I don't agree that the needs of poor students are best served by "remedial" nonacademic curriculum programs. My best guess is that no more than 30% of all students who are tracked into nonacademic courses graduate from high school. The graduation rate for college-bound students is probably 90% or better. High school graduation rates for non-college bound students is generally much lower than the district wide average for students who attend K-8 schools that serve poor neighborhoods and have high concentrations of inexperienced teachers. That helps to explain why the HS graduation rate is only 14% for Indian students and is probably less than 20% for black students.
The budgets for schools in SW Minneapolis would be impossibly low without "impact aid" because they have been grossly under-enrolled. Most of the impact aid could be cut without reducing revenues to those schools by opening enrollment to students from other parts of the city. Incidentally, I am not in favor of going back to the controlled choice desegregation plan. However, the district can and should desegregate the community schools. It's largely a question of where you draw the school attendance boundaries, where you chose to build or tear down schools, how you change grade level configurations at particular schools, and so forth. -Doug Mann Mann for School Board <http://educationright.tripod.com> _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
