Thank you to the list members who answered questions about how
Minneapolis schools are funded and run. The district is run by the
superintendent of schools, who is hired by the 7 member elected School
Board. School districts in Minnesota are funded through a combination
of local, state and federal dollars. In Minneapolis, for example, for
the year ended June 30, 2000, 64.2% of our general fund came from state
aid, 29% came from local property taxes, and 5.9% came federal. This
has changed alot over the past five years; property taxes used to be a
larger part of our general fund revenue.
A number of people had questions about test scores in Minneapolis. I am
not going to say that Minneapolis test scores are ok, or that
standardized tests should be disregarded because they are just one
measure of student performance. I believe that standardized testing is
a valid method--albeit just one of several valid methods-- to assess
students. It is used in our society for college admissions as well as
job applications. It is imperative that our students have the requisite
educational background to be successful on these tests, as well as the
confidence to be comfortable with the test taking experience.
Minneapolis test scores have been steadily increasing since Carol
Johnson became superintendent 3 1/2 years ago. I believe the pace of
that continuous improvement needs to accelerate, particulary in math,
and particularly with our African American students who are 43% of our
school population. The superintendent has a number of new initiatives in
place to focus on that. Because of the stability and vision in
leadership that Carol Johnson provides to the Minneapolis district, I am
optimistic that we will see improvements with these intiatives.
And I, like many of you, don't want excuses for poor perfomance. So
bear with me while I try to explain why I believe that the state's list
of troubled schools is not informative or helpful either to the schools
or to the general public. When we do our testing in Minneapolis, we
disaggregate our scores in many different ways, and we can follow
students who have remained in our system for a number of years. The
children who have been with us in a stable school environment have shown
tremendous growth, both from small class size and improvements in our
curriculum. One of many examples I could cite is the growth in the test
scores at Lincoln Elementary on the Near North side. While Lincoln was
not one of the schools on the state list, it is a good example, and a
number of other schools, such as Bancroft, that were on the state list,
mirror the growth at Lincoln.
We have followed the Lincoln students who took the 3rd grade Minnesota
Comprehensive Assessment (MCA test) in 1998 and the 5th grade MCA test
in 2000, and they have made tremendous growth in reading over 2 years
(134 points of growth on the MCA scale). This type of growth is
something that our schools and our teachers deserve great credit for,
and yet, because of the way that the state reports the 3rd and 5th grade
scores, you in the public are unaware of that growth. Why? For three
reasons. One, because the state is not giving credit for outstanding
growth, but looking at the number of kids at a school who are in the
higher perforning ranges. And two, because the state test is testing a
different group of children every year, you get what's called a "cross
cohort" analysis, looking at how different children perform on this test
in different years. In other words, when they say that growth has not
occurred at these schools, "growth" is not used by following the same
students over a period of time. And third, many of the schools on the
state list have high percentages of non-English speaking students. The
scores of these students are not impressive in the early grades as they
struggle to learn English, but we do see growth over time as we follow
these students. (As an example, two schools on the list for their poor
3rd and 5th grade performance in reading were Bancroft's 5th grade, with
37% ELL students last year and Anderson Open's 3rd grade, with 36% ELL
students.)
All that being said, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done,
and no one underestimates that.
Catherine Shreves
Minneapolis School Board
13th Ward
