Across Minnesota, the ratio of 759 students to each counselor in grades K-12 ranks among the worst in the nation — 49th, ahead of only California. The American School Counselor Association recommends a 250-to-1 ratio; the national average is 457 students per counselor. Lagging state funding is blamed for the shortage in Minnesota.

…

The four counselors will do traditional one-on-one work with students, helping them cope with issues from family divorce and homelessness to bullying and building friendships.

I had no idea this was a problem in Minnesota. Glad that at least one district is getting funding to improve the situation.

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

The extra efforts, they say, will help steer at-risk kids away from the path of dropping out long before they reach high school, as well as reduce the gap in academic achievement between white and non-white students.

The national Safe Routes to School program is bestowing $3.8 million to 16 communities statewide for similar purposes. Advocates say the funds are needed to encourage students to walk or bike to school.

In November, a record 133 school districts say they’ll ask taxpayers to support referendums to ward off cuts that have condensed class schedules, provoked higher pay-to-play fees and forced schools to resort to in-school advertising to make ends meet.

…

When indexed for inflation, school revenue across the state has declined by double digits over the past eight years, according to a state Education Finance Working Group convened this winter. Referendums helped close that gap and, as costs rise, more districts than ever will seek help from taxpayers this fall. But with an economy that has left families cash-strapped, too, voters may be less likely to approve them.

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.

…

“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.

Child poverty rose 56 percent in Minnesota in the last decade — much faster than the national average — so that by 2009, some 174,000 children lived in poor economic conditions, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Minnesota, which boasted the nation’s second-lowest poverty rate in 2000, fell to 11th in 2009.

…

A rising poverty rate, though, could eventually drag these other indicators of child well-being in the wrong direction. An increase in child poverty, for example, would make it harder for children to graduate from high school, Arzamendia said.

“Unless we deal with the increases in child poverty,” she said, “we cannot begin to address the other challenges represented in the data to promote the health and well-being of Minnesota’s children.”

(…I’m back to Tumblr! Took the summer off from classes and the whole ed scene - not really, but enough to stop Tumbling for a while. Time to reconnect.)

…The number of new teaching hires in the state has dropped by more than half in the past 11 years, according to state data.

Some leaders fear that heightened public scrutiny of teachers will discourage even more prospective teachers from entering K-12 schools.

Gee, you think? You should hear the cynical conversations we have in my education classes. Not about teaching itself - we all love kids and really want to teach. But about the profession, the politics, the criticism…. And most of us aren’t even in schools (the few who are working in schools are part-time or volunteer).

“Why would you go into this,” he said, “if there are constant cuts, layoffs, unfair criticism that you are responsible for every flaw in society … pay freezes [and] elimination of collective bargaining rights?”

Yep. And it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get better any time soon.

As baby boomers retire and new teachers quit, a 2010 national report warns that the teaching pipeline will collapse at both ends. First-year teacher attrition has steadily increased and the nation has the oldest workforce in more than half a century, according to the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.

NOT holding my breath. When I first became interested in teaching in 2005, the stats were that half of all teachers in Minnesota would retire in the next 5 years. Then the economy crashed, and everyone kept their jobs. Still waiting for those teachers to retire. By the time they do, school funding will have been cut so much that they won’t be filling positions anyway.

One ray of hope for new teachers may be an approaching retirement wave. Teachers age 55 and older have doubled in a decade, and superintendents project 2,772 teachers will retire by 2013.

Although many veteran teachers have delayed retirement, Blaha said she’s seeing more on the verge of quitting, tired of increased testing and public scrutiny.

“As the pressure has gone up,” she said, “the interest [in retiring] has gone up.”

No wonder. The only positive thing about this is that perhaps jobs will open up for those of us in school or recent graduates. We need jobs too. And we can’t retire for a long time.

Next year, about 1,100 students out of nearly 10,000 will go to different schools than the ones they now attend. Redrawing boundary lines would reduce socioeconomic isolation and at the same time a racial gap that often coincides with it. That’s not only good for everyone, it’s a directive from the U.S. secretary of education and the state.

…

It’s not about race, they say, but about keeping their kids in a nearby school. For most of them, that is Cedar Ridge, which now educates the kids from the Bearpath gated community. The school’s website proclaims: “We want all students to feel a sense of belongingness within our school community.”

That belongingness already is spoken for, apparently.

…

I think we simply have a case of a group of people not used to being told what to do and who can afford to sue.

Pretty much said what I’ve been thinking about this situation, only a lot nicer and with a lot more tact.

MinnCAN lays out a powerful list of reasons why all Minnesotans should care about academic progress for all children. Properly educating all students demands attention because failure to do so has real consequences — and not just for the students who are left behind.

Poorly educated children affect all Minnesotans. Demographers predict that communities of color and immigrants will double in numbers in the next 30 years, becoming a major source of future workers and citizens. That means the civic, social and economic future of the state is at stake.

Yes, but laying out good reasons for change (and they are good reasons) does not actually justify the changes.

They’re pushing for policies such as alternative teacher certification, educator evaluations that are tied to student learning, and a statewide rating system for preschool programs. Those are sound strategies that merit passage.

Other than the value of preschool, I don’t think any of the rest can be classifed as “sound strategies.” Popular, yes. Tried and tested? Only a little bit. And the results vary widely.

The author is right - it doesn’t do any good to acknowledge the achievement gap and study it. We need to act.

But that doesn’t mean we have to take the actions MinnCAN is proposing.