A recent quote by a southern Minnesota superintendent piqued my interest. In a news report aired on KIMT in Mason City, Iowa, reporter Gwen Siewert talked to  school leaders in four districts about the progress of their four-year program to share resources to save money.

The southern Minnesota districts are Lyle, Glenville-Emmons, Grand Meadow and LeRoy. They agreed two years ago to share special education services. The program is working and they say sharing teachers, textbooks and administrators may be down the road.

Here’s the quote that jumped out at me: Lyle Public Schools Superintendent Jerry Reshetar said “we’ve got to get by with less, how do we do that? And that’s why these schools have to come together and say let’s figure out a way to do this. So we can reduce our cost and maintain our high level of education.”

A fair enough thought, but what occurs to me is why schools must make do with less? Why do they have to reduce their costs while pulling rabbits out of hats to maintain quality?

The state has gutted education spending since 2003. Schools can’t fold, so they stay open while ratcheting down their resources, forcing the quality of education to suffer. Fewer teachers in the buildings mean fewer subject choices. More students in the classroom means less time spent with teachers. Dropout prevention, early childhood education, the achievement gap – when do these necessities get addressed?

The cost of providing a quality education may seem high, but it is nowhere near as high as the price to be paid if schools are not adequately funded and students are not adequately educated.

Schools are not businesses, and education budgets aren’t like business budgets. Efficiency: Yes. Needless cuts, accounting gimmicks, education on a downward slide and an undereducated generation of Minnesotans unable to compete in the 21^st century workplace: No

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Taking a page straight from the Pawlenty playbook, Wilkin County has found a novel way of dealing with the cost of snow removal: it doesn’t. Minnesota rural counties, loath to follow the pattern of raising property taxes necessitated by Pawlenty’s tax ‘cuts,’ have been forced to find alternate ways to manage budgets. So, like Pawlenty, they pass the responsibility onto lower levels of government.  It’s a development Minnesotans now experience statewide as counties delegate responsibilities to local levels and townships and cities choose between raising taxes and not acting at all.

This winter, Minnesota’s rural counties decided on the latter option.  Townships like those in Wilkin County relegated plowing to only the main arteries and left three quarters of the roads untouched. Residents along these corridors have been advised to do their own plowing.  Minnesota Public Radio quotes Nordick Township supervisor Tony Nordick, “In the township I think we depend more on people helping themselves…It’s a small personal form of government.” And so again Minnesotans face the prospect of regressive taxation or the erosion of basic services.

This trend is not likely to end with the spring thaw. More and more, Minnesotans are being asked to open their wallets and cover responsibilities in areas once taken care of by local and state government. We are being forced to pay out of pocket for civic undertakings such as snow plowing and road improvements.  Townships are considering ways to outsource summer maintenance projects, and cities like Minneapolis, Edina, and Albert Lea are demanding residents share the cost of improvements to residential streets.

The bottom line is that we all pay for these services one way or another. Traditionally, Minnesotans have pooled resources to tackle costs collectively, lessening the burden on the individual. Snow removal is only the latest tangible example of how conservative ideology has dismantled this consensus and seeks to weigh down Minnesota families. In today’s wintry economic climate, conservatives expect individuals and families to shoulder the expense of even basic civic services.

The onus is now on us as Minnesotans to demand that the state stop passing the buck. Despite the recent balmy temperatures, winter’s not over yet, and we might just find ourselves buried with no plans for digging out.

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A survey released last week by Scholastic Inc., and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shows that teachers believe there should be multiple ways to measure student performance, and that student performance should be part of their yearly reviews.

More than 40,000 teachers in every grade and state were interviewed for the survey, “Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools.”

The survey revealed a truth that is obvious to most teachers but comes as a surprise to many outside the classroom: Standardized tests should not be the sole measure of student achievement, as is currently the case with the odiferous No Child Left Behind law and Minnesota’s own Graduation-Required Assessment for Diploma (GRAD). Assessment should be driven by classroom experiences, ongoing formative assessments during class, performance on class assignments and class participation.

“Having clear measures of student achievement is critical to teachers; they rely on student performance data to innovate and differentiate instruction in a variety of ways,” the report stated.

Also, the respondents expressed an opinion long held among teachers but little expressed among lawmakers and policymakers: The most satisfying part of their work is their time with peers and students. They also crave supportive leadership.

“Teachers say higher salaries, while important, are not as critical in retaining effective teachers as other, non-monetary rewards. Teachers say that the most accurate measures of their own performance are student engagement and student growth over the academic year,” the report found.

How do we apply the results of this national survey to Minnesota’s education system?

• We refuse to participate in No Child Left Behind until it is fixed to our satisfaction by Congress. Minnesota must measure student achievement on more than one test.
• We allow for rigorous yet more general ways to show mastery of essential subjects to achieve graduation. Minnesota must measure knowledge gained through better means than the GRAD test.
• We correct Q-Comp to resemble what teachers need and demand. Minnesota teachers want collaboration and the state should allow more of it. Tearing up the salary schedule has more to do with politics than it does with education.
• Which brings us to the final point: The teachers’ demand for supportive and innovative leadership should not stop at the school building door or the administrator’s office. Teachers must demand supportive leadership from Capitol Hill and the governor’s mansion. In Minnesota, anything less is unacceptable.

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On Friday, the Governor and legislators reached a “deal” on whether or not to continue providing health care to the state’s poorest residents, an issue Minnesota 2020 has been closely following. The good news is that the program, known as GAMC, will be extended and more than 20,000 adults can remain on MinnesotaCare, the health care program for middle-class Minnesotans in which Governor Pawlenty wanted to enroll GAMC recipients. The bad news is that the program will now be severely underfunded with no plans to address the real need that exists.

According to the Star Tribune, “The bill provides $91 million over 13 months to hospitals, at least $30 million less than would have been available to hospitals under the bill Pawlenty vetoed on Feb. 18, and perhaps half as much as they would have received under the original GAMC program, which Pawlenty vetoed last May.”

So it seems hospitals will now be responsible for any costs not covered by the state. It’s another example of Governor Pawlenty balancing the budget on the backs of Minnesota communities, school districts, and now local health care providers.

Is this a long-term solution for providing health care to poor and homeless individuals? Will cuts to programs like GAMC help the state in the long run?

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When a property owner appeals the county’s valuation of a property and the owner and the county assessor cannot come to an agreement as to the appropriate value for the property, the dispute is often turned over to the court system.  The Minnesota Department of Revenue has proposed a modest clarification to state law designed to make the presentation of evidence in regard to court valuation appeals conform to the intent of the legislature and to common sense.  Unfortunately, what should be a slam-dunk at the legislature has become mired in unnecessary controversy.

First, some background.  Historically, assessors who work for counties and other assessing jurisdictions have been allowed to testify and present appraisal information in court cases where the assessor’s valuation of a property is being contested.  However, in late 2009 a tax court ruled that assessors could no longer testify based on a 1993 law.  There seems to be universal agreement that the statute cited in the court ruling was not designed to prohibit all assessor testimony, but merely prevent assessors from moonlighting on private appraisals for fee on properties within their jurisdiction.

Recently the House and Senate Tax Committees considered a statutory change proposed by the Minnesota Department of Revenue that would restore the ability of assessors to present information in court.  A handful of Tax Committee members in both the House and Senate, under the mistaken impression that they were promoting tax justice, argued that if a property owner is required to hire an outside appraiser to contest their valuation in court, the assessing jurisdiction should have to do the same.

What this argument ignores is the fact that counties and other assessing jurisdiction are already hiring experts on property valuation who are licensed, thoroughly trained, held to high ethical standards, and authorized by state law to function as property appraisers.  They’re called “assessors.”  To forbid assessors from testifying in court regarding the rationale for the valuation they assigned to a property is nonsensical and was never the intent of state lawmakers.

During a time when local government budgets are already severely pinched, it makes no sense to impose a new cost on counties and other assessing jurisdictions by requiring them to hire outside appraisers to handle court cases when they already have qualified assessors on staff.  The legislature should side with frugality and common sense by reestablishing the ability of assessors to testify in court.

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It’s not going to happen. I’ll never be convinced that the four-day school week, implemented for budgetary and not learning reasons, is good for kids.

I received a note from a school administrator, working in a four-day week school, calling me out for my The Four-Day School Week is Failure Triumphant Minnesota 2020 Journal column. It was a direct communication rather than a “Your Take” letter to the editor post so I’ll respect the writer’s privacy.

In a nutshell, the administrator confronts my critical presumption that the four-day school week is, on its surface, bad policy, challenging me to provide data for my conclusions. Well, he has me there but that’s an issue that I raised in my column. “Comparative student performance data are absent because nobody wants to risk kids’ education just for the sake of determining if a four-day school is worse than a five-day school week.”

There’s no more data supporting the four-day school week than data exist opposing it. Thus, basing substantive instructional change on the “there’s no negative data” argument just plain gives me the heebie-jeebies.

In rural communities, travel distance and low population density complicates K-12 education. As a school bus riding kid, we had it pretty good because our farm is two and a half miles from town on the county tar. Some of my schoolmates rode the bus for 45 minutes though and this was in the 1970s. Westbrook-Walnut Grove Schools are still busing kids and while the bus makes fewer stops due to fewer students, the distance from the north end of Johnsonville Township to the high school in Westbrook remains 20+ miles, gravel roads, circuitous routes and changing buses in Walnut Grove not included.

As a state, we shouldn’t shrug our shoulders and walk away. The answer involves adequate base educational funding but also additional transportation funds necessary to get kids to school within a reasonable time period.

So, yes, a handful of western state school districts use the four-day school week due to great ranch to school distance but many, many more school districts in equally low population density areas find a way to make the five-day week work.

Contemplating my five-day school week orthodoxy and reflecting on the administrator’s letter, I’m still struck by the poor financial health profile of communities embracing or considering the four-day week model. In other words, wealthy communities -the Stillwaters, Minnetonkas, Wayzatas and Eden Prairies- of Minnesota aren’t remotely interested in a four-day week. The same can be said of private schools Blake, Cretin-Derham, St Paul Academy and DeLaSalle.

I worry that the five-day school will become a luxury of the secure. Moving Minnesota forward, realizing growth and prosperity, requires advance not retreat. So far, no one has convinced me, either with data or rhetorical persuasion, that the four-day week improves K12 education where it counts most: kids’ futures and families’ lives.

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They’ve arrived. Previously only seen in locales such as Las Vegas and Blade Runner-era Los Angeles, electronic billboards are popping up in the Twin Cities metro. The placement of one such board in West Saint Paul has drawn the ire of local residents, who say they were never given notice. This scenario is beginning to play out across the country as electronic advertisements gain prominence along roadways. The companies that install the ads are targeting local and state laws across the country to enable their proliferation in residential neighborhoods and other ‘protected’ areas. The new billboard in West Saint Paul may prompt legislation to stop further placement of the signs until cities decide on their own ordinances. The Minnesota legislature should be encouraged to remain proactive in guarding the peace of the state’s residents.

The goal of legislation limiting the electronic billboards in residential areas does not place unnecessary restriction on a firm’s right to advertise. This is instead a quality of life issue. Those forced to tolerate the signs benefit in no way from their presence. Indeed, they are most likely penalized by a potential loss of property value. The legislature’s measure, if it is drafted, should look at how obstructive advertising affects those who reside along the traffic corridors which feature billboards.

Yet electronic billboards are not only a nuisance to those who live in their general vicinity; they are also a danger on the road. The Federal Highway Administration issued a report detailing the safety concerns of animated and blinking electronic signage. Minnesota’s laws about what can and cannot be placed along a highway are relatively lax: the state only bans an advertisement “which has distracting flashing or moving lights so designed or lighted as to be a traffic hazard.” This apparently does not include the flashing jumbotrons we’re now seeing. The report looked at safety issues that arise in areas featuring billboards. While it concedes the difficulty of gaining accurate numbers for how drivers are affected, studies indicate that driving performance is impaired by the presence of electronic signs.

Minnesota’s elected officials should be encouraged to consider the well-being of its citizens first and take steps against garish billboards.

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Minnesota is not among the finalists for the federal government’s Race to the Top funds, the Obama administration announced Thursday.

There’s a phrase from the gambling world that seems appropriate at this point: When the table turns cold, it’s best just to walk away.

The money – as much as $350 million for Minnesota – would have been nice. But like so many things, it would not have been as simple as getting a check in the mail. Minnesota would have had to jump through hoops and make concessions to get that money, hoops and concessions that might not be in the best interest of Minnesota students.

Minnesota’s application for Race to the Top would have created an “Office of Turnaround Schools” that would close underperforming schools or hand them over to charter schools or for-profit companies. This is the wrong way to help these students. What would help them is to provide enough well-trained teachers with enough equipment in the proper facilities to do their jobs. Students at these schools need school nurses, counselors, social workers, mental and physical health assessments – a whole range of help that they don’t receive now because the state of Minnesota refuses to adequately fund schools.

Race to the Top would have handcuffed teacher salaries to a student achievement test. This is universally regarded as a bad idea, yet one still promoted by Gov. Pawlenty and his “Quality Compensation” plan.

No one seemed quite sure what would happen to Race to the Top programs when the federal money ran out. To keep them going, the state would have had to pick up the bill, yet state lawmakers had little to no input into the state’s Race to the Top application. This means that there was a very strong possibility that Race to the Top programs would not have lasted more than several years.

There was one good part of Race to the Top that Minnesota should enact on its own: Creating a database to track students as they move through the education system from preschool through college, if possible. Such a system will give teachers access to the data necessary to create an individualized learning plan for each student tailored to his or her strengths and needs.

Money from Race to the Top to fund such a database would have been welcome but as for the rest of it, well, maybe we got lucky.

The Obama administration will choose among the following states to divvy up the $4.3 billion in Race to the Top grants: Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee. The finalists will be announced in April.

For more information, check out the Star Tribune story.

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I am on to you Governor Pawlenty. It took me a while to understand the extent to which you plan to destroy Minnesota’s public health care, but I think I finally see the whole picture now.

First you cut GAMC, a health care program for the state’s poorest residents, explaining that it is both wasteful and unnecessary. The people currently on GAMC will all be shifted over to MinnesotaCare before GAMC runs out on April 1, 2010.  MinnesotaCare is currently available to Minnesotans who do not otherwise have access to affordable health care and whose income is between 150%-275% of federal poverty guidelines. Single adults without children are currently eligible for MinnesotaCare with an income up to 275% of poverty, but the Governor’s newest proposal to cut services include limiting that eligibility to only 75% of poverty for this group. Coincidentally, that is the same income eligibility requirement as the current GAMC. If the Governor’s newest proposal goes through it is estimated that some 21,000 Minnesotans currently on MinnesotaCare will lose their health care coverage.

MN2020 has previously mentioned that it is unlikely that more than 25% of the GAMC recipients transferred over to MinnesotaCare will successfully progress to traditional MinnesotaCare after their initial eligibility expires. This is due largely to the ill-fit of the program to the clients. The cost, the paperwork, and the requirement of continuous enrollment are difficult for most GAMC recipients, many of whom are homeless, to keep up.

If we assume that roughly 35,000 people are transferred to MinnesotaCare by April 1, but only 25% will remain with it, then we should also expect another 26,000 Minnesotans to be without coverage in the next 6 months or so. When the MN Dept. of Human Services calculated the estimated percentage of GAMC recipients who are likely to successfully transition to MinnesotaCare, there was the assumption that the GAMC population would still receive General Assistance of $203 per month. But Governor Pawlenty has proposed ending General Assistance on Dec 1, 2010. Without any income, it is likely that even more current GAMC recipients will be unable to keep up with MinnesotaCare, and come 2011, we will see even more people without any kind of public health care.

The effect of the Governor’s current (and possible future) policies is the end of GAMC and a MinnesotaCare that is neither here nor there as it becomes nearly exclusive to GAMC recipients (who for the most part will not be able to afford the program cost or keep up with the administrative requirements) and the few families who still fall within the eligibility requirements. And we  can expect to have another 45,000-50,000 people without access to affordable health care. Of course, the Governor can then pat himself on the back exclaiming “savings all around!”  What the Governor will fail to mention is those Minnesotans who will now be without health care or have inadequate health care, and the rest of us who will be stuck footing the bill of increased emergency room care and an overall sicker state.

It is truly a great plan to make Minnesota’s public health care mediocre, and with any luck we can soon become the 50th rather than the 43rd lowest ranked for public health spending as we continue our slide to the bottom.

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The village of Niederzimmern in eastern Germany is selling potholes for 50 euros. But this isn’t a case of anarchists, libertarians and teagarten partisans run amok trying to bring down government.

Rather, the AFP news agency and the The Local online newspaper reports that Niederzimmern is trying to have some fun handling a mess of potholes caused by severe winter weather. The global recession has stressed local governments’ ability to do roadwork.

This does bring to mind Minnesota’s successful “Adopt a Highway” program that has volunteers substituting for public employees. It works fairly well, but not perfectly.

A few years back, the president of Southwest Minnesota State University left to take a similar post out of state. Faculty friends presented him with an “Adopt a Highway” plaque for a section of state highway on the assumption they would get an annual visit when the former president returned to clean his road ditch.

Alas, it didn’t work. But some group in the Marshall area is keeping the roadway clear. Potholes, however, may need properly funded public works.

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