Don’t give up on Minnesota!
Thank you, David. Minnesota has a very vigorous and highly segregated charter sector. Do your best to protect and strengthen our common schools.
I do not think they are “grasping at straws”.
They are shoveling/stealing public money meant for community-based public schools into their bank accounts to keep increasing their wealth to fuel their dreams of multiple homes on multiple continents, at least one deep-ocean yacht, a private jet, and a stable/very large garage filled with expensive, high-performance cars.
Did you know that the “World’s Richest One Percent Are Producing More Than Double the Carbon Emissions as the Bottom 50 Percent.”
https://www.ecowatch.com/carbon-emissions-one-percent-2647729537.html
Yes, they are grasping at hundred dollar bills.
Of maybe grasping at straws made with hundred dollar bills so they can snort their coke.
The road to hell, it’s said, is paved with good intentions. For much of the twentieth century, progressive educators fought for a view of education as the development of skills, something that was opposed to “rote learning,” viewed as memorization of isolated facts. This simple-minded dichotomy led to a lot of unexamined, confused thinking. Consider what educators have come to call “critical thinking skills.” (a typical EdSpeak sentence: “We need to teach kids not a bunch of facts but the critical thinking skills they will need for the 21st-century jobs of the future.” But, of course, clearly and carefully involves a great deal of factual knowledge because the facts are what we think about, and much of thinking is about doing things with facts. You classify things by grouping them according to their properties–facts about them. You analyze things by breaking down those things into parts (i.e., observing facts about things) and then detailing the relations among these facts. A generalization is facts about individual things in some category being considered representative of all things of in that category. And so on. The truth of any argument depends not only on its logical form but also on the truth of its premises–the facts the argument works upon. No facts, no reasonable argument. The stupidity and incompetence of someone like Donald Trump lies not only in his inability to put ideas together into logical, rational arguments but also in his PROFOUND IGNORANCE. This is a man who thought we could send astronauts to the sun; that stealth airplanes were actually invisible; that undocumented immigrants reduce the number of jobs available to American workers; that when we put tariffs on a country’s goods, that country pays those tariffs; and so on. Start from “alternative facts,” and you end up with harmful nonsense.
But this didn’t stop educators from deciding that they could forget about facts and teach critical thinking “skills” in the abstract, divorced from specific knowledge. BIG MISTAKE. In fact, it would be an altogether good thing if educators placed a moratorium on use of the word “skills,” which tends to lead to a lot of incredibly fuzzy and misguided thinking (e.g., that one can teach the abstract skill of “making inferences” in the absence of learning concrete applications of particular ways of making inferences to particular facts that students have learned). Consider the “skill” of planing a piece of wood. Well, mastering this “skill” requires a lot of knowledge of facts–that a plane must be very sharp, that there are specific tools for the sharpening, that the depth of the blade of the plane must correspond to the hardness of the wood. what the hardnesses of various kinds of wood are, that you must plane in the direction of the grain of the wood, what “the grain of the wood” means. It would be far, far better if educators stopped referring to
“skills” altogether and started talking, instead, about the declarative and procedural knowledge necessary for a given activity.
One consequence of all this simple-minded nonthinking about facts versus skills was that when the “standards” movement took off, people started writing “standards” that ignored content–facts about the world–and instead dealt almost solely with “skills” described in the abstract. This was an egregious error in the existing state English Language Arts “standard” that Lord Coleman (paid to do this by Master of the Universe Bill Gates) hacked together to produce the backward, puerile, almost entirely content free Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards (the CC$$).
And, of course, because the CC$$ in ELA are an almost entirely content-free list of vague, abstract skills, they can’t be validly measured, and so the ELA tests that purport to measure them are a scam.
cx But, of course, thinking clearly and carefully involves a great deal of factual knowledge because the facts are what we think about, and much of thinking is about doing things with facts.
correction of the correction: But, of course, thinking clearly and carefully involves a great deal of factual knowledge because the facts are what we think about, and ALL thinking is about doing things with facts. So, knowledge is key, not peripheral. Only if you know the facts can you know where or why thinking goes wrong. So, kids need a body of facts to think about, and so-called “standards” that ignore that are, well, just plain dumb.
cx: an egregious error in the existing state English Language Arts “standards” that Lord Coleman . . . hacked together
Could we say that procedural skill leads to declarative knowledge leads to procedural skill.? The infant, having developed the skill of crawling, learns declarative facts that leads to standing, that leads to declarative facts, enabling learning to walk. There seems to be a constant churning. Observing, reflecting, simulating, then copying.
In your example, think of the declarative facts coming to mind after learning to plane that piece of wood, the other things you might use the plane for, such as removing nail hole filler, rather than sanding it away. Facts that you think about and are able to explain to us.in writing.
An obvious observation: the more skills we learn, the more facts we learn about our world, the more data with which we solve problems.
Exactly. Well observed!
So many complexities to this. One is the difference between unconscious acquisition, which is passive and based upon automatic functions of the cognitive/perceptual system, and learning, which is fully conscious. It’s clear that Coleman and Pimentel–who, in their profound ignorance, foisted the CC$$ on the country–didn’t have a clue about this distinction. It isn’t even apples and oranges. It’s more like apples and the square root of negative one–utterly different phenomena, treated in the CC$$ as though they were the same.
Recent brain research suggests cognition is as beneath the level of consciousness as is movement, including learning.
Better phrase: beneath the level of conscious awareness
The Road to Hell
The road to hell is paved with gold
And greed will drive you there
Though ride is pleasant, I am told
Arrival is a bear
Awesome, SomeDAM!
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras? Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
Minnesota will definitely be discriminating against many students if that change of constitutional wording comes to pass.
The moniker “Science” is being used to sell everything these days.
The more sciencey sounding you can make something , the better.
Even measurement science is not really a science, but a branch of statistics (which is itself not science, but a branch of mathematics)
Traditionally, science is defined as “the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”
But it has now been coopted by everyone from economists to computer “scientists” (sic)
Some might say “so what? Why does it matter?”
It matters because the people like economists who call themselves scientists do so specifically to gain credibility in the eyes of the public and the real scientific community. It is done to lend credibility to methods that in may cases are not only not science but not even legitimate in any regard (not legitimate statistics , for example, in the case of VAM).
Yes, that pseudo-sheen of scientific sensibility serves to subtly shine simplistic statements shielding insanities from scrutiny.
I have friends in Minnesota who did not send their kids to public schools. And that was 20 years ago. I think their kids went to charter schools. Interestingly, these friends are super-liberal, so my guess is that the MN liberal folks might be leading and following this movement with “good intentions,” as Bob said. I don’t think my friends have/had any idea how their decisions impacted public schools and increased segregation. They talked like their decisions were cutting-edge progressive.
In Minnesota, there are Hispanic charter schools, African American charter schools, a German school (whites), and others defined by race and ethnicity. Guess it’s liberal to be a segregationist now.
Very well said, Diane!
Agree with Bob
Minnesota also has a small number of charter schools dedicated to preserving Native American language and culture, some on tribal lands and some not. I don’t think it is surprising that Native Americans distrust the BIA along with state and local governments, especially when it comes to educating their children.
Your analogy doesn’t work. Should the state fund charter schools for white children? For black children? Did you ever hear of The Supreme Court decision called Brown v. Board of Education (1954)?
Do you ever make comments that are not intended to bait someone? I think that’s called trolling.
This is a very interesting point to make! I would say without knowing an in-depth amount about the subject…that it is okay in certain circumstances. For instance, if the German school is truly a school meant to teach through German customs, it could be seen as a place where those children can feel comfortable continuing to learn about their culture or a culture that they want to be immersed in without harassment from students who are not from the same background. Similarly, black Americans have their own subcultures, if a child was worried about being pressured to not explore their black excellence this could be an option for them (like Howard University). HOWEVER, I do understand and agree that this is not an easy subject or a question that can be answered quickly. I also believe that these schools should only exist or receive support from the government if they allow students from all backgrounds to join…similar to Howard University which is a historically black college and allows students of all backgrounds to attend. I guess what I’m saying is they should accept students from all backgrounds
Like Conservative, Liberal has lost most (if not all) of it’s traditional meaning.
Not sure about other languages , but English has become hopelessly corrupted by advertisers and propagandists of all types.
It’s gotten so bad that when you read the word “up” these days, you have ask yourself what it means.
Language is now used by many to obfuscate and deceive rather than to illuminate.
The conservative and liberal descriptors should be changed to distinguish supporters of concentrated wealth v. democracy
Thypey should be conjoined to Libservative (Lipservative?) To indicate that both today’s Neocons and Neolibs service the ultrawealthy, while giving lip service to the rest of us.
Most members of Congress are Libservative.
The Senate is almost exclusively Libservative.
The most useful thing that could be done would be to pass a Constitutional amendment go abolish the Senate entirely.
It’s become pathological .
The Brits got rid of the House of Lords.
We should do the same.
This piece makes the argument for doing away with the Senate.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/02/18/what-about-eliminating-senate-altogether
Trolling
You set the bait
And then you troll
The fishing’s great
In teacher hole
I was wrong. The Brits still have the House of Lords. They are as dumb as we are.
And Lord Cruz is the poster boy for why the Senate should be abolished
Lipservitude should be added to the political lexicon.
Deanna-
What could possibly go wrong with public policy written for the rare exception, a situation of ideal circumstances?
Homeschooling comes to mind. While there may be exceptional, enlightened parents with amazing opportunity to enrich their children in all areas necessary to produce productive children, fully functional in American society and respectful of equal opportunity for all, the increased incidence of abuse in homeschooled children is a cautionary tale for society at large.
A study found that when parents were reported to child services for abuse or neglect, they frequently withdrew their children from school claiming the right to home school.
Then, there are religious schools that fire teachers who have children out of wedlock or who are gay. And, there are schools that endorse/require conversion therapy for gay students which results statistically in higher incidence of suicide.
Then, there are the religious schools that have changed the U.S. pledge of allegiance so that students recite,”..and justice for the born and unborn” putting women’s lives at risk.
Then, there are the religious schools that SCOTUS decided would be exempt from civil rights employment law ( a ruling by the conservative religious justices).
Then, there are the religious schools that prohibit women from holding leadership roles.
Et cetera.
You mean the political dyslexicon?
Poet-
Dyslexicon- I’d buy the dictionary you created!
Late and long. I am not from Minnesota, but this post sent me deep into some policies there. The idea is to frame education as a fundamental right to “quality schools” as “measured against uniform achievement standards set forth by the state.”
No. This law is written as if the standard-setting process is a business-as usual-review of existing standards and benchmarks for learning, with periodic revisions. It is not.
Right now, there is a huge controversy over the social studies standards. The battle is about whose histories count and whether conservatives should settle for anything other than patriotism as the major purpose of teaching American history. https://patch.com/minnesota/across-mn/controversy-over-mn-s-social-studies-standards-explained
Students Learning English (ELLs), are unlikely to pass the absurd requirements being proposed by the Federal Reserve (why bankers?) and as a constitutional amendment (why bankers?).
Minnesota has NO academic tests except those in English. According to a 2020 report from the Migration Policy Institute, and the 2015 American Community Survey, at least 193,600 Minnesota residents have children still learning English. All are in harm’s way. The largest foreign-born groups in Minnesota are from Mexico (67,300), Somalia (31,400), India (30,500), Laos including Hmong (23,300), Vietnam (20,200), China excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan (c), Ethiopia (19,300), and Thailand including Hmong (16,800). One of the fastest growing immigrant groups in Minnesota is the Karen people, an ethnic minority in conflict with the government in Myanmar. Most of the estimated 5,000 Karen in Minnesota came from refugee camps in Thailand. Ojibwe and Dakota are the indigenous languages of Minnesota.
Many of Minnesota’s charter schools are devoted to segregating and strengthening the identities of linguistic/ethnic groups. There are three dual language Spanish-English schools. Eight charter schools are devoted to immersion in these languages/cultures: Chinese, French, German, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. There are at least five Hmong immersion charter schools, and two for Ojibwe immersion. Two charter schools offer ELL education for East African families and one offers education using American Sign Language/English bilingual approach.
Recent reports also show how charter schools are racially segregated. In St Paul, one hundred percent of students at Higher Ground Academy are black or African-American. This percentage is about the same for Minneapolis’s Friendship Academy. In both cities the overall population of black or African-American residents is below twenty percent. By design, many charter schools in Minnesota are segregated schools. Will these schools be subjected to the wishes of the bankers or not?
In 2021, the Minnesota Federal Reserve, having no expertise in education, called in “experts” to make suggestions on a fix for so-called achievement gaps, meaning differences in scores on standardized tests. This “we-can-fix it” program was sponsored by all 12 of the nation’s District Banks in the Federal Reserve System. In other words, what happens in Minnesota may not be limited to Minnesota but extend to the orbit of District Banks in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Kansas City, New York City, Philadelphia, Richmond (VA), San Francisco, and St Louis,
Among the highly visible “experts” called in for this multi-state program were Geoffrey Canada, president of the well-endowed Harlem Children’s Zone (endowment about $148 million, and sponsor of Promise Academy brand of K-12 charter schools), and CEO Salman Khan, founder of online Khan Academy, and Kahn Academy for Kids. The papers for this program also featured the post-Katrina takeover of New Orleans schools as if exemplary. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/feds-racism-and-the-economy-series-explores-racial-inequity-in-the-education-system.
Bankers are clueless about education but they have an agenda certain to harm thousands of students in Minnesota, especially ELL students, and if applicable to charter schools, the many students ill prepared to take a test only available in English.
The last thing we need to have are the nation’s clueless bankers making permanent changes in education based on proposed Minnesota’s model of “quality.”
Laura, thank you for this wealth of information. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am from Minnesota and will use the resources you referenced in my correspondence with our newly elected legislator who is both a former student and teaching colleague. He has asked me specifically for my views on “narrowing the achievement gap” and the proposed social studies standards. I have sent him an initial message, but this gives me follow up information for him. We both taught primarily in rural Minnesota and have no charter schools in our county, but are concerned for all students in Minnesota.
Good luck. I removed active links but if you can still use some of the information, so much the better.
Students can still receive bilingual classes in public schools. Even when major academics are bilingual, diverse students have a chance to mingle with other students in electives, clubs and sports. When students learn to co-exist with mutual respect and understanding, we are promoting pro-social behavior. Too much isolation breeds mistrust of others that are different. Public schools help students build healthy relationships with all kinds of students.
Love this: “Remember that Minnesota was the first state to pass a charter law, promising to close the academic gaps. That was in 1992. Thirty years later, the state’s Big Thinkers are still grasping at straws.”