United States of America
I am a Minneapolis-based writer specializing in education reform and its impact on parents, teachers, students, and staff.
Outside Sanford Middle School on a spring day, a gaggle of kids play catch and chat. They're a patchwork quilt of black, brown, and white, dressed in everything from hijabs to skater shorts. These kids would normally be out back, shooting hoops or playing four square. But hovering cranes and...
The overall goal is to strip schools down from their messy, complicated "overspending" heights, and collapse them all into a pure "student-based" funding model. (CRPE shares their love of funding students, not programs, with ALEC, which has a model "Student-Centered Funding" bill, essentially a school voucher program.)
Testing, from the inside out: I recently sat down with five Minneapolis Southwest High School students to find out why they-along with over 500 of their classmates-had chosen to opt out of the annual, standardized MCA test. I assumed, like another Minneapolis education writer , that these students were opting out only because their evaluation-fearing teachers told them to.
New campaign finance reports filed in Minnesota show that the 2014 Minneapolis school board election is being buoyed by a tremendous amount of outside money, including a $100,000 contribution from former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg's money went to a group that calls itself the Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund.
In the aftermath of a failed 2013 bid for mayor, former Minneapolis city council member Don Samuels is running for a spot on the school board.
Minneapolis Public Schools have seen major changes in the Information Technology Department in the past year, including restructuring that removed 34 of 60 employees from their jobs. This is the first in a series of four articles exploring what happened - and what people have to say about the changes.
Flunking, failing, and worst-these words crop up immediately in the official announcement for the February 6 Minnesota Chamber of Commerce's Education Summit. In fact, the Chamber asserts that "too many of our students" are failing and thus our schools are in dire need of reform.
Minneapolis Public Schools teacher Pia Payne-Shannon works at Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary School in north Minneapolis, where she teaches English Language Arts classes to 6th and 7th graders. Recently, I spoke with her about the impact of the Minneapolis Public School district's implementation of Focused Instruction on her classroom.