One amendment offered by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., would have removed the requirement that teachers of students with disabilities be “highly qualified”.

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Another proposal that died in the committee came from Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga. He wanted to do away with limits on how many students with disabilities could take alternate tests, which are different than those their classmates take.

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“The underlying concern we have with Isakson and Paul [is that their message is] ‘It’s too difficult to accommodate you, so let’s separate you,” Jones said. “When that happens, it’s separate but not equal. It’s not a 21st century vision of society.”

They found that students in schools that are closed due to poor performance actually do substantially worse on reading and math tests in the new school to which they are sent for at least a year, and then recover and end up doing about as well as they were doing at their original school. In other words, after all the expense, acrimony, and heartache involved in closing a school, the students involved do not benefit.

I’m posting the article in its entirety here because articles drop from the Strib’s site after a few weeks, and I didn’t want to lose the text. I’ve bolded what I wanted to emphasize.

Thousands of low-income students in underperforming schools statewide will soon receive letters saying they are eligible to transfer to different schools and receive private tutoring paid for by their school districts.

If history is an indicator, however, few will take advantage of those opportunities.

Only 1,067 of the 97,562 eligible students transferred out of their schools in the 2009-10 school year, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Education. Of the 41,734 who were eligible for outside tutoring services, only 8,751 received them.

Those numbers are intensifying Minnesota’s opposition to the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires schools that repeatedly do not improve their test scores to provide those options to students.

“We have never believed that one-size-fits-all mandates are the best approach to improve Minnesota schools,” said Brenda Cassellius, the state’s education commissioner, who is seeking a waiver to opt out of the transfer and tutoring mandates.

The letters going out are a preview of Friday’s announcement of how many Minnesota schools are not making adequate progress under No Child Left Behind. The law requires such schools to spend 20 percent of their federal Title I money on the services. Schools are required to provide transfers after the second year of lagging test scores and to provide outside tutoring after a third year.

Officials see misspent money

The reasons why so few students participate vary, but rarely involve apathy by students or school districts, education officials say. Key reasons include a lack of schools and tutoring services in rural areas, but also a funding formula that allows tutoring providers to charge as much as $90 an hour.

Officials say that the $12.6 million spent on the services last year is not money well spent.

“There is little evidence that [some] mandated services have had the broad impact on student achievement that authors of the law had hoped for,” Cassellius said.

Urban school officials say Minnesota’s extensive choice system gives parents so many options that the transfer mandate isn’t necessary.

“Not very many kids avail themselves of that option, I think, because we already have a lot of choice in Minnesota with open enrollment, charter schools and so on,” said Sarah Snapp, budget director for Minneapolis Public Schools. “Kids aren’t just stuck in their neighborhood schools.”

In rural areas, there often isn’t a school to transfer to, said Fred Nolan, Minnesota Rural Education Association’s executive director.

Tutoring prices eat funding

The reason for the small percentage of students receiving outside tutoring services is more complex.

Shortly after the federal law went into effect in 2001, several small, for-profit tutoring businesses began cropping up around the metro area, but not in rural districts.

“In many medium to smaller rural communities, no one will set up provider services because there’s little money there,” Nolan said. “If there were a provider, you’re asking relatively not-well-off parents to drive their children up to 30 miles for tutoring services. That’s a difficult thing to do.”

Another key reason is that tutoring companies can earn as much as $1,700 for each student, but there is no cap on how much they can charge per hour, hence the $90-an-hour rates.

If every eligible student asked for tutoring, the districts wouldn’t be able to afford it, said Matthew Mohs, St. Paul’s director of Title I programs, which are aimed at low-income students.

Last year in Minneapolis, for example, only 2,219 of the 14,700 students who were eligible for tutoring services got them, even though the district spent almost all of the $4.6 million in Title I money it had reserved.

“We would’ve never been able to serve all 14,000 students because there’s a set pot of money for [tutoring] and it isn’t big enough to serve everyone,” Snapp said.

Officials said the funding formula also leads to another problem: Research shows students need about 40 to 50 hours of tutoring for it to have any effect. When some companies charge $90 an hour, with a $1,700 per student limit, that equals 18 hours of tutoring.

District officials say that leads to lackluster results, which adds to the litany of frustrations for administrators who say that No Child Left Behind policies can oftentimes stifle, rather than encourage, education reform.

“I think this is one of the more flawed elements of [No Child Left Behind],” said Mohs. “I think that the whole concept and model of [these support services] was flawed from the get-go.

“When there’s an expenditure of that size and you’re forced to do it and there’s not a whole lot of benefit for the students, you start to have a lot of questions about what other alternatives would be available to best serve our kids.”

In addition to requiring transfers and tutoring, No Child Left Behind imposes escalating penalties on underperforming schools, going so far as to force them to replace programs and staff. The Obama administration said last week that it would offer states a waiver from key provisions of the law if they commit to such reforms as revamping low-performing schools and adopting evaluation standards for principals and teachers.

Minnesota plans to apply for a waiver in the first round of applications due Nov. 14.

Daarel Burnette II • 651-735-1695 Twitter: @DaarelStrib

Facing mounting sanctions under the federal law, Minneapolis and other districts across Minnesota support Gov. Mark Dayton’s request, made earlier this month, for a waiver that would allow hundreds of schools to avoid penalties for not meeting the law’s ever-higher targets.

It’s part of a national revolt against a law that forced schools to focus on measurable results, yet ultimately came to be viewed as punishing educators for not doing the impossible.

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“We just can’t celebrate our white students knocking the socks off these tests when our students of color aren’t making the same gains,” said Dave Heistad, executive director of research, evaluation and assessment for the Minneapolis schools.

U.S. officials said the results show that the nation is slipping further behind its competitors despite years spent seeking to raise performance in reading and math through the 2002 No Child Left Behind law and a host of other reforms.

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The Obama administration is likely to use the results to press Congress next year to rewrite the federal education law to prod states to do more to help the lowest-performing schools. Dozens of states have also approved new national academic standards that are meant to make U.S. schools more competitive.

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Girls outperform boys in reading in every participating country. The gender reading gap, among the organization’s members, was equivalent to about 39 points on the testing scale, or a year of schooling.

Minneapolis school board members handed down a death sentence for Cityview School on Tuesday night, closing the school and paving the way for a charter academy to attempt to do what the district couldn’t: educate its most needy, vulnerable students.

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Cityview is the sixth district school to be shut down on Minneapolis’ North Side in the past three years. Some board members and residents argued that previous closures created a ripple effect that reverberated throughout the district, spurring abandonment of north Minneapolis and creating crowded classrooms in other portions of the city.

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Minneapolis faced severe penalties for Cityview’s failure to meet standards under the No Child Left Behind Act because of substandard test scores. The district’s options were reconstituting the school as a charter, getting rid of the entire staff or shutting down the building completely.

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Board members who supported Johnson’s decision considered opening a charter the most tolerable of three inadequate options.

And herein lies the problem with NCLB: when faced with a failing school, the options are all crappy.

And why exactly do we think that a charter school can do this? Why do we have such blind faith in the charter school model?

Despite federal rules that require highly qualified teachers in every class, poor students are still more likely to be taught by inexperienced or unqualified teachers or those teaching outside of their areas of expertise, according to a recent study by Education Trust. Because good instruction is directly tied to student achievement, too many poor children are at a disadvantage.

To change that inequity, states, school districts and education programs must step up efforts to improve teacher training and restructure school staffing to expand strong instruction to more students.

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Compared with the national figures, Minnesota does a better job. About 9 percent of core academic secondary courses were taught by less-qualified teachers, compared with 20 percent or more in about a dozen other states. But Minnesota also has one of the largest learning disparities between white students and a growing population of lower-income students of color — some of whom are also immigrant English-language learners.

Letters to the editor… (excerpts)

Right now, unfortunately, we are “teaching to the test” (partly thanks to No Child Left Behind), requiring rote learning and formulaic responses. Children go through the motions, disengaging from the learning process.

For successful education reform, our challenge will be how to measure standards of achievement, on the part of students and teachers, without killing the love of learning, creative thinking and innovation that have always proved America’s strong suit.

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Mr. Duncan’s emphasis on teacher accountability is quickly being translated into teachers being held accountable for raising math or reading scores, not for raising a student’s ability to think, solve problems or collaborate.

Students who are driven to value their own test scores over all else are motivated to act selfishly, not collaboratively. They are encouraged to look for the one right answer, not to take intellectual risks or to entertain alternative solutions.

The best and the brightest college students will not go into teaching and remain in the profession if they are treated as assembly-line managers, evaluated solely by their ability to produce identical, high-testing students.

If we want students to be able to think, then their teachers need to be able to think as well.

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Increasing pressure on teachers and parents will not significantly improve achievement, but if we can protect children from the effects of poverty, American tests scores will be at the top of the world.

Robert Panning-Miller is a South High teacher, a member of the Save North High Coalition and an executive board member of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, Local 59.

I don’t have much to add, but I have bolded some parts of the article that I found particularly important, posted below in its entirety:
 

Recent actions of the North High community could be a model for the Minneapolis School District and school districts across this country. Instead of parents, teachers, students and community members pointing fingers at one another for what has happened, a coalition of stakeholders has recognized that only by working together can they save their school.

For years, Minneapolis School District leaders have succeeded in pushing their agenda, an agenda that has put north Minneapolis on the verge of being a community without a system of true public schools. The district’s success has not come by bringing people together, but rather the opposite. Following the philosophy of the “No Child Left Behind” and the “Race to the Top” corporate leadership, the Minneapolis School District has driven wedges between various groups in the city’s educational community.

The school “reform” movement that has gained strength in the past decade — and is epitomized in the movie “Waiting for ‘Superman’” — is really about the privatization of public schools. The push for charter schools is not designed to reform public schools but to replace them. Parents are encouraged to “shop around” for the best school for their children rather than to work to make their public school a place that would best serve students and the community as a whole.

The ideology behind this “Race to the Top” movement holds that competition will improve public education. But competition always produces winners and losers. The results in north Minneapolis and in urban centers around the country make clear that the losers are the very-low-income and minority students that reformers claim to be concerned about.

Minneapolis Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson has said that the Minneapolis public schools cannot provide an equitable education to the students of north Minneapolis, and implied that they would be better served by the district-sponsored, privately managed Noble Charter schools out of Chicago.

Providing an equitable education to all students is the responsibility of public education. Charter schools have never been shown to achieve this. To pass off responsibility is not a bold, creative step but a concession to those who want to privatize our system of public schools.

The Save North High Coalition has argued that “the district still has the responsibility to taxpayers and to Minneapolis to educate resident children. If the District can once again abandon children living in [zip code] 55411 to charters, suburban schools, and other non-neighborhood schools, then public education is for some and not others. It will be separate and unequal.”

The Save North High Coalition will not accept a separate and unequal system of public education and has presented to the Minneapolis school board not only a demand to keep North High open but a commitment to work with the district to rebuild North. The hope for public education will never be found in its dismantling, but in a grass-roots effort to reinvest and rebuild it.

Public schools need to be fully funded, socially just, equitable and democratic. If North is closed and this current path continues, what school will be next? Edison? Roosevelt? Washburn?

The Minneapolis school board has said that mistakes were made. I have worked with teachers, parents, students and community members of north Minneapolis who have simply said to the board, “Let us help you.” Rather than perpetuating divisions and abandoning an entire community, the Minneapolis school board must keep North High open and work to rebuild it. The community stands ready to help.