Charter School Partners

Before the tattooed hordes came out of the woodwork to make a claim to her husband, there is little doubt that

Denial no longer an option.

Sandra Bullock thought her rough and tumble beau was much-maligned but, at heart, truly a good guy. A better guy, even, than the other guys who are out there.

In much the same way, Minnesotans have stood by their state (check out today’s Star Trib editorial), believing in its reputation as one of the best states in the nation in terms of the quality of the education its schools and teachers provide to students despite persistent whispers about the existence of durable and egregious racial and economic achievement gaps, teacher and school quality issues, and a powerful teachers union that is out of step with what kids need and very much in step with protecting the interests of the adult members of its ranks.

Our state’s embarrassing performance in the federal Race to the Top competition, like a tattooed bimbo, forced us to confront a new reality: Minnesota is not the best state in the nation for education; in fact, we fall woefully behind other states in our willingness to address fundamental issues of educational quality and equity.

As everyone now knows, unless it gets its act together and puts together a better proposal with greater union support in the next round, Minnesota will effectively kiss hundreds of millions of dollars for our schools and their students goodbye. It’s confusing: we’re a state that traditionally puts our money where our mouth is in terms of school funding, so why did we bomb so badly on RTTT?

The application reviewers said it best: we lack the political will to do what it will take to close the achievement gap and truly make education the vehicle for social change in the state. In our application we actually codified, perhaps for the first time, our collective recalcitrance to address the miseducation of poor kids and kids of color hiding beneath our glittering scores on national assessments. Without meaning to, we told the truth about what’s going on in Minnesota: we are willing to talk and plan around the problem of fundamental educational inequity, but we’re not willing to really address it, spiritually or legislatively.

Apparently, it took reviewers who aren’t drunk on the myth of Minnesota’s educational exceptionalism to take us to task on several key areas of weakness for the state:

First, despite cursory nods toward the existence of alternative pathways to teaching in the application, it was obvious to anyone who is familiar with states that have robust alternative certification programs that Minnesota’s window dressing simply doesn’t substitute for a broad commitment to attracting the best and brightest to the field of teaching.

Anyone who has watched the state’s most powerful teachers union, Education Minnesota, play Goliath to Teach for America’s David during its pitched battles over alternative certification at the legislature this year and last has no problem believing that the application couldn’t gloss over the state’s inability to champion new pathways- even research tested pathways that outperform traditional ones- into teaching. Anyone who heard this same Goliath’s rhetoric in the superintendent of St. Paul’s decision to dismantle its selective alternative pathway program- the St. Paul Teaching Fellows, a program of The New Teacher Project- would understand that the reviewers just couldn’t figure how a state that would end this research-tested program just as it was beginning in the core of St. Paul, breaking its contract and squandering significant federal grant money in the process, could reasonably be perceived as on the side of new thinking in terms of teacher training and recruitment.

Teachers unions throughout the state expressed concern or refused to sign Minnesota’s RTTT application because of its requirement that teacher performance be measured and rewarded based on student performance. In their resistance, reviewers might have seen what many education leaders in Minnesota try to obscure in their wonky discussions about the impossibility of measuring teacher quality: they blame the kids for their own failure. They blame the kids for being poor, they blame their families for being uneducated and disenfranchised and this scapegoating, however gentled by rhetoric, is the toxic core of the arguments many in the state use to explain away a teacher’s responsibility to actually fulfill their basic obligation to leave a child with more knowledge and skills than they had before they sat in their classroom.

This hooey- that the kids coming into our schools are just too hard to teach- has been disproven by a host of national examples of schools and teachers that accept no impediments to any child’s, regardless of their family’s income or zip code, learning and performance. Being a teacher is one of the hardest jobs in the world but it is also easily the most important- MN’s kids, especially its most vulnerable kids, deserve teachers who embrace the difficulty of their task, have high expectations for every child, and assume the failure of any child as their own.

In its entirety, Minnesota’s application described a state that has not yet acknowledged the powerful truth that all students can and will learn in systems that won’t accept anything less. When a state and its citizens come around to this belief, the failure of any of its schools, whether housed in enclaves of wealth or poverty, is an urgent crisis. And our application simply did not suggest that critical stakeholders in the state believe there is a crisis in the state. If they believed it, and if they were truly invested in closing the achievement gap, how could they reasonably resist supporting the kinds of solutions RTTT suggests states that are on track to addressing their education equity crises are employing across the country?

It’s hard to wake up and realize that your idealized image of something you love, when held up to rigorous scrutiny, isn’t what you thought it was after all. Just ask Sandra Bullock. Minnesota is not the national leader in education. But it can be again.

Our RTTT failure should be a wakeup call for every one of us in the state who believe, as all good Minnesotans do and have for generations, that education is the single best hope for changing the quality and trajectory of a person’s life. RTTT has given our state a roadmap of what we need to do to respond to the current, urgent challenge the state faces: closing the achievement gap that has persisted in the state for decades.