It is curious that Dick Day was quoted as saying that the schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul suck, and are mismanaged, but did not offer a reasoned argument to support that contention. The problem, it seems, is that kids in the big city school districts don't have enough loving people in their lives outside of school.
"Terribly mismanaged," Day said of the two city districts. "What's happening is that nobody's looking at the real causes of what's going on in those districts. What we need to have are mentoring programs, where two or three kids, maybe five or six, work with an adult and maybe go out for a hamburger once in a while. A loving person doesn't have to be a parent." - Doug Grow: Was Day crude, stupid? Doug Grow notes, "In fact, 81.16 percent of the Owatonna eighth-graders passed the test. Just 52.36 of all Minneapolis eighth-graders passed. But, at the risk of Day-like stereotyping, if only white eighth-graders are tallied, Minneapolis eighth-graders are even with the same demographic from Owatonna and outperform Owatonna kids in math." Giving the fact that a huge majority of Minneapolis eight graders are not white, the only explanation for the average pass rate for students in Minneapolis being nearly 30 points lower than in Owatonna (81.16 vs. 52.36) is that the average pass rate for students of color in Minneapolis is less than 20%. And first time pass rates on the MBST are also a fairly good predictor of high school graduation rates. Now that picture really sucks if you are not white (and / or middle to upper class). Grow also reports, "She [Ellen Samuelson Young] selected several Minneapolis grade schools with demographics similar to the four elementary schools in Owatonna, where 30 percent of the kids come from impoverished backgrounds and 10 percent have limited English skills. In most cases, Minneapolis third- and fifth-graders had better scores than Owatonna kids in math and reading." That doesn't prove that all schools in Minneapolis are about as good at educating students as the four elementary schools in Owatonna and elementary schools in Minneapolis with similar demographic profiles. If you say that the gap is not attributable, at least in part, to inferior schools (i.e., schools that suck), then the explanation must be 'that schools have very little or no effect on learning independent of a students social context outside of school (home, peer groups, etc). That is the conclusion of the 1966 Coleman study, which supported the argument of white supremacists that integrating black students into "allegedly" superior white schools couldn't help to close the gap. Yet, considerable progress was made toward closing the education achievement gap in the 1970s and 1980s. The report by a US presidential commission on K-12 education released in 1983, entitled "A Nation at Risk," warned that a 'rising tide of mediocrity threatened to destroy the foundations of our educational system.' In other words, the gap was being closed at the expense of the high achievers. But much like those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no evidence was offered to back up that contention. And a study later commissioned and suppressed by the first Bush administration, know as the Sandia Report, found no evidence of a rising tide of mediocrity in the school system during the 1970s and 1980s. However, the war against that "rising tide of mediocrity" has gone hand-in-hand with the a widening of the academic achievement gap since the last 1980s. Just a coincidence? What do you think you have happened if there wasn't a fundamental shift in educational policy during the 1980s. Imagine if further progress was made toward closing the gap. Without a big racial learning gap, the idea that whites are, by nature, inferior to blacks, and the discrimination inspired by that belief could not long endure. In my opinion, racism is not a product of cultural inertia, but a product of political and ideological struggles that serve definite economic and social interests: The interests of a fairly small, wealthy elite that gets a bigger piece of the pie by cutting down the average portion size for everyone else. The widely accepted idea that schools have very little effect on academic achievement independent of a student's social context outside of school is racist on its face, in my opinion, because it frames the problem of the education gap between blacks and whites as a reflection of the alleged stupidity of blacks, by comparison to whites. The difference between ignorance and stupidity is that you can't do anything about stupidity. -Doug Mann, King Field Minneapolis school board candidate REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
