Peebles isn't getting into hot water with the board because she is failing to turn things around for African American students. She hasn't turned things around for African American students, and it appears that that is not one of the boards concerns. And unfortunately it appears that many of Peebles backers in the African American community either don't care about it or don't know what's going on.
The African American community is not being well served by the Minneapolis Public Schools, and for the most part things have not gotten better with Peebles in charge. And the problem lies chiefly with the board of directors. As I have pointed out in other posts, The district is not in compliance with the states desegregation rule. One of most critical areas of noncompliance is the high teacher turnover rate and a high concentration of the district's least experienced teachers in "racially identifiable schools." The deseg plan approved by Peebles didn't address that issue. The deseg rule states that the MN Dept of Education "shall request" and the school district "shall provide" a comparison of the qualifications and experience levels of teachers in "racially identifiable schools" and other schools. If the "racially identifiable schools" have less qualified, less experienced teachers, and a higher turnover of teachers, which I am sure is the case, the district must come up with a plan to rapidly correct the problem. The district just laid off about 300 probationary teachers. The administration is continuing to lay off teachers it in actuality plans to rehire or replace, thereby driving up the turnover rate of teachers. Peebles had no track record as a school superintendent before getting the superintendent position here. The test scores for MN basic standard tests, recently released, indicated that the black-white test score gap continues to grow, and that schools that Peebles personally supervised, which had the lowest scores to begin with, made smaller gains than the rest of the district schools. No superintendent can turn things around for a majority of the districts students of color and many poor whites without a board that is committed to policies and practices that can make all schools good schools. -Doug Mann, King Field candidate for 8th ward city council http://educationright.com/blog REMINDERS: 1. Be civil! Please read the NEW RULES at http://www.e-democracy.org/rules. If you think a member is in violation, contact 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 Civil City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
