Based on the figures provided by Chris Johnson, it appears that the Minneapolis School District received a total of $695,906,636 for 2002-2003, which is about $45 million greater than the district's total revenues for 1999-2000. (3 years earlier)
And there appears to have been a comparable rate of growth in the district's operating budget, $10,226 per pupil now compared to about $9,500 a few years ago. Yet the district has made cuts to the tune of $100 million. Where did all that money go? Since the overall budget didn't shrink, it is evident that some expenses, like the superintendent's pay, increased a whole lot, and the holes were filled by firing teachers, bus drivers, a freezing the wages of union members (other than teachers). I looked at the MPS web site, but couldn't find any useful information about the budget, not even the incomplete and out-of-date information that was there about a year ago. And it is astonishing that the MPS is spending $10,226 per pupil compared to the average of $7,439 statewide (presumably for the operating budgets) and getting such poor results. I suspect that more than half of the difference is attributable to the high overhead costs involved with putting most of the MPS students into nonacademic curriculum tracks. The Minneapolis Public Schools has a curriculum tracking system which produces about the same results as the type of curriculum tracking system which superintendent Johnson says is illegal. From the earliest grades most MPS students are ability-grouped into separate classrooms on at least a part-time basis. With a few exceptions, elementary / K-8 schools assign students in the lower elementary grades to separate classrooms for reading instruction. There is one kind of reading instruction for the college-bound students and other kinds of reading instruction for the not college bound students. Since the curriculum in most areas is reading-based, the combination of part-time tracking for reading and in-class ability grouping in other subjects has about the same effect as the unquestionably illegal full-time tracking systems. And even the better schools within an integrated system are not very high quality if the resources that make good schools good are distributed unequally, as is the case in Minneapolis. For example, the least experienced MPS teachers have been heavily concentrated in schools that serve the poorest neighborhoods. It is usually the case that a teacher with no experience is a lot less effective than a teacher with 10 or 15 years of experience. The overexposure of students to inexperienced teachers creates an environment where the professional growth of teachers is stunted by comparison to teachers who work for school districts where inexperienced teachers are distributed more evenly between schools. -Doug Mann, King Field http://educationright.tripod,com TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
