Tag Archives: isd 709

Drawing the Lines

The Duluth school district, which has not changed school boundaries since the completion of its major school restructuring Red Plan a decade ago, has embarked on an effort to redraw boundaries. While ostensibly an effort to re-balance enrollments between some schools that are overcrowded and some that are underutilized, it has also invited some serious, difficult discussion about socioeconomic inequities and Duluth’s east-west divide. It also comes at a distinct point in time, as we have a superintendent on his way out the door and the most heterodox school board in recent memory. For professional reasons, I will not comment on the decision-making process or the work of the boundary-drawing consultant, Cooperative Strategies; this post look only at what they have produced and its implications for the future of Duluth’s schools and neighborhoods. (The two are, after all, deeply intertwined.)

At this stage, Cooperative Strategies has developed three scenarios for public consumption, though the firm and district have also noted that none of them are necessarily the final plan. The plans don’t do much to change the socioeconomic composition of any elementary schools, mostly because it is very, very hard to do so given Duluth’s orientation along a lakeshore and the location of its most affluent neighborhoods. The changes largely hinge on two considerations: the fate of Lowell Elementary and the question of where to draw the line between east and west side middle and high schools.

First, the Lowell question: Lowell has become home to the district’s two growing language immersion programs in Spanish and Ojibwe and no longer pulls many students from nearby neighborhoods. Scenario 1 turns it entirely into a language magnet and sends its remaining neighborhood students to either Homecroft or Piedmont or Myers-Wilkins; Scenario 3 keeps the language programs but also retains a few neighborhood students, and Scenario 2 splits the difference and moves the Ojibwe program to Stowe while leaving Spanish at Lowell. Scenario 3 has the added wrinkle of splitting the Lowell elementary population between the two middle and high schools, a situation the other scenarios avoid. The Lowell scenarios invite questions over the future of where Duluth Heights and Kenwood (and even bits of Hunters Park and Chester Park) fit into the picture and where to house the language programs. The former one is a complicated one that I won’t delve into here, and I’d need data on where the participating students come from to have an opinion on the latter.

Second, and more controversial, is the middle and high school boundary. Right now, enrollments are significantly higher in the east side schools than those on the west, a result of a decision made in the Red Plan days that somewhat balanced socioeconomics. All three proposed plans now seek to equalize enrollments. Scenario 2 is effectively what the Red Plan could have been with more equal overall enrollments: all Myers-Wilkins students (who currently split between east and west) head west, all Homecroft kids (now including the rural bits that currently feed into Lowell) head east, and the socioeconomic split becomes slightly more pronounced than it currently is. Scenarios 1 and 3 take a step toward equalizing socioeconomics by sending Homecroft kids, including the entirety of the Woodland neighborhood, west, while sending all of Myers-Wilkins to the east. The potential Woodland shift has, predictably, been the most explosive piece of the proposals.

Equity, Equality, and Outcomes

The question of the different demographics in schools sparks a debate about equity and equality, two words that get thrown around a lot in school boundary debates but mean very different things. The easiest way to sum up the difference: equality gives people the same resources regardless of where they all, while equity recognizes inherent differences in where people start and tries to balance them by giving more to those who need more, and (potentially) less to those who start with more. The recent debate about compensatory education dollars doled out by the state to help correct differences between socioeconomic groups, which had previously been divided equally among schools (the same amount per pupil per school) but are now divided more equitably by school (higher amounts to schools with more students are in disadvantaged groups and lower amounts to schools with less) is a good illustration of this divide.

In graduate school, I took a class from Myron Orfield, one of the foremost scholarly proponents of court-ordered integration in public schools. Predictably, Orfield has his share of critics from the right, who question things like anti-segregation busing or creative line drawing in the name of equality as overwrought social engineering. By the time I was in his classroom, however, the most vocal of Orfield’s opponents were coming from the left, and they usually framed their beef in a racial lens. These critics questioned whether mixing people together in the name of integration was a good in and of itself, and argued that shipping kids of color to more white schools in the belief that exposure to kids at such schools would somehow lift their performance was actually rather insulting to students of color. Instead, these critics argue, districts should invest more resources in neighborhood schools that acknowledge and lift up the culture of the people of color. In oversimplified terms, Orfield was a proponent for equality; his new critics wanted equity.

There’s a key difference in the Duluth proposals: by sending Woodland kids on a bus journey across the city to Lincoln Park and Denfeld, ISD 709 wouldn’t be busing kids from low-income families to more affluent schools; it would be doing the reverse. Several people in my circles who I’d generally describe as relatively well-off liberals really like this: they recognize their kids enjoy advantages that won’t fade away if they go to Lincoln Park instead of Ordean East, and they want to send them to mixed schools that reflect the general makeup of the country (or, at least, the area) that they will encounter when they complete their K-12 educations. The loud, angry reactions from Woodland were certainly predictable, though, as were the more practical concerns about logistics and drive times. As the Star Tribune pithily noted, the one thing the attendees at a workshop at Duluth East could agree on was that they didn’t like any of the options.

Fundamentally, these debates run directly along the most pronounced fissures in American society and asks a profound question: can an increasingly diverse school district in an increasingly economically divided metro area find some way to draw lines to mend the fences? Without launching into a discourse on Robert Putnam’s findings on diversity and social trust or the various competing contact and conflict theories of diverse societies, I’ll just say this: diversity, whether racial or socioeconomic, is complicated. And it should be if we acknowledge the full range of human possibility, and that complication deserves respect. In cases like this, I think it’s helpful to strip away the overarching theory for a moment and look at the incentives that changes might create.

What Incentives Do Boundaries Create?

School boundaries are, of course, one tool that communities can control that can shape their divides. But is drawing lines in ways that aim toward balance the best way to achieve that? (When court-ordered across a metropolitan area Orfield’s evidence would say yes, but that’s not what we’re talking about here: people have a lot of other choices.) And is there merit in working to have a critical mass of kids from certain backgrounds in the same place so that they can build a community and so that it becomes easier to deliver any additional support they may need? (If so, what exactly is this “group” we’re talking about?) For that matter, how would the various scenarios affect things such as compensatory education dollars? Redrawing boundaries could reshape the district in myriad ways.

If I sound more cautionary about district-driven integration than one might assume given some of my past writings, part of the reason has to be lived experience: when the Red Plan went into place, it too sought to equalize elementary school enrollments, but trends have not gone the way its architects expected. Some of this is only natural; it’s hard to predict the future, and as many in and around the district have noted, boundaries are something schools should revisit periodically.

But Duluth’s trends over the past ten years were not particularly hard to foresee. The two most affluent elementary schools, riding their reputation, became overcrowded; many of the lowest-income schools, meanwhile, bled kids. I’d need access to more data to say whether this is a product of open enrollment out of the district on the west side or families with kids consciously choosing to live in Congdon or Lakeside—most likely it’s some combination of the two—but it’s a pretty obvious trend. People will vote with their feet no matter where the lines are drawn. The question, then, is how individual schools can act in ways that attract students instead of pushing them out.

I don’t think this observation necessarily has obvious implications. Would Scenario 1 or 3 lead Woodland families to bail on the district, either by enrolling elsewhere or chopping Woodland of the list of neighborhoods they consider? It’s a very real possibility. Or do enough stay put and thereby create positive feedback loops into the western schools, thereby strengthening them (assuming one believes they actually need to be “strengthened”) and leading fewer families to bail out into Hermantown or Wrenshall or private or charter schools? We have a decade worth of data on those enrollment trends from other neighborhoods post-Red Plan to inform forecasts of what might happen here. Whichever option the district chooses, it needs to rely on more than a wishful belief in good intentions.

Fear for the Future

The questions surrounding the Woodland debate feed into a broader trend I observe so often now, whether in school choice or in any number of realms, from youth athletics to friend circles, that affect children’s futures. The logic of late capitalism has led child management for positive outcomes to become a second job, and parents will spend as much of their resources as they can to seek what they believe to be better. I don’t doubt that this has always been true to some extent, just as Duluth has always been divided between east and west, but it seems so much more pronounced now: there is a fundamental panic that things might go wrong, the product of a precarious society where even the well-off do not feel comfortable in their stations. Some west side parents feel forced to defend their choice to send their kids to the neighborhood schools as if it were a risky proposition.

This precarious world is a product of a socioeconomic climate where parents are scared their kids won’t be able to match or exceed their parents’ living standards. In an environment filled with choice, people panic that if they do not make the right choice, they may be setting their children up for failure. They may or may not be right, but perception is reality, and the need to choose correctly creates self-reinforcing loops. In this environment, the typical parent who does not live diversity and socioeconomic theory (and even a healthy number who do) will make the choices that most minimize risk of the concerns they have. They will, once again, vote with their feet.

Part of me wants to roll my eyes at this endless push. On a certain level, kids will be fine; unless it is a truly chaotic environment where no learning can take place, the evidence is pretty clear that factors beyond schools play much bigger roles in kids’ prospects than what goes on in the building itself. In my volunteer role as a college admissions interviewer for my alma mater, I’ve seen no evidence that talented kids with good support networks can’t make it in to the Georgetowns of the world, no matter where in the Duluth area they go to high school. But can I pretend that some of these considerations aren’t present as I decide which neighborhoods to focus on when I buy a house in this city sometime this year? No, I can’t.

School boundary discussions are wicked problems with no easy solutions, perhaps because we can’t quite agree on the question. Even the most committed, well-meaning believers in an integrated society struggle with where to draw lines, literal and figurative, for their own children. To that end, maybe it’s best that we pause and remember what lines cannot do: they cannot reverse people’s opinions on social and economic divides; they cannot make well-off kids dumber or turn students from hopelessly broken homes into college-bound scholars. Maybe that can offer some reassurance to both those in panic over potential changes and the full-throated believers in the transformative power of integration. Still, those who ultimately draw the lines have the task of managing the process with care and understanding for all of the people—and through them, the very fabric of a community—their decisions affect. May they choose well.

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Sobriety Amid a War

Whatever else one might say, I’ve never thought the United States doesn’t have the government it deserves. The results of the 2018 midterms reflect an increasingly polarized electorate, and promise two years of rancor to make the past two look tame. The polls were mostly right, though the Republicans can claim some real wins in the Senate and the Democrats now have power over the House. In a saner world this would prompt humility amid both parties, but we all know better than that by now. President Donald Trump again showed his peerless ability to turn out his base, and the Democrats now have some decisions to make as they decide whether to keep their gerontocratic House leadership or start anew, and whether to open up every possible investigation or learn from the 1990s Republicans’ excesses on that front. Let the fun begin.

Here in Minnesota’s eighth congressional district, Republican Pete Stauber collected a 5-point win, and gave his party one of its few bright spots in the House. The final result was almost in the dead-center of those two contradictory New York Times polls. He ran a very disciplined campaign, had massive institutional support, and had the distinct advantage of a clear field in the primary that spared him a bruising fight or a real need to take concrete positions on things versus a more Trumpy or more moderate challenger. (Sorry, Harry Welty. whatever you might say, you’re not a Republican anymore.) He stayed on point and rode a strong image, mild email flap aside, to a win. He outpaced 2016 Republican Stewart Mills by a fairly consistent margin across the district; only St. Louis County really held its margin for the Democrat, and the biggest Republican gains were not in the much-hyped swinging Iron Range, but in the rural counties that were already the reddest parts of MN-8. I’m very curious to see if Stauber now governs as the moderate suburban dad that was at the core of his persona as a candidate, or if the nationalizing forces in congressional politics lead him to vote in lockstep with his now-minority party in the House.

Joe Radinovich, on the other hand, didn’t enough to win in the face of an unfriendly district and some huge ad buys against him. He failed to control the narrative early, allowing his personal issues to dominate the race and set an ugly tone. Even when things stabilized somewhat, his messaging was a fairly generic turn to bread-and-butter DFL issues like healthcare, not the potentially race-flipping roar of old DFL labor power or some sort of independent fresh turn.

Radnovich, with his youth and lack of a professional life outside of politics, never could assume the rugged fighter’s mantel of a Tom Rukavina or a Rick Nolan. This isn’t to say another candidate from the Democratic primary would have outpaced him; the two who ran second and third were probably too disliked by one wing of the party to do any better, and everyone else was too much of an unknown. Instead, many of the more experienced Democrats who I think could have closed the gap somewhat—a cast that includes Tony Lourey and early retirees Tony Sertich, Don Ness, and Carly Melin—stayed out. (Yes, I think Radinovich’s fiancé would have been a stronger candidate than he was.) Incumbent Rick Nolan overreacted to the threat of a primary fight and dropped out, depriving the DFL of a proven winner; Leah Phifer overreacted to the contested convention, killing any energy the base might have mustered. The Democrats were left with a nice guy who was nowhere near their best option. After much hand-wringing in Democratic circles about Skip Sandman’s potential spoiler role, his ultimate share of the vote wouldn’t have made a difference either way.

So maybe a different Democrat would have made a difference, but maybe not: the results across the nation on Tuesday showed an increasingly nationalized politics, where national leanings are more and more accurate predictors of congressional seats. MN-8, with its very white working class population away from the shores of Lake Superior, is a Republican-friendly seat. As a whole, Minnesota is now in the advanced stages of a realignment, as the four flipped House seats show; it will be complete when Collin Peterson retires or Minnesota gets redistricted in 2021. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party might now be more accurately called the Democratic-Suburban-College-Educated Party, while the Republicans are anything but the Independent Republicans (their name in Minnesota until the 1990s), and are now very much the party of Trump. I expect some plaintive cries from labor Democrats and country club Republicans in the coming days as they try to figure out where their parties have gone. The world has changed.

Unlike some other states, this trend does favor the Democrats as a whole in Minnesota, as the North Star State has a dominant, white-collar metro where there are more votes to collect than in dwindling rural areas. We certainly saw that in the statewide races, where Democrats maintained their stranglehold. That was no surprise with the dominant Senator Amy Klobuchar or with Tim Walz, the governor-elect with a throwback talent for retail politics. I was, however, a bit surprised to see Tina Smith track nearly evenly with Walz. For a candidate who did not exactly exude charisma, her comfortable win was one of the brighter spots for the Democrats on an otherwise rough night in the Senate. Keith Ellison’s narrow win suggests that a front-line Republican candidate could have exploited the controversy surrounding Ellison’s alleged spousal abuse, but Doug Wardlow was not that, and a rare opportunity slipped away.

In down-ballot northeast Minnesota races, there was little to write home about; the big news here, with the Democrats flipping back the state House, took place almost exclusively in the aforementioned suburbs. Moderate Republican Sandy Layman kept the Itasca County seat she flipped two years ago, while the Democrats did appear to claw back a Bemidji area district by an infinitesimal margin. (Expect a recount there.) In the one open house race vacated by MN-8 DFL nomination aspirant Jason Metsa, Dave Lislegard of Aurora cruised. In Lislegard one sees the increasingly rare figure who can still decisively claim Range labor power and could probably win a general election in MN-8, but his staunch support of non-ferrous mining is going to be a liability in any primary. While I don’t think it was decisive this year, that divide is going to be an anchor dragging down the MN-8 DFL in one direction or another until that debate is resolved, if it ever truly is.

Closest to home, the Duluth school referendums outpaced my expectations, with a comfortable win for the second ballot measure aimed at drawing down class sizes and a very narrow defeat for the third, technology-oriented piece. As has been the case in past cycles, the second referendum’s success relied on heavy support on the east side overpowering opposition out west, though this time around there were some exceptions around Denfeld and in Lincoln Park to run up the pro-levy margins. The passage of the new levy follows on the wave of strong support for establishment candidates in the 2017 school board elections, so it seems safe to declare any lingering rancor over the Red Plan thoroughly in the rear view mirror of most Duluth voters. This city supports its public education, and district leadership now must invest its new funds wisely. (Annoyed aside to the city clerk: why didn’t you publish the results of the five ISD 709 townships in your breakdown of precinct results, as you have in the past? And while you’re at it, maybe update your format to something that doesn’t look like a photocopy from 1956?)

As one friend and I observed, there was no real cause for drinks for either party last night, either in celebration or in sorrow. The semi-United States are divided and lurching in opposite directions, as blue areas get bluer and red areas get redder. That fact should be sobering, but for the partisans in their bubbles, it won’t be. The national political environment hews all too closely to that of Lyndon B. Johnson in All the Way, and until some people figure out how to fight those battles while still pushing politics somewhere else, we will have more of the same.

Half-Hearted Election Eve Notes 2018

I feel obligated to put out an election preview post, though I struggle to find much to say that has not already been said at the national level. I’m not really in the forecasting business, and I enjoy carrying on my feeble localist quest to not let my opinions on national politics to bleed into writing on other issues. But I live in a state that probably has the highest percentage of competitive congressional seats in the country (outside of those with one or two seats), a gubernatorial election and two open senate seats, and also a whole bunch of other stuff.

The race for the Minnesota Eighth Congressional District, my home district, has mostly made me not want to pay any attention. (Way-too-early preview here; primary reaction here.) The level of discourse has been truly putrid, and I am left trying to decide whether I prefer a congressional representative who had a few parking tickets and smoked pot once or one who sent a handful of harmless emails from the wrong account. That’s what’s at stake here, right?

As has become the norm, we likely won’t know the outcome in MN-8 until late in the night on Tuesday. I’m taking it as a given that Pete Stauber will gain on Stewart Mills’ margin two years ago on the Iron Range, but that leaves a few questions that could swing the outcome. First, do the North Metro bits of the district become slightly bluer in a year when the suburbs are trending in that direction, or are they too far out for that wave to reach? But, if this is a close race, in the end I think the most crucial battleground will be Duluth. The Stauber name is well-known here, but it is also a Democratic bastion, and high turnout around Duluth was probably the difference-maker for Nolan in 2016. I’m not convinced Radinovich has done enough to shore up that flank, especially with Skip Sandman set to skim off a healthy chunk of voters disillusioned by his embrace of non-ferrous mining projects on the Range. My bead on this race hinges on two rather contradictory New York Times polls and a lot of guesswork from my work-related travels to most corners of MN-8; after Stauber seemed to take command of the race in October, my sense (shared by that of MN-8 election punditry eminence Aaron Brown) is that Radinovich is closing some down the stretch, but it may not be enough unless it really does turn into a big night for Democrats nationally. I have a lot of thoughts on both campaigns, but we’ll save the Monday morning quarterbacking for Wednesday.

In the rest of the Minnesota House seats, anything seems possible, from Democrats controlling seven of eight to a surprise upset of Collin Peterson in CD-7 giving the Republicans six, or just four seats flipping for a net change of zero. The other big-ticket races will only be dramatic if the Republicans dramatically over-perform the polls. Amy Klobuchar will roll to re-election, Tim Walz seems like a fairly comfortable favorite over Jeff Johnson, and Tina Smith probably has enough of a wave beneath her to resist fend off a spirited effort from Karin Housley. The most interesting statewide race of the night may be the Attorney General contest between Keith Ellison and Doug Wardlow, in which neither candidate has exactly piled up the positive press.

Meanwile, here in Duluth, there is one local race that’s actually interesting: we have three school board levies on the ballot. The first renews an existing levy and a second aims to reduce class sizes; as someone who would like to send his children to good Duluth public schools someday, they are no-brainers. I am a bit peeved by the third one, which focuses on technology upgrades instead of increasing class options, which the school board momentarily discussed. Moreover, the digital divide between the rich and the poor is increasingly the reverse of what conventional wisdom might assume. Poor kids get screens shoved in front of them for diversion all the time now, while the well-off have recognized that things like human interaction and personal attention, shockingly, are more valuable to their kids’ well-being, and forced their schools to respond accordingly. Students need personal attention, smaller classes, and—most relevant to ISD 709—seven-period days that allow for more class choice. But I doubt that one will pass anyway; the second question will also likely face serious opposition, and if its rejection is a prelude to some fresh thought on some of these questions within the district, it won’t be the end of the world.

I could trail on, but the world really doesn’t need any more pre-election hypothesizing. I’ll save my comments for the day after, if we know who’s won by then. Time to swallow my cynicism over awful ads and nationalized campaigns for a little while and get the popcorn ready. Even when it’s terrible, democracy can still be pretty entertaining.

Of Congressmen and Mockingbirds

Time to make a rare foray back into political commentary on two Duluth area stories that have made national attention this past week.

A Congressional Free-For-All

Well, everyone else is doing it, so I’d like to declare my candidacy for—nah. Not a chance in hell.

Rick Nolan threw the race for Minnesota’s 8th congressional seat for a loop with his abrupt decision not to seek re-election last week. (For much more timely and thorough coverage than mine, visit Aaron Brown’s blog.) I pointed to Nolan as a survivor after his 2016 win despite the Trump tide in his district, but the center he held to pull together the MN-8 DFL—economic and social populism to satisfy the base, and unabashed support for mining projects to preserve the Iron Range votes—began to fray this term. He faced a spirited primary fight from Leah Phifer, a 30-something former intelligence analyst who argued it was time for a fresh voice in Washington. Gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Otto’s win in the MN-8 DFL caucuses was a sign that Nolan was going to face a real battle, though my own suspicions about his candidacy began to creep in a few weeks earlier when he called off a Duluth fundraiser.

I found it fascinating that Phifer became the rallying point for environmental causes when her public stance on non-ferrous mining is actually a fairly muted endorsement of existing processes. It goes to show just how jaded the DFL’s environmental base was with Nolan’s attempt to defund a U.S. Forest Service study that that came along with a late Obama-era moratorium that it flocked to a moderately more acceptable candidate. This is the wedge issue in the MN-8 DFL, and Nolan’s rock-solid liberal credentials neither assuaged the environmental left nor drove away Iron Range blue collar social conservatives. To her credit, Phifer also scored authenticity points with her early entry and trailblazing around the district, and a young, female political newcomer was a better fit for the DFL base’s current mood than some of the male longtime politicians like Nolan, and some of those who could now oppose her. Time will tell if she is a serious contender or merely playing Eugene McCarthy to Nolan’s LBJ, but she’s certainly made a splash.

There is room on several sides of Pfeiffer within the DFL for competition to emerge. If the pro-non-ferrous mining camp wants a champion of its own, its foremost options are Jeff Anderson, a native Ranger and Duluth city councilor in the 00s, and Jason Metsa, the state representative in the Virginia area. North Branch mayor Kirsten Hagen Kennedy, the first announced new entrant to the race, has loosely come out in favor of non-ferrous mining, and if no one from the Range chooses to enter, she could be the beneficiary, though she has a fairly large name recognition gap on the rest of the field. Meanwhile, we have an entrant to Phifer’s left, and it’s an intriguing one: longtime Duluth TV anchor Michelle Lee. She has the media savvy and the positive general perception that she could perform well, especially in a crowded primary where turning out a base will be key. Her announcement also made it clear she isn’t going to try to “thread the needle” on the big wedge issue, as she will oppose non-ferrous mining. Candidates who leave no room to one side of themselves on this issue, for or against, are going to get some vocal supporters.

On the list of people who will probably try to thread that needle, one candidate has already declared for the race: Joe Radinovich, a former one-term state congressman who had just taken a job as chief of staff to new Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey. Like Mayor GentriFrey, he comes off as a polished young candidate groomed for politics who will take some principled stands here and there—his support for gay marriage probably cost him his House seat—but otherwise speaks in sweeping, optimistic generalities. I could see his candidacy finding the middle ground, or crashing and burning in a crowded field. Duluth area senator Erik Simonson has opposed non-ferrous mining, but does have some union bona fides that might not totally doom him on the Range if he were to enter the race. If there’s a safe pick to bridge divides, it’s probably state senator Tony Lourey, who has a long track record in the legislature, has consistently won in a very rural district, and carries a valuable family name in liberal circles. But we’ll see if he has any real interest, and if his style can succeed in a political environment that would seem to reward turning out core supporters.

No one has an easy path. Skip Sandman still looms there to drain votes away from any Democrat who supports non-ferrous mining, but any DFLer who doesn’t support it is going to take some blows on the Iron Range. A Michelle Lee-type figure would need to limit the damage there, turn out the base in Duluth, and try to make inroads in the Twin Cities exurban portions of the district that don’t much care about mining debates. Lourey and maybe Radinovich might have the best odds in a general election, but 2016 reminds us that candidates need to inspire enthusiasm in addition to seeming electability, and they’ll have to get through a crowded primary. If the DFL has a saving grace, it is probably its ground game in the Eighth; if the primary winner comes through without too many burned bridges, he or she will have the backing of a very strong infrastructure.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have a much cleaner field right now. Pete Stauber, who has a lot of potential, remains the only declared candidate. Stewart Mills is apparently pondering a third run now; while he has the money for it, he feels like an also-ran at this point. That leaves Minnesota House Speaker Kurt Daudt lurking in the shadows as the only likely person who could both win the nomination and the general. Conventional wisdom says Nolan’s withdrawal ups Republican odds of a win, since Nolan has proven resilient in past election cycles, but Nolan’s left flank on mining (and mining alone!) was exposed enough that I’m not sure that will be the case until we know who the Democratic nominee is. At this point, all Stauber can do is try to build familiarity as the Democrats squabble with one another, and we’ll revisit this if someone else jumps in.

To Kill a Reading Assignment

The other newsmaker in Duluth recently was a decision by the Duluth school district to strike two classic texts, To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn, from the curriculum due to their use of racial slurs. I’ll concede that my initial reaction was visceral: I cringe at any seeming attempt to wash away unpleasant histories, and I’m a graduate of this district who read and was moved by both. The world of Mockingbird may be an idealized version of the South, but the standard it sets for childhood recognition of injustice and moral conduct in the face of it deserves the credit it has earned. I struggle to think of a book that inspired a more emotional reception from the classroom in my high school years.  Huck Finn, while probably less beloved, is still perhaps the most complex work of one of America’s most delightful authors, and is the rare novel with literary merit that unabashedly captures the voice of an adolescent boy. And while I acknowledge that there was a fair amount of discomfort among some (white) classmates of mine in reading a certain word over and over again, I would like to think that a high school classroom should aspire to be exactly the sort of safe space where students can come to recognize the full extent of racist sentiment in American history, and hold a productive discussion about what it means, and how far we have (or haven’t) come. If not here, then where?

Of course, I know nothing of what it is like to read these books as a black kid. (For that matter, there wasn’t a single African-American in either of my Duluth East English classes in which we read these books.) And while I will defend the concept of a historical literary canon that captures the best of literature, I also don’t think that these things have to be static, with certain books taught in perpetuity. Canons grow and evolve, and there are a lot of good books that can touch on similar themes without losing literary merit. Books in English classes shouldn’t just be “relatable,” as good writing needs more than that, but there are points at which books become so inaccessible that there are better alternatives. I’ve seen plenty of suggestions bandied about already, and would have a couple of my own, too, if there were space for a productive community conversation here. The district could have that very debate internally, perhaps while including community stakeholders such as the NAACP at the table, but instead decided to make the decision first and then respond later.

What irks me most about this was how it was handled. No teachers, nor even the school board, had any say in the matter. It was an edict handed down from on high, as has become the norm in this district. (I’ve usually heard good things about curriculum director Mike Cary, but how naïve did he have to be not to realize this would happen, as he seems to suggest in his claim that this “took on a life of its own before having a chance to talk about it,” when the very first talk anyone outside of a district office heard on this was the announcement that the books were gone?) All too predictably, this drew some fairly negative coverage, and now the district gets itself splattered across national headlines, and occasionally used as a punchline. I sometimes think that ISD 709 could find some way to turn getting the best test scores in the state into a PR nightmare. This is the direct result of its manner of engagement with its most important stakeholders, its students and its teachers. Some things never change.

How Good Is That School, Anyway?

How do we measure the quality of a high school? Some schools have high test scores or send lots of kids to good colleges, but family and friends and general atmosphere probably matter far more for students’ odds at success. There are basic metrics such as the standardized tests du jour, which are very good at measuring how well students take standardized tests. The caliber of the hockey program is, of course, also an important consideration. (I jest…mostly.) Accurate measures are hard to find, though I’d still find more value in things like graduation rates and ACT or SAT scores, which, for all their flaws, are remarkably good predictors of college success. But  assumes these schools are all starting from the same place, which they simply are not. A better question asks how schools work with the students they have, rather than wishing they had.

There’s no elegant way to control for income and parents’ education and all those things, but free/reduced lunch rates are one option. What happens, for example, if we graph average ACT scores from 2012-2015 in comparison to the free/reduced lunch rates at all traditional public high schools in northeast Minnesota? Well, this happens:

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Click all images to enlarge.

Three schools stand out here: Duluth East, Esko, and Hermantown sit off by themselves at the upper left end of the graph. This shouldn’t be terribly surprising, as basically all of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the region feed into these three schools. Those demographics are friendly to strong test scores, but don’t necessarily mean a school is doing an especially good job in and of itself. Take Hermantown, for example: it’s a growing town, and invariably, young people who consider moving there talk about “the schools” as one of the reasons. Yet this graph suggests that Hermantown’s schools do a decidedly average job—even a slightly below average job—for the population they serve. People may think they’re moving for the schools, but whether they realize it or not, they’re moving for a demographic makeup that makes it easy to have a good-looking school by traditional metrics with far less effort. This is not to pick on Hermantown, which still does a reasonably good job of things, and there’s plenty to be said for wanting one’s children surrounded by other like-minded achievers. But it does show what a disservice we do when we rate schools by the most basic metrics.

At the risk of sounding a bit smug about my alma mater, East’s over-performance is actually pretty impressive given that it is already toward the high end; that said, it’s probably worth noting that East’s attendance area, while holding more poverty than Esko or Hermantown, also contains some uniquely wealthy and highly educated neighborhoods that may pull scores up. Its large student body also probably insulates it from dramatic year-to-year swings. The larger Range schools, meanwhile, perform quite well, as does Cloquet.

Denfeld, which is too often the source of less-than-happy stories about local education, modestly overachieves compared to the region. The school’s struggles when compared to its east side counterpart are entirely predictable based on who goes there, and this data suggests that’s not really the fault of the school. There may still be reasons to be leery of a place like Denfeld if it’s failing to offer the same advanced courses or difficult for students to build a schedule that incorporates those classes, but the school itself and its instructors seem to be doing fine. Places like Proctor and Wrenshall, though, where a number of kids in the Denfeld attendance area go to open enroll, actually underachieve. Floodwood, Carlton, and Bigfork all raise big red flags. High-poverty Deer River, meanwhile, exceeds expectations by a solid margin.

But wait, this may or may not be the most accurate way to do this: not everyone took the ACT until 2016, when the state of Minnesota required all students to sit for it. This is what happens when all students take the test, not just those who want to:

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It’s one year of data, so the smaller sample is somewhat limiting, but the shift after the new requirement was predictable. Scores dropped across the board, since a lot of students who are not college-bound sat for a college aptitude test. Generally, this change makes well-off schools look better, and poorer schools look worse, as the steeper trendline shows. The wealthiest schools all hover around the lowest score drops, which probably reflects the fact that the bottom end in these schools is a lot higher than it is elsewhere. Meanwhile, we see big drops on the Range and in some of the poorer schools, including some schools that looked pretty good in the data from previous years, like Virginia and Cloquet. (To Cloquet’s credit, it still does pretty well.)

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Drop in ACT scores when all students required to take test. The statewide average drop was 1.6.

There are two very contradictory ways to interpret this: one, these schools’ great scores from before tear down the curtains and suggest they’re not really that great, but instead serve their top students well while the rest shuffle along. Two, the ACT is not a great measure of what a high school is supposed to do: not every kid is destined for college, and maybe these schools are also educating the less academically-inclined kids well, and just channeling their talents in different directions. Most likely they are both true to some extent.  (Worth noting: this region has an exceptionally high number of people with associate’s degrees or other degrees that are “less” than a bachelor’s degree, but can be tickets to good, steady employment in certain trades. At the same time, the region’s average ACT score is somewhat lower than the statewide average, whereas its graduation rate outpaces the state.)

One way to plausibly better judge a school’s performance is to measure graduation rates against free-reduced lunch rates. Even if kids aren’t going on to college, they’re still equipping kids with the basic skills and credentials for whatever they do next. Of course, one could also argue that these schools are just funneling under-qualified students through the system.

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And, sure enough, if we correlate graduation rates and free/reduce lunch rates, we get a more complicated picture than with the test score graph, and see that some poor schools do an excellent job of getting students diplomas, while others do not. Here, the three affluent schools all under-perform the trendline mildly—though maybe the trendline should flatten out somewhat at higher levels—places like Greenway, Carlton, and Bigfork do a good job of graduating their students despite weak test scores.

The fundamental point here: just because a school has lower poverty rates does not necessarily mean it is good; just because it has higher rates does not mean it is bad. And yet educational reforms that supposedly aim to improve outcomes somewhere along the line, such as making all students take college aptitude tests whether or not they’re going to college or efforts to block teachers from teaching courses for college credit—a pitiful example of credential obsession at its worst—only tend to make the rich look richer and the poor look poorer. The rest becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as students drain out of the weaker-seeming schools and flock to the ones that appear strong, whether or not they really are actually better. Few things make my blood boil quite like educational bureaucracy and the underwhelming efforts to get around it.

The idea of rating schools is always fraught with difficulty, and I wouldn’t want to try to reduce the complicated things that go into an education to a single number. College rankings are trashy enough, and I say that even as someone who probably puts more stock in the value of educational prestige than most. If I had to pick out a few things I’d like to see to judge a school’s performance, though, I’d look for a high school’s college graduation rate (separated out for both bachelor’s and associate’s degrees). I’d also want a raw percentage of students earning the very highest test scores (say, ACTs over 30). And I’d control it by free/reduced lunch rate, because not all success is as it seems. It’s not a perfect way to gauge schools, but it’s at least an improvement over the poverty of current methods.

Data source: Minnesota Department of Education. Northeast Range High School (Babbitt) excluded due to lack of data.