The 'Choice is Yours' program did not resolve the problem of black students receiving an inferior education in the Minneapolis Public Schools, as the settlement of the NAACP educational adequacy lawsuit stipulates. The Choice is Yours program is the type limited, one-way, city-to-suburb busing plan that the NAACP lawyers were bargaining for when they made their first settlement offer to the State in 1999. A large majority of the active membership and executive committee of the Minneapolis NAACP branch rejected that first settlement offer. Evelyn Eubanks and I were the first branch members to oppose the settlement offer and outline reasons why the branch should reject it.
John Schulman, the NAACP's lawyer argued that predominantly poor, black schools are inherently inferior to white, middle class schools due to the effects of concentrated poverty. Isolation from and a lack of contact with the white middle class and overexposure to a "culture of poverty" outside of the schools are the main cause of poor academic performance, or so the argument goes. The solution: send black kids from Minneapolis to predominantly white, middle class schools in the suburbs. However, the identification of high-performing, high-poverty and / or minority public schools by the Education Trust is pretty good evidence that poor academic performance is not primarily an effect of concentrated poverty and that the 'culture of poverty' theory is fatally flawed. This culture of poverty theory is not only inconsistent with the evidence but also inconsistent with the analysis put forward by the NAACP during the early 1950s. [See: Evidence that School Policies Matter http://educationright.tripod.com/id173.htm ] Prior to 1954, the NAACP found that, without exception, black and predominantly black schools received less funding where it counts than white schools in the same locale. The black schools generally had less qualified teachers, larger class sizes, less challenging curriculum, textbooks that are outdated and / or in short supply, buildings in disrepair, etc. Not all of the black schools were uniformly bad. However, the best of the black schools were never on par with the best white schools. During the 1960s some states in the Deep South came up with voluntary integration plans to head off "forced integration" of the schools, while at the same time promoting, even mandating "gifted and talented" programs in elementary schools, which were almost invariably reserved for white students. Blacks were assigned to 'low-ability-learner' tracks. Few blacks were willing to enroll their children in white schools that engaged in this kind of in-school racial segregation and tracking. Most black students probably received a better education in all-black schools and didn't have to deal with the sort of hostile environment they encountered in the white schools. Desegregating the schools by large scale integration of blacks into white schools was proposed as the most effective way to ensure that black students receive a quality public education on the same basis as whites. If you can't obtain separate but equal schools, the logical solution is to send black and white students to the same schools. DESEGREGATION: A FAILED EXPERIMENT? I think the controlled-choice desegregation plan used in Minneapolis became increasingly unpopular over time, especially in the black community, for two reasons. One: It required an awful lot of students to take long bus rides to get to school, and most of the burden of bussing was put on black students. Students from predominantly black neighborhoods were scattered about much of the city, while most students in white middle class neighborhoods could attend their traditional 'neighborhood' schools. White middle class neighborhoods had (and still have) a high concentration of schools, and the school board adopted a "go slow" approach to racially integrating the schools in the wealthiest and whitest part of town: SW Minneapolis. Support for the Minneapolis desegregation plan in the black community also declined for the same reason that 'voluntary desegregation' plans didn't catch on with blacks in the South during the 1960s: Enrollment in white schools did not result in better educational outcomes for many black students in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis school board approved, promoted, and eventually mandated gifted and talented programs in most of the elementary schools. And of course whites were greatly over-represented in gifted and talented classrooms, and blacks were greatly over-represented in 'low-ability learners' classrooms. Test score data broken down by race and school lunch eligibility indicates that that is still very much the case in the Minneapolis Public Schools today. The Minneapolis Public Schools administration says that its practice of assigning students to separate classrooms for reading instruction on the basis of perceived ability is not the same as "tracking" and does no harm to students assigned to the 'low ability' learners classrooms. However, I think that even the limited data that is available to the public shows an effect one would expect from a district that "tracks" their students (using the district's narrow definition of 'tracking'). And some research has been done that shows that in-between class grouping by ability in only a single subject has a negative effect similar to full time tracking: "In between-class ability grouping or ability grouped class assignment, several classes cover the same or similar academic content (e.g., mathematics) at a pace and depth that matches the ability of students in each class. Unlike traditional, full-time tracking, a student can be placed, for example, in a low-ability mathematics class but a middle-ability social studies class. Secada (1992) finds that these grouping practices have negative results similar to those of traditional tracking practices." -- From the North Central Regional Educational Library, subject: "grouping practices" http:// www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/content/cntareas/science/ma1group.htm -Doug Mann, King Field, the new 8th ward Mann for School Board web site: http://educationright.tripod.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
