"A Generation ago, 68% of the African Americans in Minneapolis were high school graduates compared with 76% of whites..." Clarence Hightower, President, CEO Mpls Urban League [Insight News, page 2, Wed 29 May 2002]
In recent years the graduation rate for all students in the Minneapolis Public Schools has been under 50%. The graduation rate for African-American students in Minneapolis is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20%. I was a custodial parent of a couple of Minneapolis School students on the South Side and SE in the mid to late 1980s. I got the impression that the Minneapolis Public Schools were doing a fairly good job of preparing kids for college, jobs and life outside of the K-12 school system. Mark Snyder, a North High School student in the late 1980s also has a fairly high opinion of the school system based on his experience as a student. However, I changed my opinion about the schools based on further experience as a parent in the late 1990s. During the 1970s and 1980s a huge amount of progress was being made toward the goals of improving the quality of education for all and closing the academic achievement gap in Minneapolis and throughout the US. However, since the mid-1980s educational policy in Minneapolis has been driven by the agenda of a neo-conservative school reform movement that was launched with a 1983 report called "A Nation at Risk," which has given us more homework (parental involvement), more inequality (race / class segregation, part-to-full time tracking beginning in Kindergarten or grade one), and worse educational outcomes (dumbed-down curriculum for most students). A Nation at Risk was telling us that the school system was bad and getting worse. However, test score data from the 1970s and 80s tell a different story. For example, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (federal testing program) showed that the gap in reading and math test scores was closing, and that efforts to close the gap were adversely effecting outcomes for the high achievers (as A Nation At Risk claimed). The difference in reading test scores between white and black 13 year olds declined by about 50% between 1971 and 1988. From its low point in 1988 that gap has increased by about 75%. -- "Evidence That School Policies Matter" http://educationright.tripod.com/id173.htm Many of the public school districts in the suburbs and outstate are still doing a pretty good job of educating all students because they haven't gone as far in abandoning the policies that were put in place by nearly all school districts during the 1970s. In a message dated 3/21/2003 7:58:26 AM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: "When Dukakis ran in 1988, I was attending Minneapolis North High School. We never talked about who we should tell our parents to support for president...[snip] I also felt quite prepared for college two years later when I graduated and went on to the U of MN as my lowly MPS education helped me score a 30 on my ACT and a 1320 on my SATs" -Doug Mann, King Field http://educationright.tripod.com TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. Cut as much of the post you're responding to as possible. ________________________________ 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
