The Opus College of Business ranks No. 110 out of the 494 schools that hold accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate School of Business. The school ranked No. 104 a year ago, the first year that Opus was eligible because of its December 2010 accreditation, and last fall Opus’ undergraduate program ranked No. 117 among 388 AACSB-accredited programs.

“While we would like to move upward each year, we are very pleased that our rankings in only our second year of AACSB accreditation continue to place us well inside the top 25 percent of all AACSB-accredited business schools,” said Dr. Christopher Puto, dean of the college. “We see this as demonstrable proof that our mission-driven approach to business education resonates in the business community.”

The School of Law ranks No. 124, an improvement from its highest ranking of No. 135 two years ago. The School of Law was ranked for the first time in 2007, when it appeared in the third tier.

The School of Social Work, a joint program sponsored by St. Thomas and St. Catherine University, continues to be ranked No. 52, as it was a year ago. U.S. News does not conduct a new social work survey every year; in a ranking three years ago, the St. Thomas-St. Catherine program placed No. 53.

The School of Education, part of the College of Education, Leadership and Counseling, is not ranked numerically by U.S. News but alphabetically among schools in the second tier.

The St. Thomas School of Engineering is not listed in the national graduate rankings because it does not offer doctoral programs. Last fall, U.S. News ranked St. Thomas No. 69 among 193 engineering schools that offer bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but not doctorates, and are accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET).

The musical performance is free and open to the public and runs from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 15, in Woulfe Alumni Hall in the Anderson Student Center on the university’s St. Paul campus.

The evening includes a 5:30 p.m. panel discussion on the early warning signs of mental illness, and a 6:30 p.m. reception with refreshments.

“Fidgety Fair Tales” will feature stories about Goldilocks (obsessive compulsive disorder); Boyd, Who Cried Wolf (Tourette syndrome); and CinderEdward (bipolar disorder).

“Fidgety Fairy Tales” is a project of the Minnesota Association for Children’s Mental Health. The program will be of interest to those connected with youth, mental health issues, and devoted to the education of children and adolescents.

More details are available by calling the School of Education, (651) 962-4441. 

She stays sane and remains grounded by remembering why she is really in the job. It’s not just to run a $685 million, 34,000-student, 5,600-employee operation. It’s to carry out the responsibility that is so perfectly described on the nameplate on her desk:

Bernadeia Johnson

Every Day

Every Child

“It’s so easy to not individualize this work,” Johnson said late one Friday afternoon, on her 51st birthday, as she sat in her office and reflected on another frenetic and crazy week. “You have to carry the images of individual kids and remember that the decisions you make affect not 34,000 children – but individual kids.”

That’s why Johnson is following five kindergarten students – out of 3,100 in the school district – to see how they are reading. The goal is to reach a certain performance level by winter break. She gets regular progress reports, stays in touch with parents and blogs about the project.

That’s why Johnson visits a school most Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays. She often arrives unannounced to spend time in classrooms watching teachers work with students on everything from how to tell time to discussing the differences between X-rays and MRIs.

And that’s why Johnson is willing to endure seemingly endless criticism from the public when she makes controversial recommendations such as closing North High School, a community anchor for 122 years. Her bottom line: the school isn’t doing a good enough job in educating students and has lost far too many students to remain effective.

On days like this, Johnson finds herself a long way from her hometown of Selma, Ala., where she attended segregated schools until fifth grade … from the financial analyst job that she held at a bank in the 1980s … and from her first teaching assignment after deciding to change careers and enroll in the new Collaborative Urban Educator (CUE) program at St. Thomas.

Frenetic or crazy, Johnson wouldn’t have it any other way because she believes she can – and she will – make a difference in providing a better education for 34,000 children. One at a time.

“The role we play in educating students is central,” said Johnson, who last July 1 became the seventh person in a decade to serve as Minneapolis superintendent. “We are the one – the one – institution open to all students, and we can have the greatest impact on those students and what they will do with the rest of their lives. That is a wonderful opportunity.”

Bernadeia Johnson grew up in Selma during the height of racial unrest in the 1960s. She was the oldest of three children, and her parents – her mom was a teacher and her dad was a lobbyist for the United Auto Workers – were divorced. Integration came slow to the Deep South.

“There was no busing,” she said. “Just because the schools were integrated didn’t mean you went there, so mom paid for cabs. They picked us up every morning and drove us to the white school and back.”

Johnson spent summers as a teenager in Minneapolis, where maternal grandmother Hallie Hendrieth-Smith taught and served as an elementary school principal for nearly three decades. A skilled clarinetist, Johnson enrolled in Alabama A&M University on a full music scholarship, played in the concert and marching bands and majored in speech pathology. She met trombonist Reginald Johnson and they married and moved to the Twin Cities. She went to work for what now is U.S. Bank, where she had held summer jobs. Her husband has spent his career in Minneapolis and Anoka-Hennepin schools as a teacher and administrator, and today is assistant principal at Olson Middle School in Minneapolis.

A corporate downsizing led to layoffs in 1991, and Johnson found herself without a job after 13 years at U.S. Bank. With two young children at home, she struggled to find work and filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

“There was a lot of reflection time without a job,” she said. “I had to take stock in what I wanted to do. I was getting a little jaundiced about the banking business.”

Then she heard about CUE. The St. Thomas School of Education, responding to a legislative initiative for alternative teaching licensure programs, had established CUE and recruited largely from communities of color. Many students – including Johnson – were in their 30s and looking for a career change – and she caught the eye of CUE founding director Trudi Taylor.

“Bernadeia stood out,” Taylor said. “She was articulate and thoughtful. We knew she would be a great teacher. She always has had this positive, can-do attitude – for herself and everyone around her – and an amazing ability to pull people together and work together.”

Johnson flourished in the program, receiving her licensure in 1992 and her first assignment as a fifth-grade teacher at Highwood Hills School in St. Paul. It didn’t take her long to ascertain that she had made the right decision.

“I loved teaching,” she said. “I thought I was a good teacher, and I always tried to become a better teacher.”

Knowing that some educators viewed her as having taken a “back door” to her position through alternative licensure, Johnson worked even harder. She earned her master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from St. Thomas and certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, juggling course work with her duties in the classroom.

“I liked the naughty kids,” she said. “I always thought their attitudes were an expression of self and not in defiance of me. I thought I could find something in the most challenging students that they could feel good about and become successful.” She paused and laughed. “There was a little bit of defiance in me, too!”

After five years at Highwood, Johnson moved to Saturn Riverfront Academy in downtown St. Paul to intern for a year as an assistant principal and then serve in that position for a year. She had not actively considered work as an administrator but found that she liked it, encouraged by teachers who would say, “Show me what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.”

She got a call one day from Minneapolis Public Schools asking her to consider an assistant principal position, but her husband counseled her to say no. “If you are going to come to Minneapolis, you come as principal or not at all,” she recalled him saying. “So that’s what I told them.”

Somebody listened. In 1999, Johnson became principal of Elizabeth Hall Elementary School, where her grandmother had held the same position in the 1980s. She thought her granddaughter would be a good fit for the job, just as she has been a good fit as superintendent.

“She has so much to offer to young people in the way she challenges them to be the best they can,” said Hendrieth-Smith, now 94. “She always had it in her to be the best, and whatever that required, she would do it. You don’t have to tell Bernadeia what to do or where to go. She just does it.”

Reginald Johnson also believes his wife has been a good fit for her jobs, although she has needed “a little nudge,” he said. “I used to tell her all the time, ‘Bernadeia, you can do this,’ and then she gets in there and excels. She can do anything she sets her mind to. She’s that good. She’s that driven.”

The Hall position, which Johnson held for five years, challenged her. There was divisiveness among the faculty and staff, too many students fought and performance scores were low. She created safe zones and encouraged people to come to her for “tuneups.”

“I told them, ‘You can come to me for a tuneup. You can say whatever you want as long as you are respectful. Do you want to listen? To problem solve? To take action?’ One person said she found me intimidating. It blew me away. I said, ‘Wow,’ and asked why. I said, ‘Let’s do this: I’ll go away and think about my role, and you do the same.’”

They got back together, compared notes and began to get along better. Johnson later told the staff how she had had her own “tuneup” and learned a great deal from it.

In 2004, Carol Johnson, the former Minneapolis superintendent who had taken the same job in Memphis, called Johnson with an assistant superintendent offer. She moved and within five weeks was deputy superintendent. She served 16 months before taking another call – from Minneapolis superintendent Bill Green – and returning as deputy superintendent in charge of academics.

When Green decided to leave last year, the Minneapolis School Board chose not to conduct a national search but name Johnson as his successor. “I am just humbled and honored,” she said at the time. “I’m nervous and excited all rolled into one.”

It’s Election Day, and Johnson is sitting in Dunn Brothers Coffee in south Minneapolis for her weekly meeting with Minneapolis School Board Chairman Tom Madden and deputy superintendent Dan Loewenson. It’s their chance to review hot issues – and none is hotter than Johnson’s recommendation to close North High School.

Johnson has been buried in criticism about the closing of 122-year-old North, where enrollment dropped 75 percent – from 1,140 in 2004 to 265 today – as students fled for charter schools or suburban districts. Seeking a compromise, Johnson came up with a new plan: close North by 2014 and open a new North in 2012 as a 500-student magnet school.

She reviews her strategy with Madden and Loewenson, starting with a news conference to announce the plan and the board’s vote. They discuss key points to address in both settings, and Johnson vows to move forward. “I wish I didn’t have to do this,” she said, “but it’s the right thing to do.”

Two days later, the news conference draws a big crowd, including Mayor R.T. Rybak. Johnson deftly handles tough questions and challenges the community to join her in designing the new North, promising to bring together “the intellectual horsepower” of educators, government officials, businesses, alumni, parents and students.

“This is about guaranteeing Minneapolis families that no matter where you live or what your income is or what your background is, your child will get the same educational opportunities as other students,” she told the news conference. “Being able to get into a high-quality school should not be like winning the lottery. This is about delivering excellence.”

Five days later, the board approves Johnson’s plan – with one caveat. She recommended the phase-out of old North begin without enrolling freshmen in 2011, but the board decides to allow one more freshman class.

As stressful as issues like the North closing can be, Johnson always has the perfect place to escape for a break and to remind her why she took her job. She goes to school.

On this day, after the Madden-Loewenson meeting, Johnson visits Hale and Field schools. They are “twinned” schools, Hale as a K-4 and Field as a 5-8. Her first stop is Tracey Schultz’s eighth-grade science class, where students are discerning chemical reactions between elements. Later, other students compare X-rays and MRIs, and Schultz tosses in EEGs to enrich the discussion.

“You do so well in science here,” Johnson tells the students. She had received letters from parents praising Schultz and decided to see her in action. “I just wanted to know what works well.”

Johnson’s next stop is at Hale, a mile away, where first-graders are learning to tell time. “We didn’t even make one mistake!” one girl tells Johnson. Down the hall, fourth-graders pack a 36-Macintosh laboratory, and Johnson crouches next to a boy to watch him work on a math problem. All of this is done unannounced, with Johnson sliding in and out of classrooms. The practice is unnerving in one sense, admits Steven Norlin-Weaver, in his fourth year as Field principal, “but I’m not sure it’s a big deal. What are we going to do differently?”

That’s what Johnson likes to hear, she says later at lunch.

“I don’t want to go into schools to see a show,” she said, and she certainly didn’t get one in Schultz’s classroom. “The kids wanted to tell me what they were learning. They were able to communicate. There was a buzz – a real energy – in her classroom. …

“Every student engaged in an explanation of X-rays and MRIs. It was interactive. She called on students.

And if a student didn’t know an answer or got it wrong, there was an acceptance of that and a willingness to move on.”

Those experiences are affirmative for Johnson as well – and they reflect a philosophy formed over 20 years as a teacher and administrator and stated ever so simply on a nameplate on her desk:

Bernadeia Johnson

Every Day

Every Child

“As long as I remember that,” she said, “I’ll be okay.”

Read more from St. Thomas magazine

No Child Left Behind legislation passed in the early days of the George W. Bushadministration, and was based on a program he had implemented as governor of Texas.

Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bailout of the economy and many other pressing issues, meaningful policy deliberations about NCLB require a more nuanced analysis than in a five-second sound byte you might hear on the evening news.

Together, we share the administrative leadership of St. Thomas’ Department of Leadership, Policy and Administration. In these following pages we will examine the details of NCLB [1] much as we teach our students to do – within the spirit of the St. Thomas mission, with an emphasis on thinking critically and acting wisely to advance the common good.

To do this, take a step back from the specifics of the legislation itself – and the arguments of its many proponents and detractors – and instead consider the raison d’être of NCLB, both as defined by the legislation and as informed by its enactment. The stated intent of NCLB is to provide an extensive assessment tool that guarantees that all students who leave P-12 schools in the United States will be assured of having mastered a basic set of concepts, learning skills and abilities for further learning. Such systems are required due to a persistent gap between students who traditionally do well (usually of European or certain Asian cultural descent) and pretty much everybody else. Let’s start from this premise.

When thinking critically about a set of regulations and procedures implemented to affect such a significant issue, we start by considering the merit of the stated intent at face value.

Many of the modern pioneers of educational learning theory (e.g., John Dewey in the United States and Lev Vygotsky in Russia) have emphasized the need to pay close attention to one’s experience in order to get better at learning about it. In regard to organizations, theorists like W. Edwards Deming similarly have emphasized the need to pay systematic attention to how things are done in a contextually appropriate way. According to Deming, the focus should be on continuous improvement of what the system aims to do by monitoring those activities that characterize it. [2] Thus NCLB is the assessment system that finely tunes educators’ attention toward helping all students to learn so that they have a wide range of options upon graduation.

Accordingly, under NCLB all public middle-school students are tested yearly in reading and mathematics, and then again once in high school. If students don’t demonstrate progress between years (as measured by grade-level proficiency) their school is at risk of being placed on its state’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) list. Remaining on this list for more than two years in a row makes a school vulnerable to ”reconstitution,” which can mean anything from being closed entirely to reopening with an entirely different curriculum and staff. By such means – basically increased assessment and accountability – the longstanding achievement gap will purportedly be remedied by 2014.

This seems fairly reasonable at first blush; however, while thinking critically about policies like NCLB, other theoretical perspectives need to be consulted. Perhaps the first of these is what Adam Smith termed the “unintended consequences” of virtually any collection of human actions.

Smith figured that when humans are doing things well it arises from a variety of incremental modifications spawned by accumulated experience of the circumstances. When they are not doing so well it is often due to a preconceived notion that has been imposed upon the activity. [3] In slightly different terms, Andrew North Whitehead noted the human penchant for errors of “misplaced concreteness,” or mistaking one’s conception of a set of interactions with the careful observation and analysis of how they actually occur in place. [4]

Taking Smith and Whitehead seriously obliges us to take another look at NCLB. Its enactment has evidenced a number of measurement-related opportunities for misplaced concreteness. As noted, NCLB’s aim is to decrease the wide divergence between students who do and don’t leave the system well-educated. It does so by mandating the disaggregation of a schools’ student scores on the mandated tests by rule-of-thumb categories as commonly used in educational funds disbursement.

Some examples of such categories are “student race,” “free and reduced lunch” and “limited English language” proficiency. But just as these labels capture – more or less – such phenomena as a student’s race and culture, socioeconomic circumstances and facility with English, they do not effectively capture other phenomena that can have at least as much to do with a child’s poor performance in school.

Consider, for example, the everyday life of a child who is effectively homeless (which is the case with a significant percentage of contemporary urban children) or a student whose family owns virtually no books.

Further, consider the case of special education’s treatment under NCLB. This arena admittedly poses a special problem for NCLB since the legislation’s intent is to standardize a test protocol. But how does one do this when the entire category of children under consideration connotes a need for specifically different modes of instruction?

Finally, there remains the issue of ascertaining how a school educates on a grade-by-grade basis by treating each cluster of children as essentially the same (i.e., the children themselves are not tracked; rather, group scores are reported by grade level). In sociology’s early years, such logic was termed “the ecological fallacy.”

Now let’s consider some data on how these issues have played out thus far under NCLB. At this point (five years into the program), roughly 40 percent of U.S. public schools missed their NCLB targets last year; a figure that is steadily growing. [5] In Minnesota, 38 percent of our schools have landed on the AYP list, up from 26 percent in 2006. [6]

Certainly, one interpretation of these data is that NCLB is accomplishing its mission; however, some seriously complicating factors make this conclusion seem premature.

Under the heading of “unintended consequences,” it bears noting that each state at the onset of NCLB implementation was obliged to define the reading and math tests it would use. Some, like Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Mexico and North Carolina, chose a rigorous approach that has resulted in their presently experiencing AYP rates of 60 to 70 percent (and in the case of North Carolina, 83 percent); [7] thus, the 40 percent national average of states’ schools on AYP is arguably as much a reflection of their widely divergent strategies for “facilitating” of NCLB as it is indicative of meaningful learning outcomes.

This conclusion mirrors at least one preliminary analysis of the effects of NCLB thus far. A number of researchers say it is becoming increasingly clear that little correlation exists between NCLB scores and other measures of learning. For instance, only a tenuous connection has been established between the various state reading and math tests and longstanding patterns on the National Assessment of Education Progress, which, until NCLB, was commonly known as “the Nation’s Report Card.” [8]This connection implies that states have used NCLB as a kind of high stakes inkblot test, a misplaced concreteness for which they are now being rewarded or punished. Sometimes their solutions seem to have included as much political strategy as educational philosophy.

We now need to examine the political aspects of both education and leadership, another theoretical angle we urge our students to incorporate into their thinking and practice. Much as the tenuous relationship that exists between NCLB testing and what might result from other possible criteria for defining “education,” political theorists like Murray Edelman – and before him Niccolo Machiavelli – have long differentiated between a political “solution” and a serious attempt to alleviate a problematic situation.

According to Edelman, political leaders specifically look for and seek to implement prefabricated policy solutions that play to their bases with only a cursory look at what the problem is really about. Whether the solution works or not is only part of the criteria for the policy rollout, and usually not the primary one. [9] Without entirely acquiescing to cynicism, two aspects of NCLB lend themselves to this variety of political analysis.

First, NCLB has been implemented without much in the way of additional funding, although its protocols require considerable outlays for coordinated distribution and reporting of scores, not to mention any efforts undertaken to assist in student remediation.

This parallels the pattern observed earlier for policies concerning special education, which still remains seriously underfunded. Except that in the case of NCLB, a thriving for-profit cottage industry has emerged to assist schools in hoisting struggling students to grade-level scores for a fee that schools are increasingly strapped to pay.

Second, NCLB applies only to public schools. On the face of it this is a noncontroversial strategy (after all, public education is a quasi-function of government), but its net effect on the image of these schools – as we have discussed above – has been extremely negative. Yet, on balance, the reasons that schools land on the AYP list explicitly concern those students for which public schools are the first (and sometimes last) resort. By this we mean students with special learning needs (broadly defined) whom other schools cannot, or choose not to educate are overwhelmingly the students whose lack of progress penalizes AYP schools. This seems dangerously close to blaming the victim.

We hope that we have provided a more substantive context for thinking about NCLB than is typically encountered in the media or political campaigns. The analysis resists easy resolutions, but captures the essence of how we try to educate our students. Leaders, whether in schools or not, cannot avoid making substantive decisions that bear potentially serious consequences for their organizations. We think they do so best when they think critically toward acting wisely to advance the common good.

About the authors

Donald R. LaMagdeleine’s first role at St. Thomas was as director of institutional research. He is chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy and Administration and his research focus is educational policy. Dave Peterson directs the administrative licensure programs for K-12 principal, superintendent, special education director and community education director. Prior to his position at St. Thomas, he was a principal for 28 years in public education in Minnesota. 

______________________________________

   [1] Public Law 107-110, 107th Congress, January 8, 2002.

   [2] W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986).

   [3] Jerry Z. Muller, Adam Smith in his Time and Ours. (Princeton: Princeton University, 1993).

   [4] Alfred NorthWhitehead, Adventures of Ideas, (New York: Free Press).

   [5] Sam Dillon, “Under ‘No Child’ Law, Even Solid Schools Falter.”

   [6] Minnesota Department of Education, “Department of Education Releases Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) Data,” (August 30, 2007).

   [7] Dillon, op. cit.

   [8] Scott J.Cech, “Testing Expert Sees ‘Illusions of Progress’ Under NCLB,” (Education Week, October 1, 2008, p. 8).

   [9] Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988).