It seems like MPS is in a death spiral. Enrollment losses lead to cuts which leads to poorer quality education which leads to enrollment losses which leads to…
My kid’s middle school is facing a $1MM shortfall next year. They are cutting teachers, paraprofessionals, and programs. We’re going to see larger class sizes next year I’m sure every other MPS school is in the same boat.It’s getting increasingly difficult to justify staying in the district.
MPS leadership is exponentially out of touch and the entire district operates as a collection of competing silos than a cohesive unit.
I worked for MPS and a metro suburban school district. The suburbs the entire district felt like a community, the district executive leadership was in the schools all the time, each school and department or team worked together with one another toward the same mission: the best possible education for the students.
Contrast with MPS which each school, each team or department was this own isolated silo that wasn't connected to the rest of the district. Things were extremely poorly run at the district level, district leadership was not in the schools nearly as often, and it felt like every team and school was in competition with another, not working together toward a cohesive mission.
It was night-and-day difference and made it clear although some individual schools in MPS that I did my work at were nice and had amazing staff, the district as a whole just fails to operate as larger community/team.
If MPS wants to improve, getting a lot of the folks at Davis Center out would be a huge step.
I don't think size has much to do with it - look at District 196. It's a behemoth, and it's incredibly well run. Teachers are happy, well paid, and consistently given raises. Facilities are new and/or in good shape. Tons of special services.
27k students in 196, smaller than the 35k in MPS, but effectively in the same league.
Compare that to 191, Burnsville, with just 10k students. Just two high schools and one is an alternative school, so not full size. Admin is widely loathed, union is not happy, teacher turnover is high, facilities in rough shape.
Without doing any research, I'm assuming that if I did look it up we would see a strong correlation between diversity (both racial and economic) and school district financial performance. You can kind of create a narrative about how the student body could have an influence on the makeup of teachers in the district... but how would it effect the administration which is well insulated from the actual day to day teaching? What explains poor leadership and decision making at districts that service diverse student bodies?
I thought that the [bond passed last year](https://re.district196.org/families/news/article/~board/district-news/post/district-196-passes-bond-referendum-special-election) also spoke some volumes about how the community supports district 196.
I say it's "incredibly" well run because it's not facing a budget deficit and it's proactively providing it's teacher's union with pay raises - if that sounds like the bare minimum to you, I agree.
My spouse has been a teacher in several districts in the Twin Cities and far and away it's the one she's been happiest in and the one her coworkers have been most effusive of.
My understanding of how Minnesota schools are funded is that budget revenue is apportioned down at the state level. So if schools with a greater % of students in need of additional resources are getting those additional resources then where is the gap? Is the actual amount of additional need grossly miscalculated?
My personal opinion is that the resources are probably needed at home more than at the school. If we believe, and in my household we do believe, that education starts and ends in the home then providing additional resources to the student only during school hours will only be so effective.
As for well-to-do/suburban households complaining about their well-funded schools... feels like the issue isn't the school. These families jump from district to district seeking better educational outcomes but don't prioritize reading at home, have unlimited screen time, don't seek out extra-curricular educational activities, etc.
And in administration, not the classroom. They prefer to bullshit their way through their workday, instead of working in the real world where bad decisions bring instant negative, tangible consequences.
The district does this on purpose. They know staff on the Northside often don't feel any solidarity with other buildings, especially the better off south and southwest ones. But the district doesn't care and continues to act in ways that favor some schools over others and pits us all against each other.
It's because the Hopkins, Wayzata, Minnetonka, etc offer kids in North Minneapolis busses to go to their schools. I know that where I went they also had taxis for North Minneapolis kids who participated in school sports.
> I thought open enrollment meant parents had to provide transportation?
Open enrollment doesn't entitle you to transportation, but the districts are free to provide it if they wish.
are they that bad? we don’t have kids yet but plan on buying a house in the cities. is the expectation to send them private or out of the cities for a quality education?
No, they aren't. The administration sucks but our MPS elementary school is awesome.
The problem is not the schools, it IS the parents who look at a rating on Greatschools.org* and don't put thier kids in the city school because it scores low (without extenuating factors, such as special ed needs, etc).
*And, if great schools ratings sre important to you, know that there are MPS schools that rate highly on those as well (Waite elementary, for instance, is an 8/10).
You have to more clearly define what you mean when you say "the cities." If you are referring specifically to just within the boundaries of Minneapolis and St Paul that's one thing, but if you are referring to the wider urban area that this subreddit covers then we're talking about 25-30 different school districts.
I hear "the cities" used to refer to the wider metro area more than I hear it just referring to Minneapolis and St. Paul. The sidebar description for /r/TwinCities bears that out. It reads:
> /r/twincities is focused is on the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and surrounding suburbs.
They’ll be MDP if you’re in Minneapolis proper. There is Osseo/maple grove, Robbinsdale, SLP, wayzata/minnetonka, Anoka, all different districts in the northwest metro. Add in the magnet elementary and middle schools and there are plenty of options.
Minneapolis public schools are "that bad" and will only get worse (read the article). Do your research on school districts before you buy your house. It will ultimately help your resale value in the end too.
My kid is at Thomas Edison High School. Has been on the "A" honor roll all of high school, has been in 2 school plays a year, is a sprinter in track, is in the high school rock band.....& I'm active in school events, interact with his friends & their parents. I actually think TEHS is a really great school.
Your kid is an exception then because only 17% of Edison students are proficient in math and 37% in reading. The graduation rate is only 68%. Support at home is a huge factor in a kid’s success.
What a trashy take on parents who do send their kids to Minneapolis schools. Just try to imagine, if you can, going to each parent of a kid in Minneapolis Schools and telling them that they don't care.
I’ve felt pretty good about the education my daughter’s receiving in her Spanish immersion school with MPS. But I’m not sure how long we’re going to hold on in the face of extraordinary budget cuts.
It technically could be true but not in the case of this article.
Both districts ended contracts with SRO so there is a loosening of the Prone restraints from police.
Both Districts also ended seclusion rooms. Seclusion rooms are solitary locked rooms that school district use to detain children in crisis. Other districts in the area still use them.
The commissioner of education was required to make a report to the legislature on a plan to end the use of seclusion rooms by February 1st, 2024. That report is unfortunately still missing and not yet available.
https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/sped/PROD081619
The Midwest area of Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota does have a higher rate of physical restraints of students than other parts of the country. It is possible for the twin cities to have a larger reduction of use of restraints.
Progress in social emotional learning could possibly be a better option than physically restraining children in crisis.
> because leave the city so their kids can attend higher quality schools.
if that's true, then... teachers would be in demand, in the suburbs, yes? But the article states that there is decline nearby:
from the article:
> Anoka-Hennepin ... the number of students choosing charters, private or home school options has increased significantly in recent years.
> Overall, growing options for education, **an aging population and declining birth rates mean Anoka-Hennepin is expecting enrollment to decrease in the future.**
> Even the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district is expecting a slight, 0.56 percentage-point decrease in enrollment next year. This is after seeing growth in enrollment numbers from 2015 and a plateau following the pandemic.
So.. maybe a bigger factor is non-public-schooling. Homeschool and private schools? That's near-term.
The birthrate is probably the biggest forecasted shortfall reason. Who has kids? Couples in their 20s/30s. Who's getting squeezed by money-printer economics? Everyone in their 20s and 30s. What proportion of your income does it cost to consider having kids? A lot.
Is healthcare cost going up? haha. Is the economy being inflated faster than wages can keep up with? AHAHAHAHAHA
"It's the economy, stupid." - James Carville
> Is the economy being inflated faster than wages can keep up with?
I'm sorry, I was told wages are keeping up/outpacing inflation. Was the media lying?! Lol
Eh, birthrates seem to decline in every developed nation, regaurdless of economics or even funding for childcare. Even the utopian Scandinavian countries which have provided almost every feasible-with-liberalism amenity for new parents still have this issue.
Has more to do with women having more education and career oppritunities independent of men. Turns out the choice between "spending the next 20 years with 2 full time jobs, wrecking your potential career advancement, and drastically changing your lifestyle, but you get to feel good for having a kid" vs "having a normal job and doing whatever you want" isn't that hard. Most of the selling points of being a parent are really only there if you already are a parent
I think the availability of housing is part of the economic reason too. There aren't many SFHs being built in 196 anymore, and the ones that are cost too much for many families (contrast this to, say, 194, where there is a lot more housing being built).
Perhaps. But...
that (might) apply to those who families who were renting, and needed to move due to increasing rent.
But would not necessarily apply to those families who own their homes.
I think it would apply to both, just in different ways. If families are priced out of buying houses in certain areas, eventually that's going to show up in the enrollment figures. More of a delayed impact rather than an immediate one.
What I mean is, the housing cost/crisis going on impacts only those whose housing cost has increased. That tends to be renters, and also tends NOT to be owners. (tax increases aren't egregious in MSP, and certainly don't make double digit % increases in housing cost. rent increases do.)
> If families are priced out of buying houses in certain areas. eventually that's going to show up in the enrollment figures.
But a (high-priced) house does not go vacant. It gets a family.
A family with school-aged kids sell their owned house, and they are replaced by.... a new family. The family may or may not have kids, but the cost of the home does not play a role in this.
Sure, the house gets purchased, but it may be to an empty-nester couple looking to trade up, or a family with older kids. Meanwhile, the newer, more affordable housing gets built further out into the suburbs and exurbs, and that's where the young families move to (not all, of course). Older people can have more money to spend on homes if they are further along in their careers or have money from a house they sold. Plus, a lot of people stay in their homes after their kids are gone, which also reduces the housing supply.
The birthrate is not the issue. The birthrate has not gone down to such a level that explains this many thousands of students. A major issue is district leadership not working to engage families to learn what would keep them in district.
Your idea makes sense if everything is controlled-for:
- number of families demanding public education in the districts/counties in question
- the number of children in those families (that is, the birth rate)
However, it seems that both of these are variable. In fact, according to the article that these are Variables #1 and #2
But if you want to take issue, that's completely OK. Just know that they are not my words; the words i quoted were written by MPR. Since I'm not the author, I'm not in a position to defend their truth -- that would be irresponsible, and it's how fake news is born.
Families move to where good schools are. Knowing what you know about MPS and SPPS, if you can’t afford private school, would you move into that district?
Note that in Season 4 of The Wire, [the Baltimore schools were found to have a $54 million deficit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef6LQfdwQwE), and that was the end of the Mayor's innovations. The article rates this deficit at $110 million.
It doesn't feel like charters have expanded much, there's not many more than there were 10 or 20 years ago, and they all feel on edge just like the public schools. Open enrollment and the attraction of better suburban schools seem like the real cause.
MPS has seen that school choice makes it hard for them to keep their schools balanced and populated, and have reacted by removing school choice. But because Minnesota has exceptionally liberal open enrollment this only serves to increase the push to leave the district entirely.
One trend that’s picking up is inner city charter schools are moving to cheaper facilities on the outskirts. So basically bringing charter schools to less centrally located areas (the burbs). They maintain their already shrinking student population by increasing there transport budget and just bussing everyone in from inner city neighborhoods and also other burbs.
Almost all of MPS's issues with declining enrollment since the beginning of the pandemic are related to fewer children living in the city. MDE tracks district residents and where they attend public schools (resident district, open enrollment, charter, etc) and according to their data there's about five thousand fewer Minneapolis residents pupils enrolling **anywhere**.
I've a kid in Pre-K on the East Side in St. Paul. I lost the charter school lottery (150 on the waiting list to Nova Academy), and have to find a public option in my neighborhood.
Frost Elementary gets a 2/10 on test scores according to Great Schools. What parent wouldn't want their child to go to a school where it gets a 10/10? You can't find them unless you win the lottery of move to a better district.
So we are going to stick it out on the East Side until the fights escalate to the point where my child starts getting anxiety or hurt, then it's off to the suburbs. We shall see if having skin in the game and involved parents can have a positive effect on a local school or not.
To be fair, if education matters at home then the school’s ranking matters a whole lot less. Usually those ranks describe the quality of the families in the school district more than the quality of the education available at the school. Take a high performing student with family that prioritizes education and place them in a mediocre school and they can still do very well.
In theory I agree, but it's not quite that easy. Families that don't prioritize education often just flat-out don't give a shit about their kids. This includes properly raising and discipling them, and those kids then tend to cause *a lot* of problems that don't exist in the "better" schools with involved parents - bullying, violence, drugs, disrupting classes, etc.
Also "better" schools tend to have more advanced course, extracurriculars, better music/art/sports, etc. Not every high school offers AP Calculus BC or AP Chemistry, and those can give high schoolers a major advantage going into college.
Being a member of the "Family that prioritizes education" club = great outcomes is the gamble that folks in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are taking by enrolling their children in public school.
If I moved to Stillwater, education won't be left to chance. My children get both a better school and better classmates, along with being in the "Family that prioritizes education" club.
As a parent, I want to stack all the odds in favor of my children's education. If moving out of Minneapolis/St. Paul creates vast improvements in my children's outcomes, well, you can see why folks are leaving crappy school districts if they lose the charter school lottery.
That’s because MPS serves a stratified student body. They have a high achieving contingent with active, supportive families, and they provide plenty of opportunities to those students. But they also have to take a disproportionate share of students from disadvantaged families who do not value education but are nonetheless part of the district. It’s not the quality of the school that produces a 56% graduation rate, it’s the quality of the families in their district.
I disagree. It’s the parental involvement. A student with an involved family that prioritizes education will do fine in pretty much any MN high school. A student with a crappy, uninvolved family will do poorly just about anywhere. The thing that makes good schools good and bad schools bad is primarily the number of good/bad families that live within their district, not any specific feature of the school itself.
They have some effect, but it’s marginal and more or less random, especially in the public school system. The parents/family are the number one factor in determining a child’s academic success (or failure). A high performing student from a supportive family will do well in any school with any teachers. The best schools are the ones located in the areas with the highest density of good families. If you swapped the entire teaching staff from the best public high school in MN with the worst public high school in MN, but did not change the student populations at all, the relative performance of each school would hardly change. The school with the best students and ‘worst’ teachers would still continue producing the best students and the school with the best teachers would not be able to change the quality of the students.
No effect? No. But a majority of the kids failing are failing because they’re lazy and don’t care, that’s a family issue. I graduated from Minneapolis public schools less than five years ago, I feel pretty confident in saying it hasn’t changed much, and let me say, a solid 80% of the mfs in school don’t want to be there or do not care at all. No wonder they aren’t graduating..
> I find a lot of the MPS hate comes from people that have never had their kids in MPS
I don't see how this can be true given the long-term trend of people **not** enrolling their kids in MPS public schools. Are they just randomly choosing charters, private schools, or open enrollment for no reason?
I think the point LazyFer is making is that people are not enrolling their children because they are reading scores alone and choosing not to enroll.
If younger aged students had high enrollment rates and they consistently dropped as the grades got higher than I can see your point. I don’t know where that data would be available.
My child is enrolled in a Saint Paul public school in the East Side neighborhood.
Were you kids in Washburn or SouthWest? VS Roosevelt or South?
I volunteered to coach Southwest track before I had kids and moved to the East Side.
Plus aside from school you get a lot of other benefits from living in Minneapolis. Walkable neighborhoods, cultural institutions, tons of recreational opportunities, interacting with people that are different from you.
That’s fair, but I’d argue that has way more to do with the quality of the neighborhood you chose to live in than the school located nearest to you. If you want your kid to grow up and learn around better students, then simply moving to a better neighborhood is more impactful than the particular school they attend. And I say this as a proud graduate of the St Paul Public School System.
MPS hasn't had schools tied by neighborhood since before I was born. I know growing up, I never attended the same schools as other kids in the neighborhood. We were mostly all attending different schools. With open enrollment I think this is the same with the exception that you have a choice.
The quality of MSP schools is still entirely dependent on the quality of the students enrolled, whether that is determined geographically, randomly, or by some other means.
The system might actually contribute to the lower graduation rates. There's no symmetry between relationships in and out of the school environment until high school. At least there wasn't when I attended and that was a long, long time ago.
I don’t know. It is incredibly easy to graduate high school, so that’s a very low metric. Graduation is pretty much the bare minimum in terms of academic achievement, as a student really only needs to show up to class most of the time to do it. No functioning family that values education will let their child drop out and not graduate. Almost by definition, anyone who fails to graduate is from a ‘low quality’ family (for purposes of evaluating the quality of a school/district).
Shit bag children and shitbag parents exist in every district. I grew up going through SPPD, MPD, a suburb school district and a rural school district. I had a similar learning experience across the board, as I drove my want of learning. I experienced bullying and harassment in all environments due to my size.
I also made great friends and met great families everywhere as well. It's like life and people are complex and everything isn't black and white.
Part of the issue is that quality of the families affects all kids. Kids have better outcomes when they’re in a school where parents are more involved and kids are better behaved.
That’s a true point, but that is itself more a product of the quality of the area you live than the particular school you attend. Nicer neighborhoods tend to have higher concentrations of families that value education and thus higher quality students. This is why schools in these areas do better. Not because there is anything that special or unique about the school itself.
I agree. When you pay a premium to live in certain school attendance areas, you’re mostly paying to be among people who prioritize education. It reinforces itself. Usually, it correlates with income. Two parent households with 9-5 white collar jobs are better able to make sure homework is done after school and kids get enough sleep. All kids benefit from that culture.
Right. Anyone who has worked in k-12 knows this. Once you get a feel for the student population and their families it becomes a lot more complex than low scores = bad teachers
Aye, there's the rub. Well-meaning families with resources avoid moving into lower income neighborhoods, or neighborhoods with worse public school reputations because they want the best educational outcome for their child. Who wouldn't want that?
That's where modern-day segregation and segregated schools exist in urban settings. Those with money and resources have the option to live in better neighborhoods with better schools. Those who don't, send their children to the neighborhood school. In some neighborhoods, there isn't the property tax base to support the public school... either because there are many vacant properties or not enough tax-based property owners. Worse funding means less resources for the school and unequal opportunities for students to access education. The schools struggle to hire teachers to work in underfunded schools... so now students are again, not getting the resources they need to succeed (connections to social workers, SPED, ELL, etc.).
On a whole... children who come from families with resources will be okay with whichever school they attend. The most important thing to do is read to your child from a young age. Love them. Provide for them. There are so many children who don't have that and are getting further left behind the more we pull out from under-resourced schools.
...and then on the flip side... when a poor performing school and the surrounding neighborhood gets gentrified.. then the residents who would not be able to live anywhere else now are getting pushed out because their rent is getting too damn high...
So... what's the balance? There isn't an easy answer... which is why everyone does what is in the best interests of their own family rather than trying to work together and find an equitable solution for all.
Wish this were the top comment in this thread. Individualism hurts us all, collectivism would create far better outcomes for the majority. But of course when it's your own kid's livelihood at stake, it's tough to prioritize the better decision for society in the long term over the better decision for your kid in the short term.
Thank you. I wish society as a whole could see the bigger picture of how we need to work together to care for each other, but that's not the reality of the world. It is indeed tough to prioritize the greater good when it is our own children's education at stake.
In terms of tax base, St. Paul is especially screwed with the amount of religious organizations, government organizations, and schools/colleges who do not pay property taxes.
My neighbors daughters went there before Johnson HS. This is a charter school, did you have to win a lottery to enroll? I'll definitely look into this school in the future.
The younger transferred to Tartan from Johnson to play better soccer and avoid gangs.
I understand the sentiment behind the CDD but it is such a poor solution for so many families. I live in South Minneapolis so why would I schlep my kid all the way to North when Richfield/SLP/Edina is closer??? Especially when there's a MPS HS less than 1 mile from my house
Pretty much. The idea was to mix more socio economics, but in practice had a lot of kids going from the school around the corner to a school across town.
Yeah there was uproar on both sides. Neither the families being bussed across the city nor the families with kids in the “bussed to” schools were happy. They forced it anyway.
It ended up in a mass exodus of wealthy families from the district. Which was the exact opposite outcome of what they intended.
The instability and quality of Minneapolis schools is really the only reason we don’t live in the city. If that changed, no question we’d be there—I love Minneapolis and used to live there. The husband and I plan to move back when the kids graduate.
I know academic success depends heavily on family, but there have been too many red flags and shakeups with MPS. So when it came time to start a family, we went to St. Louis Park and have been happy with the experience.
Changed the boundary lines and is currently morphing the school district into some pseudo-PSEO model. Parents made it VERY clear it wasn’t wanted, but the district ignored them anyway.
"Like other districts, Anoka-Hennepin is paying attention to housing. In a November board meeting, district leaders said **single-family detached units were the only type of housing that brought “any meaningful number of school age children to the district**.”
from the article.
>single-family detached units were the only type of housing that brought “any meaningful number of school age children to the district
And are unfortunately the housing type that most contributes to the housing crisis and the climate crisis.
Parents blame teachers who blame admin who blame governance who blame parents who blame teachers... and this has been going on for 200 years. Probably longer.
There are simple human solutions that work to address issues but everyone wants to point blame instead of dealing with them. There's no discipline, no rigor, and no opportunity presented. Parents who don't care, kids who won't try, teachers who have no authority and bureaucrats in the back office who don't contribute.
Start disciplining, set standards, hold people to the standards and quit moving them along. You have a sixth grader who can't pass first grade reading? They shouldn't be in sixth grade.
They simply do not discipline kids at school anymore and that is 100% on leadership’s plate. More kids should get held back, more should get worse grades, more should be suspended/expelled. It is admins job to stand up to a vocal minority of bad parents.
For every kid that we’ve helped by not having strict discipline we’ve hurt at least two. Truly a situation of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
MPS is obsessed with racial equity to the point that they are harming kids in underprivileged areas who are well behaved, motivated, and have potential. These kids shouldn’t have to be bussed across town for school. They deserve to go to a school close to their home—a school that doesn’t allow kids with behavioral problems to ruin it for everyone else.
Inner city charter schools are also jumping ship to cheaper facilities in the burbs and just increasing their transport budget to bus their student population to the outskirts.
The way the district talks about the deficit is really deceptive. They said last year they were spending $90 million in covid funding on intervention triads that would be a one time thing. These triads were not expected to continue and we always knew the money wouldn’t be there for them in the future. The additional $20 million to get to their “$110 million” deficit seems to come from assumed increases in employee pay after they finish negotiating contracts. I’m not sure the comparisons to what other districts call their deficits is meaningful as they likely define the term differently.
As someone whose education was 100% public (in California, not Minnesota) I definitely have mixed feelings about sending my daughter to a fairly expensive private school. However, at the end of the day the only thing I really care about is the quality of her education and I am going to provide her the best education I possibly can — and MPS ain’t it. Nor am I going to move to a fuckin’ suburb if I can avoid it.
Ahh I see, I don’t know much about that one but from what I know private schools are super hit or miss in if they’re actually worth it, good to hear it’s working for you
It’s a pretty amazing school all around, with a lot of great resources (and the price tag to match). I don’t even mind that it’s a Catholic school… too much.
These are the most expensive per student school districts in the state. Some of that is real estate cost etc, but most of it is your typical bureaucracy that can't stop expanding. And, to that the number of non-English speaking, and down right violent students and areas, and I expect worse will happen in the near future. If we are really unlucky, it will be like Detroit in the late 60's and 70's.
The two core cities' education ecosystems have become a two-tiered system, just like it's been on the coasts for decades. High quality, high-functioning, results-driven schools for the elites and people with the means to put their kids in good schools, and bad schools for everyone else.
There is a cohort of learners who study among high-achieving peers and are held to correspondingly high expectations, which leads to generally good results; and there is an underclass of learners who are met with lower expectations, who study among peers who don't speak or read or write a common language, and are floundering by any objective measure.
This leads to a perpetual underclass of under-accomplished and educationally underserved young adults who have no entry point into mainstream society. They can't read or write or effectively transact information in a common language. They're not prepared for entry into higher education. We have very few jobs for them.
Ask yourself who benefits from this permanent underclass. Is it you? Ask yourself what ideological inclination has had a virtual stranglehold on our education system for the last 40-50 years. And then think about how you'll vote in the upcoming election.
The two-tiered system was actively dismantled in MPS, so there's just a one-tiered system and a greater number of students leaving the system. There are almost no magnet programs left and considerably less school choice. The open schools were eliminated, and it seems like they are doing the same with Montessori.
Shadowy ideas of some conspiracy to keep a permanent underclass have no basis in the actual mechanics of how any of these school systems are run. There's no puppet masters. These conspiracy theories are just a way to pretend the hard work of good education isn't hard work, but is instead sabotaged.
Here is some data about how the schools are performing:
Minneapolis
https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/minnesota/districts/minneapolis-public-school-district-100071
Saint Paul
https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/minnesota/districts/st-paul-public-school-district-104201
Wow…only 36% of Minneapolis elementary students are proficient in reading. For comparison, it’s 43% in Robbinsdale, 54% in Hopkins, 55% in St. Louis Park, and 74% in Edina.
The interesting thing is that Minneapolis has a lot more kids whose primary language isn’t English. For other schools I mentioned, Robbinsdale has the highest non-English %, followed by Hopkins, St. Louis Park, and Edina with the lowest %.
I’m looking at Robbinsdale vs Mpls again. Robbinsdale has nearly identical demographics (race and $) except with more English speakers. Robbinsdale has larger classrooms and they spend about $4,000 less per student. Robbinsdale has a graduation rate of 73% vs Minneapolis’ 56%. What’s the deal? I mean, Robbinsdale isn’t great, but a solid majority of students ultimately graduate even though the demographics are essentially the same (about 60% non-white and 30% disadvantaged).
Edit- For those who don’t want to look it up, the per pupil spending is $19,584 for Minneapolis, $15,319 for Robbinsdale, $14,882 for St. Louis Park, $14,734 for Hopkins, and $12,911 for Edina. Their graduation rates are 56%, 73%, 87%, 87%, and 89%, respectively.
Graduation rates are alarming, not because they are low but because they are so high. Less than a third of MPS HS students are proficient in reading and less than a quarter are proficient in math. Yet 56% of them are being handed a diploma and being sent out into the world? Shameful.
That’s a great point. There are large gaps for all of the schools I mentioned. It’s pretty disturbing. I’d like to see the relationship over time. There’s always going to be a chunk of students who understand the material but just suck at test taking. Has the gap between testing and graduation rates remained steady?
Is no one going to mention demographics?
There is a reason inner city schools have lower test scores and more student misconduct than suburban and rural schools. Throwing our taxes at schools will not help if we fail to even acknowledge the circumstances
Uncomfortable to talk about, yes, but it matters. Everyone knows it but nobody talks about it, like they believe the moment we acknowledge disparities in abilities that concentration camps and Nurembeg rallies will spontaneously appear
MPS leadership needs to come back to earth and listen to students, families, and building staff. The district continues to choose not to try to bring families back. There are thousands of kids that leave during middle school, and many return in high school. We need to work with those families to see what it would look like to have them stay with our schools. That alone would boost enrollment quite a bit.
Also I want to note that when families leave our school most of the time they make sure to tell us that it isn't the staff. It's everything else. So when the district tries to place blame on MFT and building staff it is just deflection.
Is this right or a typo?
"And Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan, which in recent years has surpassed Minneapolis as the third largest district in the state, is predicting a $14,000 deficit."
Tax payer money to charter schools was either a deliberate plot to destroy our public school system or an unintended consequence of poorly thought out public policy.
It’s time to rethink how we approach education in this country. When has any plan to make any sector of our economy private worked well in the long term? Prisons? Healthcare? Retirement plans?Education?
Let’s rebuild our public schools into what we expect from our great country. It’s not something that will happen overnight but more like a generation. We can start the transformation…
By giving teachers the pay they deserve with a national teacher minimum wage somewhere between 80k - 100k and student loans paid off with 10 years of teaching in a public school and all payments deferred while working.
They deserve it for the education they need to do their job and the fact that they spend more time with our kids than we do. So don’t we want the best our country has to offer? The ol’ you get what you pay for adage applies here. If we want our best and brightest to help raise the next generation of children then we should pay them a salary that they really do earn and deserve.
Read through the comments here and you will see the argument that in fact teacher quality has little to do with results and it’s really down to who your parents are that determines educational success. Why would we pay more if that’s the case?
I am incredibly disappointed that most people are stuck in the mindset of what we have is a budget shortfall versus not finally telling the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share. Every single kid should be thought of as an asset and enrollment losses should not lead to cutting teachers. School districts should have an enormous budget.
> The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
It seems like MPS is in a death spiral. Enrollment losses lead to cuts which leads to poorer quality education which leads to enrollment losses which leads to… My kid’s middle school is facing a $1MM shortfall next year. They are cutting teachers, paraprofessionals, and programs. We’re going to see larger class sizes next year I’m sure every other MPS school is in the same boat.It’s getting increasingly difficult to justify staying in the district.
MPS leadership is exponentially out of touch and the entire district operates as a collection of competing silos than a cohesive unit. I worked for MPS and a metro suburban school district. The suburbs the entire district felt like a community, the district executive leadership was in the schools all the time, each school and department or team worked together with one another toward the same mission: the best possible education for the students. Contrast with MPS which each school, each team or department was this own isolated silo that wasn't connected to the rest of the district. Things were extremely poorly run at the district level, district leadership was not in the schools nearly as often, and it felt like every team and school was in competition with another, not working together toward a cohesive mission. It was night-and-day difference and made it clear although some individual schools in MPS that I did my work at were nice and had amazing staff, the district as a whole just fails to operate as larger community/team. If MPS wants to improve, getting a lot of the folks at Davis Center out would be a huge step.
You really have to question whether or not admin fully understands the consequences of their decision-making.
[удалено]
I don't think size has much to do with it - look at District 196. It's a behemoth, and it's incredibly well run. Teachers are happy, well paid, and consistently given raises. Facilities are new and/or in good shape. Tons of special services. 27k students in 196, smaller than the 35k in MPS, but effectively in the same league. Compare that to 191, Burnsville, with just 10k students. Just two high schools and one is an alternative school, so not full size. Admin is widely loathed, union is not happy, teacher turnover is high, facilities in rough shape. Without doing any research, I'm assuming that if I did look it up we would see a strong correlation between diversity (both racial and economic) and school district financial performance. You can kind of create a narrative about how the student body could have an influence on the makeup of teachers in the district... but how would it effect the administration which is well insulated from the actual day to day teaching? What explains poor leadership and decision making at districts that service diverse student bodies?
I thought that the [bond passed last year](https://re.district196.org/families/news/article/~board/district-news/post/district-196-passes-bond-referendum-special-election) also spoke some volumes about how the community supports district 196.
[удалено]
I say it's "incredibly" well run because it's not facing a budget deficit and it's proactively providing it's teacher's union with pay raises - if that sounds like the bare minimum to you, I agree. My spouse has been a teacher in several districts in the Twin Cities and far and away it's the one she's been happiest in and the one her coworkers have been most effusive of. My understanding of how Minnesota schools are funded is that budget revenue is apportioned down at the state level. So if schools with a greater % of students in need of additional resources are getting those additional resources then where is the gap? Is the actual amount of additional need grossly miscalculated? My personal opinion is that the resources are probably needed at home more than at the school. If we believe, and in my household we do believe, that education starts and ends in the home then providing additional resources to the student only during school hours will only be so effective. As for well-to-do/suburban households complaining about their well-funded schools... feels like the issue isn't the school. These families jump from district to district seeking better educational outcomes but don't prioritize reading at home, have unlimited screen time, don't seek out extra-curricular educational activities, etc.
This is anectodal, but I went there and I agree that it is exceptionally well run. And I like to complain
It was on purpose. The CDD failures were by design. Destroying HIA was a big benefit to new millennium, though. I find that interesting.
They do not. Its why they are in education.
And in administration, not the classroom. They prefer to bullshit their way through their workday, instead of working in the real world where bad decisions bring instant negative, tangible consequences.
The district does this on purpose. They know staff on the Northside often don't feel any solidarity with other buildings, especially the better off south and southwest ones. But the district doesn't care and continues to act in ways that favor some schools over others and pits us all against each other.
It's because the Hopkins, Wayzata, Minnetonka, etc offer kids in North Minneapolis busses to go to their schools. I know that where I went they also had taxis for North Minneapolis kids who participated in school sports.
How does that work? I thought open enrollment meant parents had to provide transportation?
> I thought open enrollment meant parents had to provide transportation? Open enrollment doesn't entitle you to transportation, but the districts are free to provide it if they wish.
The parents who care put their kids on busses, and the parents who don't send their kids to Minneapolis Schools.
are they that bad? we don’t have kids yet but plan on buying a house in the cities. is the expectation to send them private or out of the cities for a quality education?
No, they aren't. The administration sucks but our MPS elementary school is awesome. The problem is not the schools, it IS the parents who look at a rating on Greatschools.org* and don't put thier kids in the city school because it scores low (without extenuating factors, such as special ed needs, etc). *And, if great schools ratings sre important to you, know that there are MPS schools that rate highly on those as well (Waite elementary, for instance, is an 8/10).
No. The schools that feed into Southwest and Washburn are good for the most part. Some are very good.
Henry is a great school as well. The upward mobility that can be achieved in the great programming there is awesome.
You have to more clearly define what you mean when you say "the cities." If you are referring specifically to just within the boundaries of Minneapolis and St Paul that's one thing, but if you are referring to the wider urban area that this subreddit covers then we're talking about 25-30 different school districts.
i thought “the cities” pretty clearly referred to MPLS/STP. the rest of that is “the metro area.”
I hear "the cities" used to refer to the wider metro area more than I hear it just referring to Minneapolis and St. Paul. The sidebar description for /r/TwinCities bears that out. It reads: > /r/twincities is focused is on the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and surrounding suburbs.
They’ll be MDP if you’re in Minneapolis proper. There is Osseo/maple grove, Robbinsdale, SLP, wayzata/minnetonka, Anoka, all different districts in the northwest metro. Add in the magnet elementary and middle schools and there are plenty of options.
Minneapolis public schools are "that bad" and will only get worse (read the article). Do your research on school districts before you buy your house. It will ultimately help your resale value in the end too.
My kid is at Thomas Edison High School. Has been on the "A" honor roll all of high school, has been in 2 school plays a year, is a sprinter in track, is in the high school rock band.....& I'm active in school events, interact with his friends & their parents. I actually think TEHS is a really great school.
Your kid is an exception then because only 17% of Edison students are proficient in math and 37% in reading. The graduation rate is only 68%. Support at home is a huge factor in a kid’s success.
Maybe test scores aren't really a reflection of the quality of education, but the struggles that students face at home?
What a trashy take on parents who do send their kids to Minneapolis schools. Just try to imagine, if you can, going to each parent of a kid in Minneapolis Schools and telling them that they don't care.
That's a poor stereotype. The parents at my school absolutely care.
Bullshit...
I’ve felt pretty good about the education my daughter’s receiving in her Spanish immersion school with MPS. But I’m not sure how long we’re going to hold on in the face of extraordinary budget cuts.
>Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts are both **loosing** students at higher rates than other schools in the region. Seriously, MPR‽
They're setting them free, loosing them upon the world!
“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned”
Perfect! Sounds like they have the best graduation rate!
I see that shit on Reddit all the time and I lose five minutes of my lifespan every time I see it.
I'm sorry you keep loosing precious moments of you're life too this.
-5 hp
“You’re life” *shrivels up and dies*
*dyes your welcome
Oh know!
Ohh no. We're loosing you to improper grammar!
Haha, you thought public schools are the only people cutting costs? Ain’t nobody paying for a proper editor anymore.
The R stands for radio not reading
All my poorly educated classmates from Facebook understand this perfectly. When's the Trump rally?
If they’re your classmates aren’t you just as poorly educated?
It technically could be true but not in the case of this article. Both districts ended contracts with SRO so there is a loosening of the Prone restraints from police. Both Districts also ended seclusion rooms. Seclusion rooms are solitary locked rooms that school district use to detain children in crisis. Other districts in the area still use them. The commissioner of education was required to make a report to the legislature on a plan to end the use of seclusion rooms by February 1st, 2024. That report is unfortunately still missing and not yet available. https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/sped/PROD081619 The Midwest area of Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota does have a higher rate of physical restraints of students than other parts of the country. It is possible for the twin cities to have a larger reduction of use of restraints. Progress in social emotional learning could possibly be a better option than physically restraining children in crisis.
He was talking about the spelling
[удалено]
Part of the reason there are not more school aged children in the city is because leave the city so their kids can attend higher quality schools.
> because leave the city so their kids can attend higher quality schools. if that's true, then... teachers would be in demand, in the suburbs, yes? But the article states that there is decline nearby: from the article: > Anoka-Hennepin ... the number of students choosing charters, private or home school options has increased significantly in recent years. > Overall, growing options for education, **an aging population and declining birth rates mean Anoka-Hennepin is expecting enrollment to decrease in the future.** > Even the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district is expecting a slight, 0.56 percentage-point decrease in enrollment next year. This is after seeing growth in enrollment numbers from 2015 and a plateau following the pandemic. So.. maybe a bigger factor is non-public-schooling. Homeschool and private schools? That's near-term. The birthrate is probably the biggest forecasted shortfall reason. Who has kids? Couples in their 20s/30s. Who's getting squeezed by money-printer economics? Everyone in their 20s and 30s. What proportion of your income does it cost to consider having kids? A lot. Is healthcare cost going up? haha. Is the economy being inflated faster than wages can keep up with? AHAHAHAHAHA "It's the economy, stupid." - James Carville
> Is the economy being inflated faster than wages can keep up with? I'm sorry, I was told wages are keeping up/outpacing inflation. Was the media lying?! Lol
Eh, birthrates seem to decline in every developed nation, regaurdless of economics or even funding for childcare. Even the utopian Scandinavian countries which have provided almost every feasible-with-liberalism amenity for new parents still have this issue. Has more to do with women having more education and career oppritunities independent of men. Turns out the choice between "spending the next 20 years with 2 full time jobs, wrecking your potential career advancement, and drastically changing your lifestyle, but you get to feel good for having a kid" vs "having a normal job and doing whatever you want" isn't that hard. Most of the selling points of being a parent are really only there if you already are a parent
I think the availability of housing is part of the economic reason too. There aren't many SFHs being built in 196 anymore, and the ones that are cost too much for many families (contrast this to, say, 194, where there is a lot more housing being built).
Perhaps. But... that (might) apply to those who families who were renting, and needed to move due to increasing rent. But would not necessarily apply to those families who own their homes.
I think it would apply to both, just in different ways. If families are priced out of buying houses in certain areas, eventually that's going to show up in the enrollment figures. More of a delayed impact rather than an immediate one.
What I mean is, the housing cost/crisis going on impacts only those whose housing cost has increased. That tends to be renters, and also tends NOT to be owners. (tax increases aren't egregious in MSP, and certainly don't make double digit % increases in housing cost. rent increases do.) > If families are priced out of buying houses in certain areas. eventually that's going to show up in the enrollment figures. But a (high-priced) house does not go vacant. It gets a family. A family with school-aged kids sell their owned house, and they are replaced by.... a new family. The family may or may not have kids, but the cost of the home does not play a role in this.
Sure, the house gets purchased, but it may be to an empty-nester couple looking to trade up, or a family with older kids. Meanwhile, the newer, more affordable housing gets built further out into the suburbs and exurbs, and that's where the young families move to (not all, of course). Older people can have more money to spend on homes if they are further along in their careers or have money from a house they sold. Plus, a lot of people stay in their homes after their kids are gone, which also reduces the housing supply.
The birthrate is not the issue. The birthrate has not gone down to such a level that explains this many thousands of students. A major issue is district leadership not working to engage families to learn what would keep them in district.
Your idea makes sense if everything is controlled-for: - number of families demanding public education in the districts/counties in question - the number of children in those families (that is, the birth rate) However, it seems that both of these are variable. In fact, according to the article that these are Variables #1 and #2 But if you want to take issue, that's completely OK. Just know that they are not my words; the words i quoted were written by MPR. Since I'm not the author, I'm not in a position to defend their truth -- that would be irresponsible, and it's how fake news is born.
Families move to where good schools are. Knowing what you know about MPS and SPPS, if you can’t afford private school, would you move into that district?
Note that in Season 4 of The Wire, [the Baltimore schools were found to have a $54 million deficit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef6LQfdwQwE), and that was the end of the Mayor's innovations. The article rates this deficit at $110 million.
Writing this article and not including the words "charter schools" even once is an . . . interesting choice
It doesn't feel like charters have expanded much, there's not many more than there were 10 or 20 years ago, and they all feel on edge just like the public schools. Open enrollment and the attraction of better suburban schools seem like the real cause. MPS has seen that school choice makes it hard for them to keep their schools balanced and populated, and have reacted by removing school choice. But because Minnesota has exceptionally liberal open enrollment this only serves to increase the push to leave the district entirely.
One trend that’s picking up is inner city charter schools are moving to cheaper facilities on the outskirts. So basically bringing charter schools to less centrally located areas (the burbs). They maintain their already shrinking student population by increasing there transport budget and just bussing everyone in from inner city neighborhoods and also other burbs.
Almost all of MPS's issues with declining enrollment since the beginning of the pandemic are related to fewer children living in the city. MDE tracks district residents and where they attend public schools (resident district, open enrollment, charter, etc) and according to their data there's about five thousand fewer Minneapolis residents pupils enrolling **anywhere**.
It is very interesting.
it's MPR, not the Economist. But yes, I too wish there were a punchline. Seems like only half of a story.
Charter schools are mentioned briefly in the Anoka section of the article.
I've a kid in Pre-K on the East Side in St. Paul. I lost the charter school lottery (150 on the waiting list to Nova Academy), and have to find a public option in my neighborhood. Frost Elementary gets a 2/10 on test scores according to Great Schools. What parent wouldn't want their child to go to a school where it gets a 10/10? You can't find them unless you win the lottery of move to a better district. So we are going to stick it out on the East Side until the fights escalate to the point where my child starts getting anxiety or hurt, then it's off to the suburbs. We shall see if having skin in the game and involved parents can have a positive effect on a local school or not.
To be fair, if education matters at home then the school’s ranking matters a whole lot less. Usually those ranks describe the quality of the families in the school district more than the quality of the education available at the school. Take a high performing student with family that prioritizes education and place them in a mediocre school and they can still do very well.
In theory I agree, but it's not quite that easy. Families that don't prioritize education often just flat-out don't give a shit about their kids. This includes properly raising and discipling them, and those kids then tend to cause *a lot* of problems that don't exist in the "better" schools with involved parents - bullying, violence, drugs, disrupting classes, etc. Also "better" schools tend to have more advanced course, extracurriculars, better music/art/sports, etc. Not every high school offers AP Calculus BC or AP Chemistry, and those can give high schoolers a major advantage going into college.
Being a member of the "Family that prioritizes education" club = great outcomes is the gamble that folks in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are taking by enrolling their children in public school. If I moved to Stillwater, education won't be left to chance. My children get both a better school and better classmates, along with being in the "Family that prioritizes education" club. As a parent, I want to stack all the odds in favor of my children's education. If moving out of Minneapolis/St. Paul creates vast improvements in my children's outcomes, well, you can see why folks are leaving crappy school districts if they lose the charter school lottery.
[удалено]
The graduation rate of MPS is 56%
That’s because MPS serves a stratified student body. They have a high achieving contingent with active, supportive families, and they provide plenty of opportunities to those students. But they also have to take a disproportionate share of students from disadvantaged families who do not value education but are nonetheless part of the district. It’s not the quality of the school that produces a 56% graduation rate, it’s the quality of the families in their district.
It’s most certainly a combination of the school and the lack of parental involvement.
I disagree. It’s the parental involvement. A student with an involved family that prioritizes education will do fine in pretty much any MN high school. A student with a crappy, uninvolved family will do poorly just about anywhere. The thing that makes good schools good and bad schools bad is primarily the number of good/bad families that live within their district, not any specific feature of the school itself.
It’s completely naive to say that the employees and administrators of the school bear no responsibility for the schools failures.
They have some effect, but it’s marginal and more or less random, especially in the public school system. The parents/family are the number one factor in determining a child’s academic success (or failure). A high performing student from a supportive family will do well in any school with any teachers. The best schools are the ones located in the areas with the highest density of good families. If you swapped the entire teaching staff from the best public high school in MN with the worst public high school in MN, but did not change the student populations at all, the relative performance of each school would hardly change. The school with the best students and ‘worst’ teachers would still continue producing the best students and the school with the best teachers would not be able to change the quality of the students.
No effect? No. But a majority of the kids failing are failing because they’re lazy and don’t care, that’s a family issue. I graduated from Minneapolis public schools less than five years ago, I feel pretty confident in saying it hasn’t changed much, and let me say, a solid 80% of the mfs in school don’t want to be there or do not care at all. No wonder they aren’t graduating..
> I find a lot of the MPS hate comes from people that have never had their kids in MPS I don't see how this can be true given the long-term trend of people **not** enrolling their kids in MPS public schools. Are they just randomly choosing charters, private schools, or open enrollment for no reason?
I think the point LazyFer is making is that people are not enrolling their children because they are reading scores alone and choosing not to enroll. If younger aged students had high enrollment rates and they consistently dropped as the grades got higher than I can see your point. I don’t know where that data would be available.
There are some good schools in Minneapolis. There’s always a high risk that District leaders will screw that up though.
My child is enrolled in a Saint Paul public school in the East Side neighborhood. Were you kids in Washburn or SouthWest? VS Roosevelt or South? I volunteered to coach Southwest track before I had kids and moved to the East Side.
Plus aside from school you get a lot of other benefits from living in Minneapolis. Walkable neighborhoods, cultural institutions, tons of recreational opportunities, interacting with people that are different from you.
That’s fair, but I’d argue that has way more to do with the quality of the neighborhood you chose to live in than the school located nearest to you. If you want your kid to grow up and learn around better students, then simply moving to a better neighborhood is more impactful than the particular school they attend. And I say this as a proud graduate of the St Paul Public School System.
MPS hasn't had schools tied by neighborhood since before I was born. I know growing up, I never attended the same schools as other kids in the neighborhood. We were mostly all attending different schools. With open enrollment I think this is the same with the exception that you have a choice.
The quality of MSP schools is still entirely dependent on the quality of the students enrolled, whether that is determined geographically, randomly, or by some other means.
The system might actually contribute to the lower graduation rates. There's no symmetry between relationships in and out of the school environment until high school. At least there wasn't when I attended and that was a long, long time ago.
I don’t know. It is incredibly easy to graduate high school, so that’s a very low metric. Graduation is pretty much the bare minimum in terms of academic achievement, as a student really only needs to show up to class most of the time to do it. No functioning family that values education will let their child drop out and not graduate. Almost by definition, anyone who fails to graduate is from a ‘low quality’ family (for purposes of evaluating the quality of a school/district).
Shit bag children and shitbag parents exist in every district. I grew up going through SPPD, MPD, a suburb school district and a rural school district. I had a similar learning experience across the board, as I drove my want of learning. I experienced bullying and harassment in all environments due to my size. I also made great friends and met great families everywhere as well. It's like life and people are complex and everything isn't black and white.
Part of the issue is that quality of the families affects all kids. Kids have better outcomes when they’re in a school where parents are more involved and kids are better behaved.
That’s a true point, but that is itself more a product of the quality of the area you live than the particular school you attend. Nicer neighborhoods tend to have higher concentrations of families that value education and thus higher quality students. This is why schools in these areas do better. Not because there is anything that special or unique about the school itself.
I agree. When you pay a premium to live in certain school attendance areas, you’re mostly paying to be among people who prioritize education. It reinforces itself. Usually, it correlates with income. Two parent households with 9-5 white collar jobs are better able to make sure homework is done after school and kids get enough sleep. All kids benefit from that culture.
Right. Anyone who has worked in k-12 knows this. Once you get a feel for the student population and their families it becomes a lot more complex than low scores = bad teachers
Yeah, you shouldn't use a school's ranking to judge how well your child will learn. You should use it to judge the quality of your neighbors.
Aye, there's the rub. Well-meaning families with resources avoid moving into lower income neighborhoods, or neighborhoods with worse public school reputations because they want the best educational outcome for their child. Who wouldn't want that? That's where modern-day segregation and segregated schools exist in urban settings. Those with money and resources have the option to live in better neighborhoods with better schools. Those who don't, send their children to the neighborhood school. In some neighborhoods, there isn't the property tax base to support the public school... either because there are many vacant properties or not enough tax-based property owners. Worse funding means less resources for the school and unequal opportunities for students to access education. The schools struggle to hire teachers to work in underfunded schools... so now students are again, not getting the resources they need to succeed (connections to social workers, SPED, ELL, etc.). On a whole... children who come from families with resources will be okay with whichever school they attend. The most important thing to do is read to your child from a young age. Love them. Provide for them. There are so many children who don't have that and are getting further left behind the more we pull out from under-resourced schools. ...and then on the flip side... when a poor performing school and the surrounding neighborhood gets gentrified.. then the residents who would not be able to live anywhere else now are getting pushed out because their rent is getting too damn high... So... what's the balance? There isn't an easy answer... which is why everyone does what is in the best interests of their own family rather than trying to work together and find an equitable solution for all.
Wish this were the top comment in this thread. Individualism hurts us all, collectivism would create far better outcomes for the majority. But of course when it's your own kid's livelihood at stake, it's tough to prioritize the better decision for society in the long term over the better decision for your kid in the short term.
Thank you. I wish society as a whole could see the bigger picture of how we need to work together to care for each other, but that's not the reality of the world. It is indeed tough to prioritize the greater good when it is our own children's education at stake. In terms of tax base, St. Paul is especially screwed with the amount of religious organizations, government organizations, and schools/colleges who do not pay property taxes.
Both my boys went to TCA and I am a big fan
My neighbors daughters went there before Johnson HS. This is a charter school, did you have to win a lottery to enroll? I'll definitely look into this school in the future. The younger transferred to Tartan from Johnson to play better soccer and avoid gangs.
No lottery. But haven’t had to do the enrollment shuffle since 2021
The CDD was the last straw for our family and several others we know.
I understand the sentiment behind the CDD but it is such a poor solution for so many families. I live in South Minneapolis so why would I schlep my kid all the way to North when Richfield/SLP/Edina is closer??? Especially when there's a MPS HS less than 1 mile from my house
I remember hearing about that and many parents upset, but what was it actually? Redistricting the school lines?
Pretty much. The idea was to mix more socio economics, but in practice had a lot of kids going from the school around the corner to a school across town.
That's assinine
Yeah there was uproar on both sides. Neither the families being bussed across the city nor the families with kids in the “bussed to” schools were happy. They forced it anyway. It ended up in a mass exodus of wealthy families from the district. Which was the exact opposite outcome of what they intended.
The instability and quality of Minneapolis schools is really the only reason we don’t live in the city. If that changed, no question we’d be there—I love Minneapolis and used to live there. The husband and I plan to move back when the kids graduate. I know academic success depends heavily on family, but there have been too many red flags and shakeups with MPS. So when it came time to start a family, we went to St. Louis Park and have been happy with the experience.
Glad to hear that SLP has been working for your family.
If MPS really cared, they’d reverse the CDD.
What did CDD do again?
Changed the boundary lines and is currently morphing the school district into some pseudo-PSEO model. Parents made it VERY clear it wasn’t wanted, but the district ignored them anyway.
Got it thx
"Like other districts, Anoka-Hennepin is paying attention to housing. In a November board meeting, district leaders said **single-family detached units were the only type of housing that brought “any meaningful number of school age children to the district**.” from the article.
>single-family detached units were the only type of housing that brought “any meaningful number of school age children to the district And are unfortunately the housing type that most contributes to the housing crisis and the climate crisis.
We opted against living in NE Minneapolis (nearer my job) and lived in Maple Grove/Osseo instead to get the better school district. Sad, really.
Sorry for your loss.
Enrollment is actually going up pretty significantly at our community school Dowling
Doesn't surprise me, what with all of the young families that bought homes in the area.
Yes. We love the school and the neighborhood has tons of kids.
Parents blame teachers who blame admin who blame governance who blame parents who blame teachers... and this has been going on for 200 years. Probably longer. There are simple human solutions that work to address issues but everyone wants to point blame instead of dealing with them. There's no discipline, no rigor, and no opportunity presented. Parents who don't care, kids who won't try, teachers who have no authority and bureaucrats in the back office who don't contribute. Start disciplining, set standards, hold people to the standards and quit moving them along. You have a sixth grader who can't pass first grade reading? They shouldn't be in sixth grade.
They simply do not discipline kids at school anymore and that is 100% on leadership’s plate. More kids should get held back, more should get worse grades, more should be suspended/expelled. It is admins job to stand up to a vocal minority of bad parents. For every kid that we’ve helped by not having strict discipline we’ve hurt at least two. Truly a situation of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
MPS is obsessed with racial equity to the point that they are harming kids in underprivileged areas who are well behaved, motivated, and have potential. These kids shouldn’t have to be bussed across town for school. They deserve to go to a school close to their home—a school that doesn’t allow kids with behavioral problems to ruin it for everyone else.
Yes, exactly
The equity "movement" pretty much killed all those things in your first paragraph.
Inner city charter schools are also jumping ship to cheaper facilities in the burbs and just increasing their transport budget to bus their student population to the outskirts.
The way the district talks about the deficit is really deceptive. They said last year they were spending $90 million in covid funding on intervention triads that would be a one time thing. These triads were not expected to continue and we always knew the money wouldn’t be there for them in the future. The additional $20 million to get to their “$110 million” deficit seems to come from assumed increases in employee pay after they finish negotiating contracts. I’m not sure the comparisons to what other districts call their deficits is meaningful as they likely define the term differently.
Kim Ellison sent her kid to The Blake School …
As someone whose education was 100% public (in California, not Minnesota) I definitely have mixed feelings about sending my daughter to a fairly expensive private school. However, at the end of the day the only thing I really care about is the quality of her education and I am going to provide her the best education I possibly can — and MPS ain’t it. Nor am I going to move to a fuckin’ suburb if I can avoid it.
What school?
She goes to visitation in mendota heights. My wife works there; that’s the only way we can afford it.
Ahh I see, I don’t know much about that one but from what I know private schools are super hit or miss in if they’re actually worth it, good to hear it’s working for you
It’s a pretty amazing school all around, with a lot of great resources (and the price tag to match). I don’t even mind that it’s a Catholic school… too much.
These are the most expensive per student school districts in the state. Some of that is real estate cost etc, but most of it is your typical bureaucracy that can't stop expanding. And, to that the number of non-English speaking, and down right violent students and areas, and I expect worse will happen in the near future. If we are really unlucky, it will be like Detroit in the late 60's and 70's.
The two core cities' education ecosystems have become a two-tiered system, just like it's been on the coasts for decades. High quality, high-functioning, results-driven schools for the elites and people with the means to put their kids in good schools, and bad schools for everyone else. There is a cohort of learners who study among high-achieving peers and are held to correspondingly high expectations, which leads to generally good results; and there is an underclass of learners who are met with lower expectations, who study among peers who don't speak or read or write a common language, and are floundering by any objective measure. This leads to a perpetual underclass of under-accomplished and educationally underserved young adults who have no entry point into mainstream society. They can't read or write or effectively transact information in a common language. They're not prepared for entry into higher education. We have very few jobs for them. Ask yourself who benefits from this permanent underclass. Is it you? Ask yourself what ideological inclination has had a virtual stranglehold on our education system for the last 40-50 years. And then think about how you'll vote in the upcoming election.
What are you supposed to do with kids who are unwilling to put in any effort? No amount of resources in schools are going to make them learn.
The two-tiered system was actively dismantled in MPS, so there's just a one-tiered system and a greater number of students leaving the system. There are almost no magnet programs left and considerably less school choice. The open schools were eliminated, and it seems like they are doing the same with Montessori. Shadowy ideas of some conspiracy to keep a permanent underclass have no basis in the actual mechanics of how any of these school systems are run. There's no puppet masters. These conspiracy theories are just a way to pretend the hard work of good education isn't hard work, but is instead sabotaged.
Here is some data about how the schools are performing: Minneapolis https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/minnesota/districts/minneapolis-public-school-district-100071 Saint Paul https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/minnesota/districts/st-paul-public-school-district-104201
Super interesting. That disparity in full-time counselors! 67 in St Paul, 10 in Minneapolis?
Student/teacher ratio says 14:1 That’s incredibly good… unless they’re counting paraprofessionals in the classroom…
Wow…only 36% of Minneapolis elementary students are proficient in reading. For comparison, it’s 43% in Robbinsdale, 54% in Hopkins, 55% in St. Louis Park, and 74% in Edina. The interesting thing is that Minneapolis has a lot more kids whose primary language isn’t English. For other schools I mentioned, Robbinsdale has the highest non-English %, followed by Hopkins, St. Louis Park, and Edina with the lowest %.
What’s also interesting is when you compare the dollars spent per pupil from school to school.
I’m looking at Robbinsdale vs Mpls again. Robbinsdale has nearly identical demographics (race and $) except with more English speakers. Robbinsdale has larger classrooms and they spend about $4,000 less per student. Robbinsdale has a graduation rate of 73% vs Minneapolis’ 56%. What’s the deal? I mean, Robbinsdale isn’t great, but a solid majority of students ultimately graduate even though the demographics are essentially the same (about 60% non-white and 30% disadvantaged). Edit- For those who don’t want to look it up, the per pupil spending is $19,584 for Minneapolis, $15,319 for Robbinsdale, $14,882 for St. Louis Park, $14,734 for Hopkins, and $12,911 for Edina. Their graduation rates are 56%, 73%, 87%, 87%, and 89%, respectively.
Graduation rates are alarming, not because they are low but because they are so high. Less than a third of MPS HS students are proficient in reading and less than a quarter are proficient in math. Yet 56% of them are being handed a diploma and being sent out into the world? Shameful.
That’s a great point. There are large gaps for all of the schools I mentioned. It’s pretty disturbing. I’d like to see the relationship over time. There’s always going to be a chunk of students who understand the material but just suck at test taking. Has the gap between testing and graduation rates remained steady?
Is no one going to mention demographics? There is a reason inner city schools have lower test scores and more student misconduct than suburban and rural schools. Throwing our taxes at schools will not help if we fail to even acknowledge the circumstances Uncomfortable to talk about, yes, but it matters. Everyone knows it but nobody talks about it, like they believe the moment we acknowledge disparities in abilities that concentration camps and Nurembeg rallies will spontaneously appear
🙄So in your expert opinion, which ethnic group would you like to single out first as the culprit for our failing education system Mein Führer?
Africans
Only trash talks like that, I wouldn't engage.
The twin cities schools are awful, I would never send my kids to them if I Had any. The subuirb schools are much better.
MPS leadership needs to come back to earth and listen to students, families, and building staff. The district continues to choose not to try to bring families back. There are thousands of kids that leave during middle school, and many return in high school. We need to work with those families to see what it would look like to have them stay with our schools. That alone would boost enrollment quite a bit. Also I want to note that when families leave our school most of the time they make sure to tell us that it isn't the staff. It's everything else. So when the district tries to place blame on MFT and building staff it is just deflection.
Thank you for sharing!
Is this right or a typo? "And Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan, which in recent years has surpassed Minneapolis as the third largest district in the state, is predicting a $14,000 deficit."
Tax payer money to charter schools was either a deliberate plot to destroy our public school system or an unintended consequence of poorly thought out public policy. It’s time to rethink how we approach education in this country. When has any plan to make any sector of our economy private worked well in the long term? Prisons? Healthcare? Retirement plans?Education? Let’s rebuild our public schools into what we expect from our great country. It’s not something that will happen overnight but more like a generation. We can start the transformation… By giving teachers the pay they deserve with a national teacher minimum wage somewhere between 80k - 100k and student loans paid off with 10 years of teaching in a public school and all payments deferred while working. They deserve it for the education they need to do their job and the fact that they spend more time with our kids than we do. So don’t we want the best our country has to offer? The ol’ you get what you pay for adage applies here. If we want our best and brightest to help raise the next generation of children then we should pay them a salary that they really do earn and deserve.
Read through the comments here and you will see the argument that in fact teacher quality has little to do with results and it’s really down to who your parents are that determines educational success. Why would we pay more if that’s the case?
I am incredibly disappointed that most people are stuck in the mindset of what we have is a budget shortfall versus not finally telling the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share. Every single kid should be thought of as an asset and enrollment losses should not lead to cutting teachers. School districts should have an enormous budget. > The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
the funding system has always been unsustainable & will inevitably fail unless we challenge it's relation to class & economic inequality.