Fight for America's Future Tour 2010: Minneapolis/St. Paul

Dakota Hills Middle School and Eagan High School
May 19, 10:30 a.m.

Welcome to Lake Wobegon country, and, yes, humorist Garrison Keillor got it mostly right: The women are all strong here and the men good-looking enough. But that part about all the children being "well above average" may need to be revisited if school job cuts keep landing hard the way they have at places like Dakota Hills Middle School and Eagan High School, the first stops in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area and the final leg of the AFT's Fight for America's Future Tour 2010.

The schools share a campus in Dakota County, about a 20-minute drive south of Minneapolis and home to the Dakota County United Educators. AFT president Randi Weingarten was flanked by state federation president (and AFT vice president) Tom Dooher, local union president Jim Smola and district superintendent Jane Berenz on a tour of a beautiful facility: a huge, squeaky-clean brick complex on manicured grounds that sport a beautiful auditorium and huge stadium (Go Wildcats!). Inside, visitors were greeted by colorful, inviting classrooms that feed into a tech-laden learning center at the hub of the high school.

Human capital—well that's a different story, and one that's told by the large numbers of "Pink Hearts, Not Pink Slips" buttons being worn by school staff.

The buttons are part of a tour-related AFT initiative to save jobs in education, and that's no small concern in this district. Budget cuts at Eagan cost the positions of 150 probationary teachers. Fourteen tenured teachers are on five-year "standby," waiting for jobs to open in the system. Middle school foreign language is just one of the programs that took a big hit in the cuts: It's likely that a lot of these students will pick up their first razor before they pick up their second language.

Tony Soruco, an eighth-grade science teacher who was displaced in the latest round of cuts, stopped by during the school tour to chat with Weingarten and to thank her for building a national dialogue around what the AFT calls "360-degree accountability"—the view that making schools better for kids only happens when everyone works together, a far cry from blaming teachers for everything from schools to the economy to the decline of western civilization. "There need to be stakes for all," Soruco says, but he's not seeing it so far—not when cuts have ballooned class sizes from the mid-20s to more than 30 students, and not when the tail that wags the dog is "a mania for testing that is just becoming insane." And being forced to leave Dakota Hills Middle School after 10 years just adds insult to that injury, he says.

To their credit, parents in the community do love their schools and do step up when asked to support them on local ballot initiatives, says Kim Hill, a remedial reading instructor for grades 6-8. But there's fear out there—Northwest Airlines is a major employer in Dakota County and the recent merger with Delta makes these anxious times—so keeping local schools strong requires everyone to step up.

That's why a big goal of the AFT's campaign is a $23 billion appropriation for schools by Congress. In a chat with juniors and seniors at the high school, Weingarten explained how, at the end of the day, this was really a campaign for them—a fight to keep their futures from becoming collateral damage in a Wall Street meltdown. "Why should you suffer because you just happen to be in 11th and 12th grade at the same time we're going though this" grinding recession, she asked. They say good lawyers don't ask questions unless they know what the answer will be, and Weingarten seemed confident that no answer would follow. She was right.

Interview with Minnesota Public Radio
12:30 p.m.

AFT president Randi Weingarten dropped by Minnesota Public Radio for a 20-minute interview on what turned out to be a "newsy" kind of day for schools in the state. Gov. Tim Pawlenty had just announced that he was pulling the plug on the state's application for up to $300 million under the new federal Race to the Top (RTTP) program and (surprise!) also managed to toss teachers and teachers unions another "it's-all-your-fault" bouquet in the process.

Weingarten left no doubt that she wasn't buying any of this, and neither should the audience. If unions are the problem here, she asked listeners, how come the governor was pulling the plug and blaming the union on the VERY SAME DAY that governors in Colorado and Florida were wrapping up RTTT applications and key school reform legislation that they had put together with the help of their teachers unions? How come applications from Delaware and Tennessee, the only two RTTT winners so far, were roundly praised by the U.S. Education Department because they shunned "end run reform" and actually reached out to teachers and other stakeholders?

Pawlenty's specific gripe is that teachers and their unions wouldn't cave on an alternative licensure bill, and that prompted his "Kevorkian moment" when it came to Minnesota's bid for RTTT that schools in the state really need. But alternative licensure is not a deal-breaker on this or any other RTTT application. On a 500-point scoring system, alternative pathways are only a fraction (21 points) of the score.

The drama out of the governor's office "was about scoring political points" in an upcoming presidential bid and had nothing to do with RTTT, Weingarten told the audience.

John A. Johnson Elementary School
1:30 p.m.

There have been some fantastic schools featured along the Fight for America's Future tour, but it's tempting to use phrases like "they saved the best for last" when it comes to the final school stop. John A. Johnson Elementary sits high on a hill along St. Paul's east side, and the view from the school traces much of its neighborhood history. Across railroad tracks in the distance are the downsized plants of 3M, Whirlpool, Stroh Brewery and the like, the opportunities that drew immigrants to this community decades ago. A little closer is the strip where the city tore down a row of crack houses a few years back when that epidemic hit at about the same time jobs started to dry up. Closer still are the collection of modest Cape Cods in various states of repair, many of them rentals for low-income families who tend to move a lot.

It was St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, in fact, who pointed out how Johnson's vistas trace the neighborhood history, how new immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia keep the immigrant story alive. Along with St. Paul Federation of Teachers president Mary Cathryn Ricker, the mayor joined the AFT delegation for the tour. (Actually "joined" may be too soft a word, since Coleman pretty much had to be pried from the tour by a staffer.) The mayor calls the small brick preK-6 school a neighborhood "anchor," and that's a pretty apt term. Johnson is a community school that works hard to get the important pieces in place and lined up—great teachers and staff, strong curriculum, fun and engaging activities for summer and after school, and a knock-your-socks-off array of services that remove barriers to success for the kids and their families. More than 90 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.

The school combines foundation grants and public dollars with an offer of free space for organizations that bring their services to the school, housed in a new wing connected to the old building. The result: Kids and parents can walk into their school and find health, dental, family and emotional support, housing assistance, early learning, meal and clothing assistance, employment aid and adult language instruction, a full YMCA—all of it just a corridor away. It's seamless, but by no means effortless, delivery. Johnson academic coach Alyssa Polack says teachers and specialists work hard in tandem so that, when it comes to supports, kids and their families see the side of the tapestry that doesn't come across as a confusing tangle of services.

It's a community school model known in St. Paul as Achievement Plus, and the city is so happy with the results, not only in terms of in-building measures like student achievement but also in terms of tackling big, systemic problems like student and family mobility, that the model has been expanded to three other schools.

At Johnson, there's a happy, confident vibe among staff and students alike. When it came time to explain to visitors how things like after-school tutoring, the poetry club, the school store, the online book bulletin board and other enrichment works at the school, the staff was more than happy to let sixth-graders take the lead—which says a lot about confident professionals in the school.

The tour also visited a group of 6-year-olds who were eager to show off their ability to read sentences—a few kids broke off the exercise spontaneously at one point because they thought it would be fun to pick out the rhyming words and proper names in the sentences they were reading. No sooner had the delegation moved from the classroom to the corridor than they were buttonholed by 7-year-old Antonio, who walked up to Weingarten because he just wanted to "shake hands with the president of all the teachers." After a short chat with the AFT president about his favorite topic (rocks) in his favorite subject (science), Antonio received a hug and kiss from "the president of all the teachers"—and the young man wasn't shy about giving it "the ol' wipe-off" kids normally reserve for relatives at holiday gatherings.

No stranger to visits to schools, community and otherwise, Weingarten called Johnson "the best I've seen so far." Look for expanded coverage in an upcoming issue of American Teacher.

St. Paul Federation of Teachers union meeting
4:15 p.m.

A beautiful, 80-degree day in St. Paul, a heavy "hump day" workload for teachers and a late-afternoon union meeting—it had all the ingredients for a pretty thin turnout, but that was not the case at St. Paul local headquarters.

The chairs were quickly filled with dozens of union members, joined by top officers from the local and state affiliate and Minnesota AFL-CIO president Char Knutson. They took the opportunity to pose questions to Weingarten and voice concerns over everything from minority participation in teaching careers to treatment of special education under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to unproven "turnaround" models for struggling schools. It was easy to spot the signature "Pink Hearts, Not Pink Slips" button here, as well, with members showing support for this job-saving initiative that is part of the tour message.

A thread running through many of the comments, Weingarten pointed out, is the need to fight attacks on teachers with a positive vision of change—one that entire school communities can rally around. That means building and strengthening bridges to parents and the community, it means giving teachers and students the tools and conditions they need to do their best, and it means a discussion of the "360-degree accountability" that puts students' best interests in the spotlight. These positions are "not excuses," Weingarten stressed. "Teachers just know kids need these things, and they want students to have them."

A big opportunity to get this message out, Weingarten told St. Paul members, is what promises to be a historic Sept. 26 march in Washington, D.C., for strong schools. It's being planned by a coalition of groups that includes the AFT, and it will be the first time that Washington has seen a major rally focused specifically on what teachers and parents know is good for education. Weingarten urged members in St. Paul to join colleagues from around the country at this unprecedented event, and to stay connected on an ongoing basis with lawmakers at every level, so that the classroom voice can be heard.

The meeting ended more with au revoir than goodbye, since Weingarten is scheduled to return to Minneapolis later this week for a conference on professional development and evaluation that will bring together union-district teams from Minneapolis, St. Paul and more than a dozen other districts around the country. [Mike Rose/photos by Janet Hostetter/video by Brian Pascale]