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The Cedar Riverside Plaza, where Cedar Riverside Community School opened out of in Minneapolis.
In June, one of the nation’s first charter schools abruptly shut down after nearly thirty years. The Cedar Riverside Community School was located in a central Minneapolis neighborhood with a significant population of East African immigrants.
It opened in 1993, just two years after the Minnesota state legislature allowed for the creation of charter schools that receive public funds.
Children who live in poverty but still perform well on standardized tests are the stuff of wealth-saturated, neoliberal dreams, where inequality is but a stepping stone for bigger things—provided one learns to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
A message on the school’s website states that the school office is closed as of July 1, and all student records have, therefore, been transferred to either the Minneapolis Public Schools or another school district, depending on where students live.
Cedar Riverside Community School operated directly out of Cedar Riverside Plaza, a concrete housing complex built in the 1970s in a rash of utopian exuberance that hasn’t quite panned out.
A wealthy couple bought up land in the area in the 1960s, apparently on the advice of their investment strategist, and envisioned a glittering community of wealthy and poor folks rubbing elbows and being content with their place in the world.
Cement housing complexes were supposed to stretch on for blocks and blocks, with swimming pools and other amenities for those who could afford it.
That hasn’t happened. Instead, Cedar Riverside Plaza is more of a reflection of how we treat under-served communities. The main housing stock consists of two slender concrete monoliths, minimally decorated with occasional swaths of colored panels and precariously surrounded by busy highway passes.
Two years ago, a fire broke out in one of the area’s public housing units, killing five residents and prompting an investigation into the building’s hazardous condition.
Cedar Riverside Community School was supposed to provide a better path forward for the children who live in the area. For a while, it appeared to be living up to this ideal.
The high point came in 2010, when the Star Tribune deemed it a “beat the odds” school whose students were performing well on standardized tests, according to a report from Becky Dernbach of the local Sahan Journal.
Before going further, it’s important to unpack the very concept of “beat the odds.”
In recent years, the Star Tribune, which is owned by Minnesota billionaire Glen Taylor, has published an annual ranking of K-12 schools.
The rankings are determined by comparing students’ standardized test scores to their school’s rate of poverty, according to federal free and reduced lunch criteria. Schools with a high number of students living in poverty who score well on annual reading and math tests are thought to be “beating the odds.”
This is exactly the type of school success metric that befits a newspaper owned by a billionaire.
Children who live in poverty but still perform well on standardized tests are the stuff of wealth-saturated, neoliberal dreams, where inequality is but a stepping stone for bigger things—provided one learns to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Plenty of Democrats have embraced this narrative, so this is not a partisan belief.
In Minneapolis, often considered one of most liberal cities in the United States, prominent Democrats have helped fuel the expansion of charter schools like Cedar Riverside Community School, to the detriment of the local public school system.
And to the detriment, it must be said, of the families who came to depend upon Cedar Riverside Community School.
Dernbach has shared some of their stories over the past year while doing a deep dive into the school’s implosion.
Many of the parents Dernbach spoke with were grateful their children could attend a school right where they lived, since the majority of families were new to the country and appreciated the peace of mind afforded by such convenience.
Since 2010, when the school was lauded for its test score achievements, it has slipped, Dernbach noted. Staff turnover took hold, particularly in the administrative ranks. By 2018, the executive director position had been filled and then vacated numerous times, until Bert Strassburg was hired.
Strassburg came to Cedar Riverside Community School from a northern Minnesota school district, where he was a superintendent but had resigned under circumstances that remain unclear.
Strassburg promptly fired or oversaw the departure of every teacher at the school while maintaining his side career as a psychic with a stake in a Minneapolis-based metaphysical shop.
While parents at the school had reportedly asked Strassburg to make some staffing changes, his mass termination approach also pushed out those who had “demonstrated a familiarity with refugee life” in favor of inexperienced teachers, Dernbach discovered.
Cedar Riverside Community School was overseen by a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, Pillsbury United Communities, which acts as an authorizer. Such an arrangement is required for charter schools in Minnesota, and authorizers are paid yearly fees worth thousands of taxpayer dollars for providing some level of oversight for the schools.
Pillsbury United Communities has a large stake in Minnesota’s charter school industry, with a roster of twenty of these privately managed, publicly funded schools.
In March, Pillsbury United Communities met with Cedar Riverside Community School stakeholders. Because a quorum was not reached, in terms of the number of school board members in attendance, the meeting was not open to either the public or the press, according to Dernbach’s reporting.
At this meeting, it was announced that the school would close in June. While the move apparently caught many parents off guard, the decision to shake off a “failing” school is a feature, not a bug, of neoliberal education reform.
The Minneapolis Public Schools could never decide to simply close a school without a public hearing, Dernbach notes, because it is a public, governmental entity. Pillsbury United Communities is neither of these things and thus is not subject to the same level of scrutiny.
And now, it seems likely that Minneapolis’s public school district will be left to pick up the pieces of the Cedar Riverside Community School meltdown.