[This is the text of an Email sent to the Minnesota Green Party Listserve on August 20, 2002. It was sent in response to the idea that Public schools in Minnesota need massive investments and massive reform. I think that the schools in a majority of districts across the state don't need to be reformed, and their resistance to being reformed along the lines proposed by the Bush administration is commendable. Unfortunately, the Minneapolis school districts is not one of those school districts]
We need a massive increase in spending on education. Across the US, appropriations for the K-12 public school system from all sources, reckoned as inflation-adjusted dollars per pupil, has steadily declined since the 1970s. Ditto for higher education. We need massive reform in some school districts, but not in others. The educational establishment in the US was generally on the right track during the 1970s and early 1980s, if you're idea of being on the right track is closing the test score gap without lowering the bar for high achievers. That began to change after the release of a 1983 report entitled "A Nation at Risk," which was issued by a blue ribbon panel of K-12 education experts picked by the Reagan-Bush administration. The thesis of A Nation at Risk: The test score gap was being closed at the expense of high achievers [during the 1970s and early 1980s]. However, the first Bush administration ordered the Sandia National Laboratories [a division of the dept of energy] to do an analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal testing program. The thesis of A Nation at Risk was proven wrong by this study, which the Bush administration suppressed [it was quietly released during the early years of the Clinton administration] [An example of] the type of reform successfully promoted since 1983 is tracking students into nonacademic curriculum tracks as early as Kindergarten through the use of ability-grouping. The US was the first, and may still the only country where ability-grouping is done in elementary schools. It was widely introduced during the late 1950s and early 1960s in order to keep black students in their place, i.e., in the "low-ability" groups. Minnesota provides a chilling example of how the post-1983 K-12 school reform movement has set back the gains of the civil rights movement in the field of education. A generation ago 68% of blacks and 76% of whites graduated from high school in Minneapolis. Today only about 33% of black ninth graders finish high school on time in the state of Minnesota. The graduation rate for black students in the Minneapolis Public Schools is much lower than that. On the other hand, graduation rates for black students (the US average) have improved to a modest degree. The quality of education provided to the majority of students in other big city school districts has also declined in the past decade, but the public school system in Minneapolis takes the cake. [For example] The graduation rate for African American students in the Houston Public Schools is about 50%. That's about where its at in some of the other big city school districts like Seattle, Chicago, New York, etc. Sorry for not citing my sources in this post. I have posts at my web site that cover the same ground with sources properly cited. -Doug Mann 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
