July 11, 2007 - ANALYSIS

* Shortly after this meeting, I talked with I talked with a community member who had done some analysis on the Minneapolis Schools and MFT.  He felt that the MFT system was indeed unique in Minnesota, but not in comparison to other medium-large cites in the US.  He said that he had gone back and read the past 20 or so MFT contracts, because he had heard that the current seniority system was instituted after the 1970 teachers strike.  He said that he found that was wrong, that the big shift in seniority powers came some years after that, in 1976 or so.  He also thought that history affected some of the union politics, as the AFT had unionized the big-city Minnesota schools, bringing a more industrial union ethic, while NEA had unionized the rest of Minnesota with a more professional ethic.

* He said that David Heistad, the director of the MPS department of research and evaluation, had a few years ago produced analysis that showed high teacher-turnover rates correlated with lower student performance in middle schools, even when poverty rates were factored out.  He thought that Mr. Heistad had intended to do this same analysis on elementary schools, but he thought that report was never published.

* He talked about getting data on teacher seniority himself, and doing his own analysis of how this related to the district's QPI measure and some other student performance indicator.  He said that he gave all the data to someone who does statistical analysis, and this guy found that there was a statistically significant correlation between school performance and average teacher seniority.  He said that he was surprised that nobody had picked up the issue that having low-seniority teachers at high-poverty schools meant that the district was spending more salary dollars at low-poverty schools.  He felt that the district kind of buried this fact in the budget, but that it could be uncovered with a little work.