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Fewer students, fewer dollars – blame the charters?
St. Paul Public Schools have seen steadily declining enrollment, according to figures from the SPPS Web site (2008 estimated). From 2001 to 2006, enrollment in Minneapolis Public Schools fell 23%, according to a 2006 independent demographic study commissioned by the Board.
The numbers certainly look dramatic – St. Paul enrollment alone is projected to fall 1,700 students between 2007 (K-12 enrollment 39,550) and 2009, according to the SPPS website – but does the declining enrollment in Minneapolis and St Paul public schools mean charters are winning the battle for “customer choice”?
Not so, say members of both the St. Paul and Minneapolis school boards. In interviews, several members sketched a complex situation influenced as much by demographics as much as by “consumer choice.”
Lydia Lee, chair of the Minneapolis Board of Education, described a district in a state of demographic turmoil, with the legal and financial odds stacked against it. For the last 10 years, the Minneapolis school district has been getting younger as more young professionals move into the city. However, most of these new arrivals are unmarried, and according to a 2004 independent demographic study commissioned by the district, many move away before starting a family.
In some neighborhoods, such as Minneapolis’s North Side, many families have moved out, Lee said Enrollment in North High School has dropped by one half since the mid-1990s. Part of the reason, according to Lee, is that an entire public housing complex was demolished, beginning in 1994, without locating most of the replacement units in the neighborhood. Families driven out by the foreclosure crisis might have an additional impact, she added, but it was too soon to tell. [Recent rumors to the contrary, North High will remain open.]
Most importantly, Lee said, the number of babies being born, both in Minnesota and the United States, is steadily declining, as the “baby boom” generation moves beyond child-bearing years, and their children have fewer children.
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Lee did not deny that charter schools have played a major role in drawing away students. However, citing independent studies commissioned by the district, she claimed that 40% of parents who pull their children from district schools choose charters because the district is legally required to provide transport for charter students from school to their front doors. As a cost-cutting measure, Minneapolis school buses currently pick up students in district schools from designated stops, instead of directly from a student’s front door. Lee said the parents surveyed were worried about their children’s safety as they walked from home to bus stop.
Transportation requirements, Lee said, not only impose a financial burden – the district is reimbursed for less than one fourth of the cost of transportation – but also strip away students. This also diminishes state and federal funding, since districts are given assistance on a per-student basis.
In contrast to Minneapolis’s complexities, Tom Goldstein, treasurer of the St. Paul school board, said St. Paul has a “dramatically different” situation.
Like Minneapolis, St Paul faces a steadily declining number of children born in very year. “Kids are aging out of the system,” and not being replaced by younger children, Goldstein said. As in Minneapolis, this means fewer state and federal dollars. To balance the budget, Goldstein said, teachers must be fired and some programs curtailed.
However, he said, administrative reforms several years ago mean the district can easily coordinate reforms throughout the school system, giving them an advantage when trying to build parent’s confidence in St Paul’s schools.
St Paul “certainly has some competition” from charter schools, Goldstein said, but instead of damaging the district, it forces them to be “more nimble and creative.”
New program offerings beginning in September 2008, such as the Hmong academy at Phalen Lake Elementary and the gender-segregated elementary classes at North End Elementary, are “most definitely a response to charter schools,” said St. Paul school board member Keith Hardy. The new programs are designed to compete with charter schools that have special academic or cultural focuses, Hardy said, and are intended to mitigate the unavoidable drop in students, until the trend levels off in the coming years.
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James Sanna is a freelance writer and an intern at the Daily Planet.
Comments
Where Did Ms. Lee Get This One?
To quote the article: “citing independent studies commissioned by the district, she (Lydia Lee) claimed that 40% of parents who pull their children from district schools choose charters because the district is legally required to provide transport for charter students from school to their front doors.”
WRONG! Minnesota Statute §124D.10 Subd 16 (C) requires the local public school district to provide transportation to resident students attending charter schools within the District boundaries when requested by the charter school. There is NO requirement for “door to door” transportation and, indeed, the statute specifically states “If the district provides the transportation,
the scheduling of routes, manner and method of transportation, control and discipline of the
pupils, and any other matter relating to the transportation of pupils under this paragraph shall be
within the sole discretion, control, and management of the district. “
How could a school board member get it this wrong?
Minneapolis schools are
Minneapolis schools are also facing the issue of a segregated city. Minneapolis is racially and economically segregated as a community. You have extremes of resources. In North Minneapolis you have trouble getting teams fielded. In the Southwest, it’s getting small neighborhood schools that are boutique in nature.
In St. Paul to a degree, there is a common culture. A sense of one community. That is not the case in Minneapolis right now. It is every community for itself and that is playing out sadly in our schools as well.
The most important thing we all can do is to acknowledge the segregation. This will not make the barriers disappear but it places our problems in the appropriate contexts. Second we have to limit the number of boutique programs. This means saying goodbye to some really cool but small programs. Finally, we need to end our love affair with the small neighborhood schools. The educational marketplace is diverse and many consumers are willing to travel to get their kids good educations. Maybe it’s time to reward those schools and teachers who get it done with bigger schools and budgets.
But first we have to admit that the problem is more structurally pronounced than just education.
"door-to-door" busing
@Anon. 23:43 — It seems like clarification is in order. In my interview with Lydia Lee, she was very explicit that busing for charter students was door-to-door, in contrast to the public school buses, which operate more like a MetroTransit bus, with designated stops where kids gather. She said the system was designed to reduce the number of miles driven by school buses, and was at pains to point out that district buses had to travel much farther to pick up and drop off charter school students, and that the situation was out of the district’s hands.
It’s possible that the state law you cited is not the final word — it leaves the door open to negotiated agreements with individual charter schools or groups of schools — and, it could be that whatever agreement or policy put the current busing scheme in place was arrived at before the district system was changed. I admit, I did not press her on how the situation came to be.
downsizing the MPS system
I am not surprised that parents opted to put their children in charter schools in many cases where bus service has been eliminated since the fall of 2002. I doubt that the cuts in service in 2002 really saved the district a lot of money in its transportation budget. And what it saved was more than offset by the decline in enrollment that the transportation cuts produced.
Prior to 2002 the district also pushed many students out of the district with the aggressive enforcement of a new attendance policy that overwhelmed the Hennepin County court system.
The school-age population in Minneapolis has been shrinking rapidly due to the migration of young families to the suburbs. African Americans and other people of color have been leaving Minneapolis in large numbers as parts of the suburban housing market have become more accessible.
The Minneapolis school district has long engaged in employment practices that drive up teacher turnover rates in schools where students of color are heavily concentrated, with teacher turnover rates exceeding 100% in most black schools in a 3 year period ending in 2004. For example, the district has been sending layoff notices to far more teachers than actually need to be laid off: All probationary teachers (first 3 years of employment) for many years, and in recent years to the more senior tenured teachers as well. The district actually spends far less money on educating ‘disadvantaged’ students and gets millions of dollars in ‘compensatory’ funding from the state and federal government that follows the same disadvantaged students.
The district also intensified its curriculum tracking system by sorting and grouping students into separate classrooms for reading instruction in grades K and 1 beginning in 1997. White students have been more heavily concentrated than black students in classes with a college-bound curriculum.
I advocate taking steps to drastically reduce teacher turnover rates, the most critical step being putting an end to the practice of sending layoff notices to more teachers than the district actually plans to layoff. With stable staffing, a school can more easily eliminate non-college-bound curriculum tracks without watering down the college-bound classes.
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