No amount of tweaking can repair the Profile of Learning

Star Tribune
January 15, 2003
Katherine Kersten

Since its adoption in 1998, the Profile of Learning -- Minnesota's "show what you know" graduation rule -- has been the subject of bitter debate. As the new legislative session opens, the Profile is again in the public eye. House Republicans have introduced a bill that would repeal Profile standards and give state education officials until April 15 to propose new graduation requirements.

Profile supporters are sure to resist. They claim that Profile standards just need tinkering. But the Profile is fundamentally flawed -- no amount of tweaking can fix it. It must go, so the Legislature can replace it with the high-quality standards that Minnesota children need and deserve.

The Profile's original goal was laudable: to create rigorous academic standards that would allow comparison of student performance across schools and districts. What we have today is very different: a sprawling hodgepodge of 10 "learning areas" and over 100 "content standards" for K-12. Profile standards are standards in name only. They are vague, full of jargon, and untestable. Adding to the confusion, school districts across the state interpret and apply the standards in strikingly different ways.

The Profile's fundamental flaw arises from the theory of learning behind it: that process -- how kids learn -- is more important than content -- what kids learn. As a result, the Profile downplays knowledge (who, what, when and why) in favor of time-consuming, hands-on, "discovery learning" projects that often drive out the real substance of education. The Profile's aim is self-contradictory -- to teach children to "think critically" about subjects about which they've often learned very little.

Under the Profile, for example, students can graduate from high school without studying vital subjects like European or world history. They can leave school without serious exposure to basic concepts of citizenship like federalism and the three branches of American government.

Why is this? The Profile holds that it's more important to teach students to "think like historians" than to teach them about Classical Greece, Islam, World War I or the evolution of the Constitution. How do kids learn to think like historians? The Profile emphasizes "recognizing patterns" in timelines, and identifying the biases of past historians. Eventually, kids should "construct" their own versions of history, with heavy emphasis on race, gender, social class and disability.

The Profile seeks to assess students' mastery of standards -- not with objective tests -- but with hands-on, "real world" projects. One of the Department of Children, Families and Learning (CFL) model history tasks, called "Growing Up in America," is typical.

In this project, a student interviews someone -- say, Grandma or Uncle Vernon -- and then makes a timeline. The timeline interweaves the events of Grandma's life with the larger events of her era. (Presumably: "May 28, 1947, Grandma gets married," "June 25, 1950, North Korea invades South Korea with 135,000 troops.") The student also seeks Grandma's perspective on historical events. For example, project instructions suggest asking Grandma if she "remembers when President Kennedy was assassinated and if the feelings and mood of the country were as low and tragic as many books and movies say it was [sic]."

Trivial tasks like this are no substitute for learning the basics of U.S. and world history. Other CFL model social studies projects are problematic in other ways. In one ideologically freighted task, for example, students visit a local business and categorize its employees by race and social class. Then they analyze matters like the organization's "portrayal of power relationships" and speculate about how "cultural diversity" affects institutional "conflict and cohesion."

Not surprisingly, almost every educational organization that has reviewed the Profile has panned it. Education Week magazine recently gave Minnesota a grade of D-minus in its 2002 review of state standards and accountability.

Many Minnesota teachers are also fed up with the Profile. For years, teachers have complained bitterly about its burdensome paperwork and general disdain for knowledge. In a 2000 Education Minnesota poll, 90 percent of teachers advocated eliminating or significantly altering the Profile. Only 9 percent endorsed it as is.

Profile supporters tend to discount such criticisms. In the current legislative session, they are also likely to insist that the Profile must be left intact to comply with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the new federal education law. NCLB requires states to develop standards and testing plans, and Profile supporters maintain that Minnesota could incur penalties if the Profile is repealed.

But with NCLB on the horizon, it's all the more important to get Minnesota standards right. In coming years, our state will be building a statewide testing and accountability system, with far-reaching implications for our kids. If we base the new plan on the Profile, we'll be building on a rotten -- and shaky -- foundation. The Legislature should begin crafting new standards now.

-Katherine Kersten is a senior fellow of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.  She was a member of Gov.-elect Tim Pawlenty's transition advisory committee.