Home > News & Events > For Immediate Release	Print View

As the Chairperson of the MN House of Representatives E-12 Education Policy Committee I am writing to solicit your assistance with two pieces of legislation we are undertaking this year.

First, I would appreciate your views and advice on the bills. We can send you copies of the bills and they are also available online at the www.house.mn.

One, authored by Rep Brynaert (HF 3329) partially re-designs the state's "School Report Card" to create within it a complementary, parallel measurement of school success to the AYP measurement required under NCLB. This new measure would be based on a "value-added growth model" created by the MN Assessment Group (Dr. David Heisted of Mpls. Schools is the lead person) in response to Legislative inquiry. It allows us to identify effective practices - by sub-group - for sharing across the state based on accelerated growth progress against state growth norms. We believe it is important to have such a diagnostic tool. We also believe that the current AYP designation model, based on status measurements, fails to provide helpful diagnostic information for helping our schools become better at what they do. However, our approach does not get rid of status measurements, as we do want to know if we are meeting state standards. The growth measurement to be reported in the School Report Card is truly meant to be a complementary tool. The MDE is worried however, that our approach - using the Report Card - can "lead the public to a false sense of security" about meeting standards. We do not share that observation but would like your views on that concern as well as other thoughts you may have about the School Report Card and on using growth and value added measurement tools.  The report card bill also takes first steps toward adding measures of rigorous coursework and student perceptions of school climate to the report card.

The other bill is one I am authoring (HF 3472) that creates a first-step approach to getting our state directly focused on the "achievement gap" (racial disparities in education outcomes) issues. It would require Districts to submit plans to MDE of what they are doing to "close gaps" and create high quality outcomes for students of color and for low-income students. A Task Force is created in the MDE of community experts and K-12 and higher ed practitioners (including at least one representative each from urban, suburban and greater MN districts) to further analyze the plans and submit a Report to the 2009 Legislature on next steps in aiding schools to "close racial gaps" and create equity in quality educational outcomes. The intent is to focus the state on this issue in a clearer, transparent, more committed way than we have been in the past and to develop a deeper sense of what it will take to ending race-based unequal student outcomes. Again, your views would be most helpful. We are drafting a major rewrite of the bill as introduced and we can make that available to you by contacting my office.

Second, if you feel that either or both of these bills are worthy, I would appreciate your assistance in encouraging your local legislators to take an interest in and support the bills. It would also be helpful to contact the Commissioner of Education and Governor and register your views with them as we need to convince them to join in with the legislature in moving forward with these initiatives. Finally, talking up the bills among your professional, school and local community could help to raise their visibility in public and expand ownership of the solutions we are trying to arrive at with the bills.

I think it is very important for the Legislature to work closely with educators, parents and others "on the ground" and hope you will take us up on doing so. It is my goal to help keep the House and Senate guided by both real experiences in our classrooms and of sound research in conducting education policymaking. We can accomplish that through mutually respectful engagement with you and your colleagues in the spirit of learning from each other and of focus on our young people.

Look forward to hearing from and working with you.

Rep. Carlos Mariani