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Minnesota: Be Careful of What You Wish For

NOTE: As an anti-Standards person, I am as quick as the next person to decry and mock the silly antics that performance standards sometimes fall prey to. But to bring in dumpsters filled with "skills" easily assessed on fill-in-bubble sheets as an alternative is worse than ludicrous.

What do we have to show for the Profile of Learning now that it's dead?

Probably not much worth bragging about.

The massive graduation rule cost tens of millions of dollars and countless thousands of hours of time over about eight years. Among its more noteworthy accomplishments: Creating record-keeping headaches for teachers and counselors, puzzling parents and ticking off students who often felt deluged with busywork.

And, now, it's gone anyway.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed the Profile out of existence Wednesday. Doing so quashes the movement to redirect student learning away from lectures, textbooks and easy-to-grade test questions toward a system that favors portfolios, independent research and group learning.

Now comes a new set of rules. They mark a big break from the Profile. While the Profile of Learning's emphasis was to have students doing things to show what they learned and not just spitting out right-or-wrong answers in the classroom or on tests, the new requirements are more about knowing.

There are hundreds of things to know: reading 10 common words in kindergarten, understanding adverbs and verb tenses in fourth grade and knowing the metric system in sixth grade, for instance.

These new requirements come to your public school this fall. The tests that will measure them begin in 2005. Nobody can predict how the new requirements -- "standards" and "benchmarks" in education lingo -- will play out in the classroom. No price tag has been put on them. No one has tried to give them a catchy name. New standards and benchmarks have already been spelled out in all grades for language arts, math and the arts.

And more are on the way.

Potential land mines

With the new standards come potential new hazards. Too much testing could provoke resistance from teachers and parents. So could a sense that memorizing facts and figures will dominate classroom learning. And teachers and principals will have to live with both the Profile of Learning and the new learning requirements as the new rule phases in and the old one phases out.

This year's seventh-graders will be the first students to graduate under the new rules.

The outgoing Profile changed a few things in education. Teachers are talking more about common goals, and it added a fresh breath of activity to classrooms that had been stuffy with book and lecture learning. But many teachers say the Profile hasn't really changed what they teach that much.

The Profile suffered an image problem from goofy-sounding assignments, such as one girl having to write a paper on abortion for a geography class, or another running up and down the basement stairs carrying a 1-pound can of corn or beans in each hand. And Minnesota colleges and universities generally don't use it in admissions decisions.

Wayne Sigler, director of admissions for the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus, estimates that only 5 percent of the university's applicants submit Profile of Learning transcripts.

"We didn't pay any attention to it," said Paul Thiboutot, dean of admissions at Northfield's Carleton College.

The cost of implementing the Profile of Learning has been huge, even if exact figures don't exist. Profile expenses are intermingled with costs of another graduation requirement called the basic-skills tests, a sort of flip side to the Profile that requires Minnesota students to show basic proficiency in math, reading and writing. Plus, the state never required school districts to separate out their Profile expenses.

But figures compiled recently by the state's Department of Children, Families and Learning show that $638 million in state and local funds has been dedicated since 1998 to implementing both the Profile of Learning and basic-skills tests. Not all that money was spent on the two-part graduation rule, since no state law required districts to do so. And much of it would have been there anyway, though spent on something other than the Profile of Learning.

And the $638 million figure doesn't include millions more spent annually on the graduation rule by Children, Families and Learning.

School districts can break out some of the costs they attribute to the Profile.

In the Anoka-Hennepin School District, assessment facilitator Mike Lindstrom said $1.2 million was spent over the past eight years on writing course requirements and descriptions to bring them in synch with the standards. School materials had to match Profile requirements too. That cost $12 million. And staff training, virtually all of which was focused on getting up to speed on the Profile, cost $9.6 million.

In Minneapolis, schools spent $100,000 over five years on a computer system to keep track of students' Profile records.

History of the Profile

The movement to come up with a Profile of Learning-type education system goes back to the 1980s. It was a time when schools were being panned for not preparing their graduates for college or the workplace. Educators were devising reforms for education that would set goals for student learning going beyond course credits and letter grades.

In 1984, the Minnesota Business Partnership -- a public-policy consortium of Minnesota's largest corporations -- released a report that cited "a downward drift in Minnesota and United States education," and that said Minnesota students needed to be taught the kind of "higher-order skills" that would allow them to do things such as calculate mortgage rates, write a clear letter, and understand written directions.

The movement toward a system of learning based on stated goals, or "standards," picked up steam in the early '90s, when state government tackled creating a new approach to learning. In the mid-'90s, the effort divided into two parts, creating the basic-skills tests and Profile of Learning.

A revolving door of education commissioners made it tough to keep the process flowing smoothly. Education special interest groups clamored to have their areas represented in standards.

By the beginning of the 1998-99 school year, when schools had to implement the Profile of Learning, it had been loaded down with "performance packages," complicated and time-consuming bundles of assignments circulated by the state as potential lesson plans to meet Profile standards. And since school districts balked at discarding letter grades and course credits in favor of a pure standards-based system, schools ended up having to deal with both at the same time.

Meanwhile, the Profile was being obscured by a heavy dose of jargon. Words such as "authentic assessment," "invigilator," and "rubric" began getting associated with the Profile, making it that much harder to figure out what was going on.

Last week, Terri Bostrom, an industrial technology teacher at Wayzata East Middle School was having her eighth-graders build solar-powered cars. Although there's a Profile of Learning requirement associated with building the cars, Bostrom was having her kids do that assignment before the Profile existed. For her, the Profile was neither a boon nor a hardship.

But because of the Profile, Bloomington Kennedy teacher Barbara Parrish's English students have to put together a career study project, complete with field trips, worksheets and checklists. She's cut out some of the novels and short stories she used to teach.

"I've only been able to sneak in Huck Finn a couple of times. I haven't been able to teach 'Death of a Salesman.' Sometimes, I lose 'Of Mice and Men,' " she said.

While Parrish won't shed tears over the Profile's demise, she warned that she and other teachers won't automatically embrace the newest learning requirements.

"I don't want to go back to 20 years ago either, where you would lecture and kids would regurgitate it back on tests," she said.


— Norman Draper
Requiem for the Profile of Learning
Star Tribune
May 25, 2003
http://www2.startribune.com/stories/1592/3900214.html

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