Minneapolis-based journalist Sarah Lahm writes about Minnesota as a pioneer in the school choice movement, but the state is now awash in choice and disruption. She sees hope in the growing community school movement, which fosters bonds between schools and families instead of competition among schools for scarce resources.
She writes:
In Minnesota, the Saint Paul Public Schools district has been left gasping for air as school choice schemes continue to wreak havoc on the district’s enrollment numbers and, subsequently, its finances.
This district is one of the largest and most diverse in the state, if not the nation, with approximately 35,000 students representing a wide array of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Two-thirds of the district’s students live in poverty, according to federal income guidelines, and almost 300 students in the district are listed as being homeless.
As a result of more school choice, in 2017, 14,000 school-age children living in the city were not enrolled in the Saint Paul Public Schools district. Instead, they either attended a charter school in or near the city or chose to open-enroll into a neighboring school district.
Just two years later, in 2019, the exodus of families had risen to more than 16,000. Today, more than one-third of all students living in Saint Paul do not attend Saint Paul Public Schools, leaving the district in a constant state of contraction.
The district’s lagging enrollment numbers can be attributed to shrinking birthrates and “a rise in school choice options,” according to a recent article by Star Tribune reporter Anthony Lonetree.
As a consequence of shrinking enrollments, district officials recently outlined a reorganization proposal that calls for the closure of eight schools by the fall of 2022 “under a consolidation plan,” in an attempt to offload expensive infrastructure costs and improve academic options for students.
Charter school options abound in and around Saint Paul, and many represent the worst effects that come with applying unregulated, market-based reforms to public education.
There’s the handful of white flight charter schools within the city limits, for example, that have long waiting lists and offer exclusive programming options, such as Great River School (a Montessori school), Nova Classical Academy, and the Twin Cities German Immersion School. On the flip side of this are racially and economically isolated Saint Paul charter schools such as Hmong College Prep Academy, where according to state data 98 percent of the students enrolled are Asian and nearly 80 percent live in poverty, according to federal income guidelines.
Hmong College Prep Academy has been in the news recently, thanks to a scandal that was dubbed a “hedge fund fiasco” by the Pioneer Press. The school is run by a husband-and-wife administrative team who invested $5 million of taxpayer money in a hedge fund, hoping it would provide a return that would help pay for the school’s expansion plans. Instead, the hedge fund investment apparently lost $4.3 million, leading to calls for the school’s superintendent, Christianna Hang, to be fired—something school officials refused to do. Hang finally submitted her resignation in late October.
In short, the market-based approach to education reform that Minnesota helped pioneer has caused a great deal of disruption, segregation and chaos. In a Hunger Games-type setting, districts and charter schools have been forced to compete for students with white, middle and upper class students and families largely coming out on top.
The end result, critics allege, is an increasingly segregated public education landscape across the state, with no widespread boost in student outcomes to show for it.
Thirty years after Minnesota’s charter school and open enrollment laws ushered in a mostly unregulated era of school choice, many states—including Minnesota—and federal officials may be turning their attention to the reform model offered by full-service community schools.
Full-service community schools offer a holistic approach to education that is about much more than students’ standardized test scores or the number of AP classes a school offers. Instead, this model seeks to reposition schools as community resource centers that also provide academic instruction to K-12, or even Pre-K-12, students.
In Minnesota, a handful of districts have adopted this model, often with impressive results.
The state’s longest running full-service community schools implementation is in Brooklyn Center, a very diverse suburb just north of Minneapolis. Since 2009, the city’s public school district has operated under the full-service model, providing such things as counseling and medical and dental services alongside the traditional academic offerings of the school system.
In recent months, Brooklyn Center’s community schools approach has been put to the test, due to both the ongoing pandemic and the unrest that erupted after George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. In April 2021, as Chauvin’s murder trial was underway a few miles away in downtown Minneapolis, a white Brooklyn Center police officer shot and killed a young Black man named Daunte Wright during a traffic stop.
This layering of trauma upon trauma might have broken the Brooklyn Center community apart, as large protests soon took place outside the city’s police headquarters and caused disruption among residents—many of whom are recent immigrants and refugees. During this turmoil, school district staffers, already familiar with the needs of their community, were able to quickly mobilize resources on behalf of Brooklyn Center students and families thanks to the existing full-service community schools model.
It’s not just urban districts like Brooklyn Center that have benefited from this approach. In rural Deer River, Minnesota—where more than two-thirds of the district’s K-12 students live in poverty, according to federal income guidelines, and 85 Deer River students are listed as being homeless—the school district adopted the full-service model in recent years, thanks to startup grants from state and federal funding sources. Staff in Deer River are reportedly very happy with the full-service model, which allowed them to pivot during the pandemic and provide food, transportation services and other community-specific needs. A local media outlet even noted that the community schools approach enabled school district employees to survey families during the COVID-19 shutdown and provide them with things such as fishing poles and bikes to help them get through this challenging time.
Several other districts across the United States, from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Durham, North Carolina, have also adopted the full-service community schools approach, which is built around sharing power and uplifting communities rather than closing failing schools and shuttling students out of their neighborhoods through open-enrollment or charter school options.
Community Schools Approach Is on the Rise
Disrupting public education through the proliferation of school choice schemes, including charter schools, has long been the preferred education reform model for politicians and wealthy philanthropists in the United States, and while the charter school industry has been able to score billions in federal funding, the full-service community schools model has instead been relegated to the sidelines.
That’s starting to change.
In February 2021, a coalition of education advocacy groups, including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, wrote an open letter to congressional leaders asking that more federal dollars be spent on full-service community schools. Most recently, the letter notes, Congress allocated $30 million in funding for such schools nationwide, a number the coalition deemed far too low to meet the “need and demand for this strategy.”
Now, the Biden administration has proposed dramatically bumping this funding up to $443 million, based on the support this model has received from people such as the current U.S. Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona. While giving input to Congress on behalf of Biden’s proposed budget for the Department of Education, Cardona explained that full-service community schools honor the “role of schools as the centers of our communities and neighborhoods” and are designed to help students achieve academically by making sure their needs—for food, counseling, relationships, or a new pair of eyeglasses, and so on—are also being met.
Thanks Diane. This article was created by my Our Schools media project which is amplifying the community schools approach as a positive alternative to market-based education policies. Any of your followers who are interested in telling me about successful implementations of the community schools approach in their districts can DM me on twitter: @jeffbcdm or reply in the comment thread here.
I have been waiting for communities to wake up to the fact that they have squandered so much money on privatization and have little to show for it. It is overdue for the public to realize that privatization costs more for no better and often far worse results than authentic public education. With increasing numbers of poor students in public schools, the community model of education offers supports and resources instead of the bogus vainglorious claims of profit-seeking privatizers. I shudder to think about all the money that has been wasted on amateur privatizers’ grand experiments. Our children should not be the guinea pigs of the 1%. The big products of privatization are more profit for the already wealthy, increased segregation and depleted, ransacked public schools. I imagine what could have been accomplished if real education experts had had access to all that money.
we are always waiting for the public to wake up …
Mr. Bryant,
Three questions
(1) While the state Catholic Conferences, “the public policy voice of the Catholic church in states”, have had great success in gaining school choice legislation*, are they now supporting the initiative described in the post? (2) If not, is there value to identifying a significant public square advocate for privatization? (3) Or, is the preferable strategy to ignore a high visibility and successful enemy of public schools?
*Southwestern Indiana Catholic Community Newspaper, at the search prompt, type in school choice, scroll down to 4-22-2021, “An Insider’s Look at the evolution of the choice scholarship program”, by John Elcesser.
Specific to Minnesota, at the Central Minnesota Catholic magazine for the Diocese of St. Cloud, the following is posted, 5-30-2021, “Minnesota Catholic Conference: Speak up now for school choice….the past year has elevated the need for students across Minnesota to have real educational choices…Watch a video on this issue featuring Bishop Andrew Cozzens, vicar for Catholic Education in the Diocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.”
Silence about theocracy doesn’t appear to be working for abortion rights but, it does appear to enable the advancement of the Koch agenda. At the Minnesota Catholic Conference Facebook site, a video is posted, “We demand that the judicial imposition of abortion on demand in this country be ended.” Scrolling further down on the Facebook page, “Did you catch the podcast with Dr. Daniel DiSalvo of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research?” The Manhattan Institute is Koch.
Margaret Atwood, author of Handmaid’s Tale, asked how we would recognize right wing totalitarianism. Her first answer was, “There will be talk of God.”
A “pioneer” in the Community School Movement was 1929 Elsie Ridley Clapp when she took John Dewey’s thinking on democracy into The Ballard Memorial School in Jefferson County Kentucky. Not all that far from Mayfield, Kentucky where today the public high school is still standing after last night’s devastating series of tornadoes.
Mayfield High School has been turned into a shelter. People are taking refuge there. They are being fed, treated for injuries, fed nourishing, cafeteria meals. Clothing is provided, WiFi, relocation services, even transportation to another safe destination.
It does not take much to imagine this as an example of a community school IN ACTION. No one chose this weather catastrophe but it serves to remind us of what resources community schools can coordinate when administering to The Moment.
Elsie Clapp later ran a community school in FDR’s industrially ravaged Arthurdale, West Virginia. Starving families were literally selling body & soul just to stay alive when this Great Depression era school sprang up from a buckwheat farm and began demonstrating how public schools can enter a crisis and become the HUB and the ❤️ HEART of people-directed restoration and recovery.
Charter schools are in no position to do any of this work. It is not in their “DNA”. But it is the genetic makeup of community schools and there is plenty of crisis at hand. The Pandemic is the monster opportunity but so is the climate crisis headed our way.
Elsie Ripley Clapp learned how to enter, enjoy and energize the very humane energy stream of people-powered problem-solving. Community schools walk right into the middle of the fray, facing it head-on because they are the practical embodiment of We The People.
Minneapolis schools have many problems. See this recent NYT article on efforts to desegregate one of the most segregated school districts in the country: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/us/minneapolis-school-integration.html
Charters are even more segregated than the public schools, intentionally so.
There are about 867,000 students enrolled in k-12 in Minnesota. Of those about 56,800, or 6.6% of students are enrolled in a charter school. Eliminating charter schools will do little or nothing to reduce segregation in k-12 education in Minnesota. The only way to reduce segregation in Minnesota k-12 education is to reduce it in traditional public schools.
School enrollment source: https://education.mn.gov/mdeprod/groups/educ/documents/basic/bwrl/mdg3/~edisp/mde087765.pdf
Eliminating charters won’t reduce segregation by much. Nonetheless, quite a few charters are purposely segregated for African Americans, Hispanics, whites (the German immersion charter), Hmong, and other groups. As a writer for. Loom erg News one wrote, visiting charters in Minneapolis feels like the Brown decision never happened.
As the first African American elected to the St Paul City COuncil (and later, appointed by a Democratic Governor, Mn Commission of Human Rights wrote in Mn’s larger daily newspaper,
“Some critics don’t seem to understand the huge difference between forcing people, because of their race, to attend a school, and giving new options to people, especially those from low-income families and families of color…..As a child growing up in southern Indiana, one of us knew far too well what segregated schools were. He was bused past three all-white schools in order to attend the one school designated for children of color…. more attention needs to be placed on education and less on spurious arguments about segregation.
https://www.startribune.com/in-praise-of-strong-charter-schools/260479981/
Thousands of BIPOC families in St Paul, Minnesota and millions around the country appreciate the opportunity to make some choices in public education – choices which until the district and charter options were created, were mostly reserved for those who could afford to live in mostly white, affluent suburbs or pay for private schools.
A demonstration of rationalizing the “benefits” of racial segregation. George Wallace would have applauded.
Unlike some who post here, Bill was forced to attend a school because of he was African American. Unlike some who post here Bill, didn’t sending his children to expensive private schools. His children, like ours, attended urban integrated public schools.
Here’s what Minnesota’s largest daily newspaper wrote about Bill:
https://www.startribune.com/st-paul-s-bill-wilson-civil-rights-activist-and-educator-dies-at-79/566585571/
St. Paul’s Bill Wilson, civil rights activist and educator, dies at 79
By Anthony Lonetree Star Tribune DECEMBER 31, 2019 — 6:01AM
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, left, said Bill Wilson, former council member and council president, spent his life in service to others and paved the way for his own public service.
As St. Paul’s first black City Council member, Bill Wilson lived and preached the message of racial equality, and for years he was a fixture at events commemorating the dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
He also kept an eye out for the kids, and so on a cold day in January 1992 outside the State Capitol, Wilson, then the council’s president, could not help but point to the young people gathered near the stage.
“What a beautiful, beautiful representation of the dream,” he told the crowd. “Let us make their paths a little clearer.”
Wilson, who went on to found Higher Ground Academy, an acclaimed K-12 charter school in St. Paul known for “beating the odds,” died Saturday after being hospitalized with a blood clot in his chest. He was 79.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, himself a trailblazer for capturing the office that eluded Wilson, cited his influence.
“Former City Council President Bill Wilson literally spent his entire life in service to others,” Carter said in a statement Sunday. “I’ve leaned on him for years as both a mentor and confidante, and his public service paved the way for me in more ways than one. He will be greatly missed.”
JOEL KOYAMA, STAR TRIBUNE
With his calm, deliberate manner, Wilson brought style and dignity to the office. His words, carefully chosen, could make a difference in contentious times such as 1990 when some balked at the timing of a gay-rights proposal. Wilson said “now” was the time to deal with human rights, activist Susan Kimberly recalled then.
Joe Nathan, a charter-school advocate and friend of Wilson’s for more than 30 years, said Monday: “Bill’s life was a demonstration of what one humble, positive, persistent person can do to make a huge difference in generations of people.”
A bust of Wilson just outside the council’s third-floor City Hall offices, in fact, reads “Govern With Humility.”
Wilson knew what it was like to struggle.
He grew up in the 1940s in a rural area beyond the blacktop and utility lines of Evansville, Ind. His father, John Wilson, worked in an Ohio River shipyard, and managed to save enough to buy a house and a car but was blinded by sparks from a welder’s torch. Unable to support them, John left his wife and three children so they could get public assistance.
Bill Wilson and his siblings lived periodically in foster homes and an orphanage before being reunited with their mother. He recalled later being forced to ride on buses for long distances to attend a segregated school.
It was while standing in a high school cafeteria lunch line that Wilson heard a radio report about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and was inspired to write a speech on segregation and injustice. It won a state oratorical contest.
He first came to St. Paul while working a summer job as a railroad porter, and then moved to the city in the early 1960s. Later, Wilson helped found the Inner City Youth League, and in 1980 he was elected to the City Council.
His wife, Willie Mae Wilson, held a high-profile position, too, serving 30 years as president of the storied St. Paul Urban League — known since 1923 as the place to be if you were black and needed training or leads to find work.
As a council member, Wilson fought prostitution and drug activity, and then for four years provided a steady hand as president. Twice he tried to make the jump to the mayor’s office, but he abandoned both bids and ultimately chose not to seek re-election in 1993.
Five years later, he started Higher Ground Academy. A high poverty school, it has been recognized repeatedly in recent years by the Star Tribune for beating the odds in state test scores. The school’s student population is nearly 100% black or African-American, which has put it on the radar of critics who accuse charter schools of fostering segregation.
Wilson, in a 2014 appearance before a state Senate committee, countered that it’s families who decide where the kids go, and charter schools must abide by their wishes. That is far different, he said, than being bused past three white schools like he’d been in Indiana.
This spring, Wilson suffered a stroke, Willie Mae Wilson said. But after stints in rehab, he was back on the job in September and still was there until winter break, working on a special project with the University of Minnesota.
“Bill was a workaholic,” Willie Mae said Monday. “He was planning to be back when school opened again.”
Anthony Lonetree has been covering St. Paul Public Schools and general K-12 issues for the Star Tribune since 2012-13. He began work in the paper’s St. Paul bureau in 1987 and was the City Hall reporter for five years before moving to various education, public safety and suburban beats.
Teachingeconomist,
Charters are supposed to have the freedom to show public schools how it is done. Why aren’t those charters being more integrated? It is obviously not because of union teachers or because of overpaid public school bureaucrats, so I guess we should assume those charters prefer to remain segregated and model how good segregation is to public schools?
The perfect market-based mechanism for segregated white-flight schools: German immersion. Wow.
A “pioneer” in the Community School Movement was 1929 Elsie Ripley Clapp when she took John Dewey’s thinking on democracy into The Ballard Memorial School in Jefferson County Kentucky. Not all that far from Mayfield, Kentucky where today the public high school is still standing after last night’s devastating series of tornadoes.
Mayfield High School has been turned into a shelter. People are taking refuge there. They are being fed, treated for injuries, fed nourishing, cafeteria meals. Clothing is provided, WiFi, relocation services, even transportation to another safe destination.
It does not take much to imagine this as an example of a community school IN ACTION. No one chose this weather catastrophe but it serves to remind us of what resources community schools can coordinate when administering to The Moment.
Elsie Clapp later ran a community school in FDR’s industrially ravaged Arthurdale, West Virginia. Starving families were literally selling body & soul just to stay alive when this Great Depression era school sprang up from a buckwheat farm and began demonstrating how public schools can enter a crisis and become the HUB and the ❤️ HEART of people-directed restoration and recovery.
Charter schools are in no position to do any of this work. It is not in their “DNA”. But it is the genetic makeup of community schools and there is plenty of crisis at hand. The Pandemic is the monster opportunity but so is the climate crisis headed our way.
Elsie Ripley Clapp learned how to enter, enjoy and energize the very humane energy stream of people-powered problem-solving. Community schools walk right into the middle of the fray, facing it head-on because they are the practical embodiment of We The People.
Brilliant stories Kathy. Thank you.
Charter schools are essentially a Wall St. product. Wall St. products are designed to produce profit above all else. They have no mandate to strengthen community ties or serve those in need.
I am not going to be surprised when the fascist, MAGA-Trumpist controlled GOP comes up with another conspiracy theory, loaded with deliberate lies designed to mislead the ignorant racists among us, propaganda campaign to demonize “full-service community schools” just like they did with CRT Critical Race Theory.
John McWhorter takes on CRT in his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
For example:
“Critical race theory tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses—and that if you are not Caucasian in America, then you are akin to the captive oarsman slave straining below decks in chains.
“Almost anyone can see what a reductive view this is of modern society, even without having read their Rousseau or Rawls. We must not be taken in by the fact that this is called ‘critical,’ that it’s about race, and that it’s titled a ‘theory.’ It is a fragile, performative ideology, one that goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s ‘story’ constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.” (p. 63)
High Priests of the “New Religion” are Ta-Nehisi Coates, as in his book, “Between the World and Me;” Robin DiAngelo, as in her book, White Fragility; and, of course, Ibram X. Kendi, as in his book, How to Be an Antiracist.
McWhorter also writes to mention Kendi’s new board book for children, Antiracist Baby. From the Amazon Sample of the book:
Antiracist Baby learns all the colors,
note because race is true.
If you claim to be color-blind,
you deny what’s right in front of you.
If this baptizing or christening of babies in the dogma of the “New Religion” doesn’t give one pause, it’s hard to imagine what will. Frankly, it makes me feel sick all over.
And then there were the CRM school kids in Birmingham, AL who knew everything, firsthand about Hierarchy, Plutocracy and Power Abuse/Torture. But they sang this in Lockup and they meant it and they lived it.
“Oh my sister was a soldier. She had her hands on the Freedom Plow. But one day she got old.She couldn’t fight anymore. She had to stand up and FIGHT anyhow.”
Watch us because we are just getting started, AGAIN. 😊
Glad to see more attention to the community schools approach of schools & community organizations sharing space.
This was promoted in the 1985 National Governors Association Report, “Time for Results” (for which I served as project coordinator). Majority of state governors were involved in meetings and helping write this report.
In 2001 and 2007, our organization published reports highlighting outstanding examples of district & charter public schools using the community schools approach. That includes, for example, the wonderful Julia Richman (disrict) complex of schools & organizations in NYC, several Boston (district) Pilot Schools, and the first chartered public schools.
Here’s a link to our 2007 report on the value of community schools http://centerforschoolchange.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/saneschools.pdf
And I certainly don’t need a study to be certain that a community school that dumps the students who aren’t doing well in community schools will have much better rates of success than community schools that do weed out the students who aren’t doing well in community schools.
In fact, I am quite certain that the more ruthlessly a community school weeds out the students who don’t do well in their community school, the more that community school — if it has no integrity and their leaders are self-serving and greedy dishonest folks — will brag that they have discovered some miracle and deserve to be highly rewarded for it.
Good thing that people running PUBLIC community schools aren’t incentivized to mislead the public the way people running charters are.
Joe Nathan, this is usually where you invoke the irrelevant fact that public school districts are upfront and honest about having selective magnet schools and make the wildly illogical leap to why that justifies the lies and dishonesty of charters making claims about “99% success with the same kids found in failing public schools” that are misleading and harmful to so many children
If you don’t understand the difference between honesty and integrity and self-serving lies and bragging, then I know my comments are wasted. I do understand that you represent the type of person who supports charters. I value honesty and I understand the difference between a selective magnet that acknowledges there are high percentages of students they refuse to teach, and a high performing charter that lies about the fact that there are high percentages of students they refuse to teach and instead convince the public that they perform miracles who can turn all the students in failing public schools into high performing scholars if only politicians would let them expand.
Do you understand the difference between them?
If the ed reform movement can’t be honest about the students and families they want and do not want to teach, they have no business running community schools. Having people with no integrity running a community school is problematic. Having people with no integrity who are incentivized to make their results look good knowing the ed reform movement will cover up and justify what they do to get those results is problematic.
Charter schools are not public schools any more than parasites are hosts.
I posted the article itself at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Why-Minnesota-Is-Joining-N-in-General_News-Education-Costs_Education-Funding_Education-Vouchers_Educational-Crisis-211211-784.html#comment799775
One of the important features of community schools is they don’t segregate based on the two genders, men and earthen vessels.
OMG you made me laugh, even though it’s more scary than funny.
Although there are more than 2 genders now!
Courtesy of the Guardian writer in a story about the danger of Christian nationalists.
Conservative Grayson Quay (Georgetown) is quoted in the article.
He opines a defense for Rep. Matthew Cawthorne and I conclude he is a Kyle Rittenhouse wannabe, based on an earlier article he wrote.
A couple of years ago, Quay wrote, “Why do so many woke activists on the cultural left know so little or nothing about religion?”
A person doesn’t need to know a lot to know that being an earthen vessel has its limitations.
Axios posted a map today, “Red States crack down on abortion pills.”
South Dakota’s ban is via the Governor’s executive order.
The only “rights” that Americans will have will be those conferred by the theocracy.
The article highlights the actual effect of school choice: it is on poor, urban students. MN’s overall stats reflect the nation’s—7% in charter schools—yet in St Paul, where 2/3 of students live in poverty, 1/3 of the city’s children attend charters or neighboring schdistrs, leaving the home schdistr looking to close 8 schools– with those who have opted out attending either a handful of exclusive [racially-segregated] charters, and the rest in minority-majority charters, some of which are riddled with corruption. Kudos to them for their new community schools ventures.
MN pioneered this mess, and maybe they will pioneer us out of it.
Not only will it help for schools to be community based. It will also help if there are stable communities. We now have a problem on a national level with American slash and burn approaches to urbanization. We think, “wow! Big urban midwest town is a hole, let’s move to LA. Then wow! LA is a hole, lets move to Houston. Now they are coming to Nashville at a rate of 100 a day.
We can no more have good community schools under these conditions than we can with the disruption of charter schools and their private brothers. Stable communities and community schools go together. Disruptive influences, whatever they may be, will destroy all aspects of community. This includes schools, civic organizations, religious organizations, and schools.