Andrew Lyman-Buttler

The Minneapolis school district, in the midst of perhaps the most disruptive event in public school history (COVID-19), has approved a plan that will compound the disruption in the name of furthering equity, with Arneson, Ali, Caprini, Ellison, Inz, and Pauly voting yes 6-3. Since bandying about the word "equity" is table stakes for any education debate (note the names of the largest pro- and anti-CDD groups), the CDD plan needs to be evaluated on its outcomes, not its stated intent (which probably isn't its real purpose anyway). Supporters of the plan have made statements along the lines of "our kids can't wait" or "doing nothing isn't an option", but having a sense of urgency is not a good thing when you're running full speed in the wrong direction. When the plan inevitably fails to fulfill its promises (as I believe all available evidence and historical memory strongly suggests it will), I predict the following:

1. Achievement gaps won't budge. CDD does nothing to address the in-school factors that could make a difference here; for example, there is no plan to replace the district's reading curriculum, which includes elements of the discredited whole-language approach, with a scientifically validated program. CDD does nothing to implement evidence-based strategies (like PBIS, for example) to improve school climate and reduce discipline problems that contribute to a disrupted learning environment. CDD does nothing to confront the abysmally low and ever-lowering expectations routinely set for students in our hardest-hit schools (for example, my neighborhood high school recently adopted a grade scale where a score as low as 25% is still considered passing). Obviously, low expectations are great for the graduation rate, and district administrators and school board directors love to pat themselves on the back when they increase. But the goal of a school system is not to crank out diplomas, it is to transmit knowledge. (To be clear, improving graduation rates is an important goal, but it must be accomplished by improving upon what students know and are able to do, not by manipulations like "credit recovery" schemes and moving goalposts.) CDD must be evaluated based on objective, externally validated measures like MCA and ACT scores, and sadly I believe these will stagnate or decline in the years to come.
2. By the time the data renders a verdict, the architects of this plan will have moved on to bigger and better things, with no way to hold them accountable. Ed Graff will go on to greener pastures in a larger district, as urban superintendents always do, and his school board allies will hold their seats as long as they want to because nobody can afford to challenge them for a full-time job that pays about $14k per year.
3. North Side and Northeast families will not enroll in neighborhood schools in greater numbers. In Northeast Minneapolis, where I live, about two-thirds of parents do not send their children to MPS schools. I throw up a little in my mouth every time I'm out for a walk and I see a yard sign advertising a Minneapolis household's allegiance to St. Anthony or to a private school. This is not the hallmark of a healthy, functioning public school system. Nevertheless, parents have real concerns about the safety and academic quality of area schools, concerns that the district leadership either elided or set up straw men for. For example, parents may worry that their children are subject to more bullying because of the district's increasingly laissez-faire approach to discipline. MPS puzzlingly reframed this as a concern with the safety of the walk zones around the schools. MPS thinks they can attract parents to a school by rebranding it as a "STEAM magnet", slapping a shiny new label on it without changing the underlying fundamentals. As long as MPS continues to deny or deflect the real issues, they aren't giving families a reason to come back.
4. CDD will precipitate a mass exodus of families from MPS. Many parents affirmatively choose to send their children to a district school; most parents don't make this choice for ideological reasons, although for a few it seems to be a strong motivating factor. We chose an MPS magnet school for a whole raft of reasons--diversity, school culture, K-8 structure, safety, academic quality, etc. Offerings like K-8 and Spanish immersion have been important tools for engaging the Somali and Latino communities. CDD drastically reconfigures magnet school structures and neighborhood school attendance boundaries such that nearly two-thirds of all MPS students will have to attend a new school when it takes effect. This means many families who previously chose MPS will be forced to begin the choice process anew. There are a lot of school options in and around Minneapolis. There is no reason to expect that all, or even most, families will opt for whatever "take-it-or-leave-it" default they are presented with under CDD. Charter schools must be practically salivating waiting for 2022.
5. Accelerated declining enrollment will cause a financial crisis unlike anything in recent memory. MPS is already in lousy financial shape, still stinging from recent mass layoffs (which preceded the end of my teaching career) and budget austerity measures. The loss of per-pupil revenue under the state funding formula will lead to accelerated school closures, increasingly intractable labor disputes, difficulty recruiting and retaining faculty and staff (especially non-licensed staff like special ed assistants and associate educators, who are often the first to be dismissed, and who are disproportionately comprised of the very underrepresented minorities MPS claims to be trying to recruit), shrinking extracurriculur programming, larger class sizes, etc., etc. This raises the very real specter of a fiscal death spiral, in which contracting opportunities spurs even more families to opt out of the district, until the only kids who remain are those without any options. This is not equity.
6. CDD will increase the breach of trust between MPS top administration and parents, teachers, and building administrators. This plan was concocted and passed by a small handful of ideologically-motivated Davis Center functionaries and well-organized externally-funded activists. Parents didn't ask for this. (The district didn't conduct any scientifically valid polls, but it appears that 85 to 95% of parents oppose the plan.) Many Latino families in particular are upset about the drastic reduction and realignment of dual language immersion programs, and now the school district has given them one more government agency they can't trust. Teachers didn't ask for this. Principals weren't even consulted. Parents were surveyed leading up to the plan, but their opinions were recast and misrepresented.
7. Teachers will be blamed. Actually, I'm surprised someone hasn't already tried to blame teachers for COVID-19.

I hope none of this comes to pass--nobody wants to see their own city fail--but sadly I think we have a lot of reasons to expect it.

Minneapolis Public Schools held their first public info session last night on Comprehensive District Design (CDD), which is being marketed as an ambitious school desegregation plan. The district claims that, by changing attendance zones, eliminating K-8 programming, and making a number of other fairly drastic changes, six "Racially Identifiable Schools" will no longer be categorized as such. There's a big problem with the plan, though: the CDD boundary changes will actually increase the number of MPS students who attend segregated schools. In fact, you can prove this relatively easily using MPS's own data.

To understand how this is possible, we need to pick apart the MPS administration's misleading claims about the impact of the proposed changes. The most disingenuous--but also the most flagrant--bit of misdirection is when MPS sets a goal based on number of school buildings instead of number of students. School buildings are just bricks and mortar. The MPS presentation doesn't show us how many kids are desegregated--only how many buildings.

The other big lie that the CDD case rests on is that the definition of a "Racially Identifiable School" (RIS) has any useful meaning in the real world. The definition comes from a state statute, and any school that overrepresents non-white students by 20 percentage points or more relative to the student population of the district as a whole. For example, if MPS students district-wide are 66% non-white, then a school that's 86% or more students of color is considered a RIS:

 

(click on images to expand; source for all slides is here)

At first glance, this distinction appears relatively unimportant; after all, the proposed change would drastically reduce the disproportional representation at most of these schools. But let's look a little closer at Anishinabe/Sullivan. These are currently two separate schools (Anishinabe Academy and Anne Sullivan School) that share a physical address in South Minneapolis. It's unclear from the report if they would merge under the plan or if they are just listed this way for reporting purposes; in any case, MPS appears to consider them a single school site here. The CDD model claims that the proposed Anishinabe/Sullivan (henceforth A/S) will have 84% students of color. This number is alarmingly close to the statutory 86% threshold, which raised my index of suspicion for numerical gamesmanship, data massaging, and manipulation.

It is intellectually dishonest for MPS to represent A/S  as anything other than a segregated school, for several reasons:

• The 86% threshhold is an arbitrary legal construct that has no particular significance for student experience, and the district has offered no evidence that an 84% or 85% segregated school can provide students with qualitatively better opportunities than one that overtops the magic 86% bar. In fact, the 66% population figure used to calculate the 66+20 threshold is already out of date. MDE reports that MPS currently has 64.6% students of color, which puts their categorization of A/S even more in doubt. This may sound like a quibble, but it matters a great deal when MPS is making incredibly consequential decisions based on arbitrary numbers with razor-thin margins.
• There is nothing special about the 86% threshhold except that the State of Minnesota arbitrarily decided on the 20% differential rule. Every state has its own rules for deciding which schools are racially isolated; some set a lower bar, some higher. The Urban Institute published a study proposing a quantitative theory of school segregation that takes into account multiple student and neighborhood characteristics:

I have not done the math on any MPS schools with this formula, but it's easy to imagine the results diverging from the statutory definition for schools that are close to the threshold. The point is that school segregation is a slippery thing to pin down, and it's hardly the only legally important concept where the most useful definition may be "I know it when I see it".

• Student mobility renders the 84% figure meaningless. Large numbers of students enter and leave schools every school year, with mobility rates strongly correlated to concentrated poverty. 5% annual turnover appears to be a relative floor, observed only in affluent districts with stable populations; typical urban schools see turnover ranging from 10% to 50% or more. This means the district's projection of 84% students of color attending A/S is a number written on the sand; in fact, enough students transition between schools midyear that it may have already been invalidated.
• The CDD model assumes all students who are rezoned will continue to attend their assigned school; in fact, we know that school attendance zone changes are typically followed by signficant changes in school enrollment patterns. This isn't a good thing, but it is a fact of life that the district fails to account for, and this further invalidates its assumptions about the racially identifiable status of A/S.

Despite MPS's application of an arbitrary statutory criterion that A/S just barely (and only maybe) meets, it remains a racially segregated school by any reasonable definition. It turns out this matters a great deal because this is the bit of mathematical deception that supports the rest of the case for CDD. MPS didn't include numbers of students in its presentation--only percentages--but these can be calculated using another slide buried near the bottom:

You can look up a school's current enrollment on the MDE website. (This is the source I used for all enrollment calculations going forward, mostly because the figures in the CDD presentation don't always agree with each other.) MPS says A/S is currently enrolled to 41% capacity, and MDE says they together have 842 students. This means it has capacity for 2053 students; if it's modeled to be 92% full, then 1046 more students will end up there. I used the same method to calculate projected enrollment changes at all of the racially identifiable schools, because what we should really care about is how many STUDENTS will be reassigned to attend segregated schools, and how many will be removed from them. I've attached my calculations to the end of this post so you can check my math. The general trend is that while some newly desegregated schools are being created, students are also being moved out of them and into existing segregated schools. At the same time, affluent, predominantly white Southwest Minneapolis schools generally become even whiter, and their enrollments increase, while enrollments at popular integrated schools around the city decrease--if they even stay open.

It's difficult or impossible to track individual children as the move into or out of schools under the CDD proposal, but what we can do is estimate the number of students who would no longer attend segregated schools, and the number that would be reassigned to attend segregated schools. Let's say we give the district full credit for integrating the schools (except A/S) that come off the "racially identifiable" list. Pillsbury, Sheridan, Folwell, Jefferson, and Anwatin end up with a total projected enrollment of 1900 using the methodology explained in the previous paragraph; however, this number comes with a loss of 547 students from those schools relative to their pre-integration enrollments. Meanwhile, schools that remain segregated (Bethune, Jenny Lind, Andersen, A/S, Bryn Mawr, Green, Lucy Laney, Hall, Nellie Stone Johnson, and Olson, nearly all on the North Side) increase their enrollments by 2274. At the same time, the new racially identifiable school created by the model (Whittier) has a projected enrollment of 747.

The bottom line: Schools that become desegregated under the CDD plan lose 574 students (resulting in a total projected enrollment of 1900), while schools that remain (or become) segregated would increase their student populations by 3021. (Presumably some of these students are the same individuals!) Even if you don't count the massive A/S increase, you have a relative toss-up of around 2000 students entering and leaving segregated schools. This means CDD is an unmitigated failure as a school integration plan even if you allow MPS their most optimistic assumptions (for example, that every reassigned student will actually attend their new school).

TL;DR:

MPS is playing a shell game with children by moving large numbers into a single segregated school that only just barely meets the strict legal definition of "non racially identifiable".

CDD creates a handful of meaningfully desegregated school buildings, but the moves large numbers of students out of them.

CDD increases the net number of MPS students attending segregated schools (or, in the best case scenario, doesn't change it).

CDD disrupts the lives of 63% of all MPS students without furthering any greater good.

There are lots of other reasons adopting CDD would be a bad idea.

I encourage you to contact the MPS School Board and let them know how CDD actually results in more students attending non-integrated schools. Other ways to get involved: join the Minneapolis Public School Families for Equity Facebook group, contact savek8mps@gmail.com to join the mailing list, and sign our petition (English, Somali, Spanish).

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Minneapolis Public Schools has recently announced its desire to drastically shake up where most students attend school and how they get there in a program they're calling Comprehensive District Design. (Full disclosure: I have a child in a district school, one that we selected in part because of its K-8 structure and diverse student body, and I used to be an MPS teacher. I agree with the goals of strengthening neighborhood schools and reducing inequity and school segregation. I'm coming out against CDD not because I think it will harm my child--not that anyone should EVER have to apologize for advocating for their child--but because I believe it's a bad move for MPS and is unlikely to further its stated goals.) District administration is billing this as an urgent equity issue; if you want to sell more food you label it "all-natural" or "gluten-friendly," and if you want an education reform measure to gain traction, you claim that it's all about equity, whether or not it really is. Lip service to equity is the coin of the realm in any education policy discussion.

The core feature of CDD (or, at least, the most disruptive one) is a boundary study that proposes relocating about 63% of the entire MPS student body, along with the elimination of all K-8 programming and a shuttering or realignment of most, if not all, magnet schools. The scale of this change alone should be enough to prompt skepticism--families build their lives around school routines, adjusting careers and living arrangements--but it turns out there are a number of other reasons to be suspicious of CDD:

• CDD is unlikely to reduce school segregation. MPS has yet another looming budget deficit of nearly $20 million. This has many causes--unfunded special education mandates, bad state laws requiring reimbursements to charter schools, and mismanagement by district administration--but declining enrollment due to steady exodus of families appears to be the biggest driver of year to year variation. In particular, students of color are leaving the district at an unprecedented high rate, a fact the district acknowledges in its CDD presentation. Buried deeper in the weeds is a back-of-the-envelope calculation estimating $5 million in transportation savings. Minneapolis is a profoundly residentially segregated city, so it's hard to see how cutting transportation and transitioning to strict neighborhood attendance zones makes sense as part of a plan to address this. In fact, this is exactly what MPS tries to argue in its presentation--a sprawling document that could double as a sequel to "How to Lie with Statistics". Let's unpack a few of their claims. I'll start with a particularly egregious case from slide #17:

Never mind that the slide title ("Lack of effectiveness of magnet schools") is attached to a chart that contains absolutely no data on any measure of school effectiveness! A more accurate chart subtitle would be "Nearly half of MPS magnet schools gained students of color from 2013 to 2017, while only one had a substantial loss." This leaves aside other, more fundamental questions, such as: What's going on in the magnets that is working (or not) to fight segregation? How many students are represented by these schools? Why are families choosing or leaving them? Are these percent changes being caused by students of color leaving, or by white students enrolling, or the inverse? Instead of using the data to address intereting questions, the chart and its misleading title are simply presented without comment as if the data speaks for itself. Here's another one:

"Zone 1" is North and Northeast Minneapolis, the region of the school district with the highest rate of students open-enrolling out of district or into charter schools--at least one-third (!) of all resident school-age children. (Full disclosure: it's also where I live and where my son attends school.) The most segregated schools on this list would barely shift in their demographic makeup. A few of them would, by virtue of very small changes, inch across an artificial statutory threshhold that would cause them to no longer be considered "racially identifiable" (although still obviously segregated by any realistic or reasonable standard when compared with the demographics of the city at large). Next, let's look at how this would affect the city's weathiest, whitest schools, those concentrated in the Southwest corner:

Armatage, Burroughs, Kenny, and Lake Harriet are the four elementary schools in the affluent Southwest; the rest of the South Side schools on this chart are located farther north and east, in more diverse tracts of the South Side. Guess what: the district's four whitest elementary schools get even whiter! (Or stays the same, in the case of Lake Harriet.) Why would the District put forth a design that actually worsens school segregation and then call it an equity plan?

• "Move fast and break things" may be great for a tech startup, but it's no way to run a school system. I emailed my school board representative, Jenny Arneson, to raise my concerns about CDD. In her reply, she said "doing nothing isn't an option", a refrain I've heard echoed by every proponent of CDD and every other school reform scheme ranging in scope from federal government to the janitor's closet. This, of course, presents a false dichotomy; all progress requires change, but not all change is progress.
  
  Another irksome bit of sophistry the district has engaged in is to stridently deny at every opportunity that CDD is a "plan" or a "proposal" in order to shut down criticism. (To wit, from the Arneson letter: "You may not realize there is not an actual proposal or recommendation.") You can practically hear the shouting from CDD proponents on the Facebook discussion threads. ("iT's NoT a PlAn!!!") The scheduled debut of the "actual proposal" is late January--leaving a scant two months for stakeholder input--which I'm given to understand is a feature, not a bug. It may be that the superintendent is trying to minimize public engagement and railroad through whatever design his team of bureaucrats wants, which would make sense given a meeting I attended with a principal who frankly described the superintendent's lack of interest in feedback from teachers and building administrators.
  
  We are not faced with a choice between "doing nothing" and upending everything, and CDD skeptics should not be cowed by insinuations that we are merely pro-status-quo. Here are some things we could consider, just off the top of my head, before throwing the baby out with the bathwater:

• Open a K-8 dual immersion magnet school on the North Side
• Reserve a certain number of seats in every school for students whose neighborhood school is segregated
• Cut Davis Center (central admin) funding and TOSA (non-instructional teacher) positions and redistribute the savings to the schools that need it most
• Implement an effective system to provide non-IEP interventions and reduce the inappropriate identification of disabilities (which happens a lot more than you would suppose)
• Reform the school choice process to make it more inclusive so that it better meets the needs of our most underserved communities

Anyone who says "doing nothing isn't an option" as a defense of a large, sweeping, disruptive change is being intellectually dishonest. A "sense of urgency" is no substitute for good judgment. The district has failed to make a compelling case for CDD, and trying to pigeonhole critics as do-nothings is a sign of a weak argument.

• There's nothing in CDD about improving schools. In a rare moment of candor, the district acknowledges on slide #84 that "in numerous district surveys, parents indicate that school culture and climate, safety, and academics are the lead drivers for choosing schools and/or leaving the district." Spoiler alert: parents from all backgrounds want safe schools with high expectations for learning and behavior! As a former teacher who left the profession mainly for this reason, I can attest that the district is actively making this worse. The year after I quit teaching, my former high school (a school with concentrated poverty) adopted a policy that students must earn credit for scores over 25%. That's not a typo: twenty-five percent is now a passing score. As if this weren't offensive enough, students who fail a course are shunted into "credit recovery" programs with shockingly low academic standards. The district, in step with schools around the country, has also goosed its graduation rate through various manipulations without effecting a corresponding increase in student academic achievement. It's hard to imagine how this serves the interests of students who graduate unprepared for post-secondary education with a now-worthless diploma. This should enrage anyone concerned about school equity. Similarly, standards for civility, respect, and student conduct have continued to deteriorate, and while this is hard to measure directly, you can see it in the high rate of familes open enrolling out of district and teachers switching to less challenging schools after accruing enough seniority. This piece from last year about Madison's schools paints a pretty good picture of what this can feel like from the inside. CDD acknowledges these issues, but describes them as problems in themselves rather than symptoms of larger problems. Working in (and, presumably for many families, being enrolled in) a school with perenially low expectations of its students is morally exhausting, and nothing about this dynamic will change until the underlying problems are addressed substantively. The only solutions on offer in CDD are a system called MTSS (which has been in place for years already without apparent effect) and the usual platitudes about restorative justice, a concept that should improve school climate but is more often honored in its breach. Without any real plan to improve behavior and academic achievement, CDD's reshuffling of students starts to look like a rearrangement of the proverbial deck chairs.

• Closing thriving, diverse magnet schools defies logic. Many of the parents opposing CDD come from Barton and Marcy, K-8 magnet schools that attract a diverse range of students from around the city, as well as Windom, a popular Spanish dual-immersion K-5 school. Eliminating these programs is very much on the table as part of CDD, which would create a great deal of educational harm without any commensurate benefit. Another MPS parent has done an incredibly thorough and compelling writeup of the successes of these schools, so I won't belabor the point here. The amenities offered by these schools--K-8 programming, culturally relevant language immersion, an intentional culture of peace, etc.--have convinced parents to choose MPS over non-district alternatives, which brings me to my next point:

• Declining enrollment is an existential threat to MPS. CDD is likely to make it worse. We've seen this movie before: in Saint Paul, which implemented a similar plan in the early 2010s that precipitated a mass exodus; in Austin, TX, where another parent I've discussed CDD with grew up. No grand plan can ignore the laws of supply and demand; we may wish we didn't live on a school landscape dominated by choice, but we can't wave a magic wand and make it disappear. (By the way, the business consultant who was the architect of the disastrous SPPS plan, one Dennis Cheesebrow, is also at the center of the MPS CDD initiative. Go figure!)

• Declining MPS enrollment is great for the charter sector. Sarah Lahm has covered this better than I can, so I'll just link her pieces. I am pretty uncomfortable with the fact that a lot of the social media dialog on CDD is being driven by a private foundation that has a history of supporting charter schools and corporate education reform organizations. Suffice to say there's a lot of unaccountable private money at work behind the scenes trying to manage the conversation here, and a lot of it connects back to shady anti-public-education Astroturf front groups with ironic names (in the sense of "People's Democratic Republic" Communist state names) like Educators for Excellence and Students for Education Reform, as well as Teach for America, a group that aims to increase the number of "thought leaders" (but not teachers) in the work force. I believe that expansion of the charter sector would ultimately lead to the death of the teaching profession in Minnesota; this is a big claim to be sure, one I plan to unpack in a future post at some magical indeterminate future date when I have more free time.

In summary, CDD promises massive disruption in the service of noble goals, but provides no plausible mechanism for furthering those goals, while at the same time posing real risks to the viability of the district itself. We are not Silicon Valley. The opposite of "move fast and break things" is "move deliberately and fix things". Let's start there.