Editorial: Take dramatic steps if schools flunk test

Star Tribune Editorial

When it comes to "gaps" of various kinds, Minnesota has little to be proud of.

From health care to employment to education, this state has some of the widest disparities in the nation between haves and have-nots, and whites and people of color.

Now add another dubious distinction to the list.

In a recent study of 10 states, Minnesota was found have the highest rates of persistently low-performing charter and district schools and the lowest rates of closing those schools in the country.

That combination illuminates the need for Minnesota educators and school communities to stop giving lip service to efforts to close the performance gap by taking stronger action with poor-performing schools.

They need to use proven educational models and throw out methods that don't yield results, while getting tougher about closing schools and starting over when necessary.

Those turnarounds have drawn a lot of attention lately in part because the Obama administration is doling out $3.5 billion to motivate America's chronically bad schools to improve.

But a recent Thomas B. Fordham Institute report on Minnesota and nine other states found that only a tiny fraction of the worst schools dramatically improved, that very few struggling programs were shut down and that successful turnarounds are rare.

Fordham studied 2,000 chronically low-performing schools between 2004 and 2009 and found that only about 1 percent had reached their state's average performance in those five years.

A Brookings Institution study found that two-thirds of schools that were low-performing in 1989 were still low-performing two decades later.

Fordham, a conservative think tank, found that 94 percent of low-performing Minnesota schools remained so over five years.

Researchers examined math and reading outcomes for 17 charters and 67 Minnesota district schools that met the low-performance criteria.

District schools pretty much flat-lined during the five-year study period, showing no additional academic improvement. That's not good enough to prepare young people for productive adult lives.

However, the same data show some signs of progress at charter schools, and it revealed that poor charters are more likely to be closed than district schools.

Proficiency rates at some of the worst Minnesota charter schools improved from 30 percent up to 45 per percent, showing that they are on the right track.

A number of factors make it difficult to turn around or close struggling schools.

And in Minneapolis, school administration efforts to close North High School -- which has some of the lowest test scores and enrollment in the city -- are being fought by some members of the community.