In our last post (Blogspot | Substack), we compared six Minnesota public school districts and one higher-performing charter school, Higher Ground Academy. We focused on a very large difference in the reading proficiency of Black students whose demographic characteristics were comparable. Among Black students who are not English learners, 2026 reading proficiency ranged from 15.5 percent in Minneapolis to 53.4 percent at Higher Ground Academy, about 48 percent after adjusting for its low special education rate. Anoka-Hennepin, the state's largest traditional district, reached 43.1 percent.
From that data we drew a conclusion: Minnesota must do much more to make sure districts and schools get the support they need, the funding they need, and a more robust form of supportive accountability. If some schools can help these students read well, the state has an obligation to find out how, and to make sure every school serving similar students can do the same.
This is the first in a series of posts on how Minnesota might do that. We begin with the system the state has now. This is not a criticism of any one: it is a criticism of Minnesota's systemic failure meaningfully to intervene and of the states rather anemic failure to identify and report on what's not working. The fault lies with both political support for radical unaccountable local control.
Minnesota's current system: radical local control
Minnesota's approach to struggling schools rests on radical local control. The state identifies schools that are falling behind, publishes data about them, and offers help. Beyond that, decisions about curriculum, staffing, schedules, and how to respond to poor results belong to the local district. Accountability consists almost entirely of the publication of descriptive data.
Every three years, the state's North Star accountability system identifies the lowest-performing schools. In August 2025 it identified 310 of them. Identification brings a label, a requirement to write an improvement plan, and an offer of assistance. It does not bring a required change in practice, an outside review of whether the plan is working, or any consequence beyond a deeper designation if the school fails to improve.
In summary, Minnesota's system has these characteristics:
- Identification without intervention. The state finds struggling schools reasonably well, but has no authority to intervene when a school stays at the bottom cycle after cycle.
- Voluntary support. Help is offered, not required. Districts choose whether and how to use it.
- Self-directed plans. The district writes its own improvement plan. No independent party approves it or checks whether it is carried out.
- No required practices. Identified schools need not adopt any particular curriculum, instructional framework, or staffing approach.
- Modest dedicated funding. The state's support system costs about $13 million a year and pays for regional staff, not for help delivered directly in schools.
- No evaluation. The state has never measured whether its support improves student outcomes.
Minnesota has moved in a more directive direction in one area: the READ Act now requires evidence-based reading instruction and teacher training. But for schools identified as struggling, the basic model remains local choice backed by published data.
How COMPASS works
By all accounts, the people who staff COMPASS are dedicated professionals. Nothing in this post questions their commitment or their skill. The problem is the design of the system they work in.
COMPASS, short for Collaborative Minnesota Partnerships to Advance Student Success, is the state's system of support for school improvement. It is run by the Minnesota Department of Education together with the state's nine regional service cooperatives. Since July 2024, each cooperative has had a regional COMPASS team, created under a Joint Powers Agreement with the department. The COMPASS team work with the limited resources and limited, should I say, non-existent authority provided by the legislature.
State-level teams develop professional learning "pathways" in areas such as literacy, math, attendance, classroom instruction, and school improvement. Regional teams help districts analyze their data, choose pathways, and get coaching and technical assistance. Support comes in three levels: universal help open to every district, customized help for schools showing early warning signs, and intensive help for schools identified under North Star.
That is the system on paper. In practice it is failing the students it exists to serve, for these reasons:
- It is optional. The state's own description calls COMPASS an "opportunity," accessed according to "local needs and capacity." A district can serve its identified schools itself instead. Minneapolis, I understand, relies mainly on its own school improvement staff and uses COMPASS only selectively.
- It changes nothing it is not invited to change. COMPASS cannot require a school to adopt a curriculum, alter its schedule, or change how it assigns teachers, even if what it is doing is not working.
- It works mostly through courses and consultation. The research favors coaching inside classrooms, frequent observation, and feedback, not professional learning modules. (ie., a coach working inside a teacher’s classroom, observing frequently and giving immediate feedback on actual lessons)
- It has no outside check. No independent party reviews whether a school's plan is sound or whether it is being carried out.
- It has no consequences. A school that does not improve receives more of the same help.
- It is not measured. After years of operation under COMPASS and its predecessor, the state cannot say whether any of it works.
The critique
The results
Based on the data that I can find, it appears that few schools leave the bottom. Of the schools North Star identified in 2018, only 30 met the state's standard for exit by 2022. Sixty-four others avoided re-identification but missed at least one of their improvement targets, so they continued to receive support. The same schools appear on the list cycle after cycle.
Outcomes in the largest district have stalled. From 2022 through 2026, math proficiency among Black students in Minneapolis stayed essentially flat at about 8.3 percent, reaching 9.5 percent in only one year. Because the math test (MCA-III) did not change during that period, the results are directly comparable from year to year. Fewer than one in ten Black students in the state's largest city are proficient in math, and nothing in five years of data suggests that is changing.
The state's own plan for measuring COMPASS will not tell us whether it works. Through June 2027, COMPASS will measure participant satisfaction surveys, evidence of engagement, and districts' self-evaluations. Through June 2029, it adds knowledge and skill gains, case studies, and interviews. Student outcomes will be tracked only for districts that choose to engage, with no comparison group and no date attached.
The Best Practices reports
Since 2012, state law (Minn. Stat. 120B.35, subd. 4) has required the education commissioner to report annually on the best practices used in Minnesota's high-performing schools. This is the one place where the state is required to study what works. The reports show how little the state has learned.
They report improvements without validating the reason for improvement. Each report describes schools that did well in some area and asks what they did. None compares them with similar schools that did not improve, so none can show that the practices made a difference. Every report says so itself: a conclusive causal link between the practices and student performance cannot be made.
The reporting method changes almost every year. The reports have surveyed "high growth" schools, then "reward" schools, then schools recognized under North Star, then schools that held up through the pandemic, then schools that exited identification, then rankings of high-achieving schools, then graduation rates. In FY2018 there were no high-performing schools to study at all. No year's findings can be compared with another's.
The evidence is thin. In FY2017, only 36 percent of surveyed schools responded. In FY2022, the department interviewed leaders at 19 of 32 schools. These are informal accounts from the schools themselves.
The findings are too general to act on. The FY2023 report examined the 30 schools that exited identification. It found three themes: evidence-based practices, targeted support, and relationships. It also found that no single practice was particularly common. A legislator reading it learns that successful schools do good things, but not which things or how to replicate them.
The state spends almost nothing on them. The department estimated the FY2017 report cost about $609 to prepare, and the FY2021 report about $1,750. That is what Minnesota invests in its only statutory inquiry into what makes schools succeed.
The reports' authors did what the statute asked with the resources they had. The failure is in what the Legislature asked for: a description of success, rather than a measurement of what causes it.
What defenders of the current system would say
Supporters of the current approach make serious arguments. Local control respects the knowledge of educators and communities closest to students. Mandates imposed from St. Paul can produce compliance rather than real change. COMPASS's regional structure is only two years old, and fair judgment of its effects may take longer. Some Minnesota schools have improved under the current system, and several are named in the Best Practices reports.
Those arguments deserve an answer, and the next posts try to give one. But none of them explains why, after nearly a decade of North Star, the state still cannot tell whether its support system works, or why so many of the same schools remain at the bottom.
Next: what other states have tried
Minnesota is not the first state to face this problem. Massachusetts, Tennessee, Mississippi, and others have tried more demanding approaches: binding turnaround plans, outside review, intensive coaching inside schools, early-literacy guarantees, and state authority to change what is not working. Some succeeded, some failed, and the differences between them are instructive. Unlike Minnesota, several measured their results carefully, so we know what they achieved.
Mississippi is a case in point. Rachel Canter, who led Mississippi's leading education reform organization for 17 years, argues that states copying Mississippi's reading law miss the point: its gains rested equally on rigorous accountability, real consequences for persistent failure, and a state agency with the capacity to support districts that lacked their own.
We will have more to say about the experience of Mississippi and other states in a subsequent post.
Sources
- MDE release on 2025 North Star identification
- MDE and Minnesota Service Cooperatives, The Atlas: COMPASS (2026)
- MDE, Best Practices in High-Performing Schools reports to the Legislature: FY2016, FY2017, FY2018, FY2019, FY2021, FY2022, FY2023, FY2024, 2026
- Bryn Mawr Elementary, ESSA information (Minneapolis Public Schools)
- Rachel Canter, Inside the Mississippi Marathon (Progressive Policy Institute, April 2026). The author led Mississippi First, a reform advocacy organization, and writes as a participant in the reforms she describes.
