The same old song at Minneapolis Public Schools

On Sept. 15, Minneapolis Public Schools presented a proposal to close 16 city schools. Under the guise of “School Transformation,” the proposal “reimagines” the district with fancy buzzwords that imagine students “thrive — academically, socially and emotionally.”

The incompatibility of closure with community thriving has not been lost on many. As a former MPS educator, I have spent seven years studying the history of MPS policy to make sense of historic disparities and the persistence of inequities in the district. 

As I reviewed news coverage and examined district materials on the proposed closure, the rhetoric echoed decades of what I have found in the archives. I sensed this policy history in the classrooms of MPS and have since had the time to qualify those feelings with facts that I hope help the public push back on policies that have harmed students, families and communities in the city. MPS has closed schools before, often under the pretense of improving education and budget efficiency. 

Related: Amid threat of school closures, MPS parents and teachers want more time on their side

One of the first major mass closures of Minneapolis Public Schools came in 1982. These closures were hardly insignificant as MPS had just been under a decade of court-ordered desegregation. Under Booker v. Special District No. 1 (1972), Judge Earl Larson found that MPS had exhibited a pattern of discriminatory policies segregating the district and requiring the application of precedents from Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the most northern reaches of the United States.

For a decade, Larson oversaw the court-ordered supervision of the district in an effort to remedy inequities. During those years, enrollment declined from 58,000 students to 29,000, while minority enrollment increased from 8,700 to 13,000.

The turbulent years of court-ordered school desegregation ended with the schools first Black superintendent, Richard Green, declaring success while also announcing plans to close 17 schools. Among those closed were the district’s most diverse, and in many cases those in the most disadvantaged communities, including Phillips Junior High and Central High Schools.

A decade of “neo-segregation” later, Minneapolis faced renewed calls from the NAACP for court intervention as academic achievement increasingly diverged along lines of race. School closures ensured any progress under court-ordered desegregation was undone, and by the turn of the century education in Minneapolis existed as an apartheid system. 

Since then, MPS has been subjected to rounds of reforms designed by public-private partnerships, often characterized as neoliberal education policies, at the expense of racially marginalized students. Most notably, MPS had policies that led to the 2007 closures of six Northside schools drawn up by McKinsey & Company and concealed through the Itasca Project, which worked behind the scenes drawing up education policy without public input, scrutiny or consent.

McKinsey’s role was explicitly acknowledged in the district’s 2010 Employee Handbook, though the Itasca Project hardly hid McKinsey’s influence. Significantly, these anti-democratic policy decisions drawn up behind closed doors, and by private interests, were done so under the guise of school improvement using “metrics and timing” to close schools and harm students during the past two decades when an “achievement gap” has been endemic in the district.

Related: Minneapolis school board approves budget for next school year

Even more recently, Superintendent Ed Graff pushed through a controversial plan to “restructure” the district in 2020 in the midst of the COVID pandemic, despite popular opposition, especially among students. Graff, who left MPS in 2022, had been working with consultant Dennis Cheesebrow and, just before the pandemic, had been promoting “optimal utilization” of school facilities. Narratives around “utilization” often argue that lower school building enrollment is less “efficient” despite evidence that shows the opposite is true — student achievement improves with smaller school sizes.

As teachers, parents, students and public school supporters face the prospect of more MPS closures, it’s important to put the evidence of the past in service of the future. This evidence shows that closing schools increases inequalities, harms student achievement and comes at the expense of participatory democracy.

With this at hand, it seems that public engagement, including resistance to these detrimental proposed policies, is what is required. In recent years, Minneapolis residents have met every challenge to thwart their rights in the city, from the murder of George Floyd to Operation Metro Surge. The struggle over equitable, high-quality public education as a right should be no different.

Christopher Getowicz is academic manager for the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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Originally reported by MinnPost by Christopher Getowicz. Read the full story at the source.