While I believe Ms. Kosnoff was properly chastised for her dismissive post regarding
Mr. Atherton, I, and I daresay other list members, share her frustration with the
gadfly nature of some of Mr. Atherton's (and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Mann's)
education posts. Allow me a few minutes to explain why.
Given the incredible variety of students (in terms of class, race, socio-educational
readiness and learning styles) that need to be accomodated within the Minneapolis
Public Schools, plus the ever-changing mandates handed down by state and federal
education officials, MPS board members have, in my view, the most thankless and
slippery task of any politicians in the state. Yet many of the education posts on this
list pick out one program--or one aspect of one program--and subject it to a
rigorously critical review, citing studies and/or anecdotal evidence, to almost
invariably conclude that the school board is failing in its mission to improve
education in Minneapolis. As has been pointed out, board members who respond to this
list seemingly can't win--for example, they have been denigrated for providing too
much and too little information. In addition, the longer a thread evolves, the harder
it is for me, and perhaps other list members, to see the forest for the trees.
In the interest of creating a debate with a broader perspective, I'd be interested to
know how the MPS stacks up versus similarly-sized school districts across the nation
in terms of test scores, dropout rates, etc. Are other major urban districts doing an
appreciably better job than MPS? While it is occasionally helpful to hear citations
regarding the success of a certain pilot or charter program, or to hear about an
improvement by another district from abysmal to merely mediocre in terms of overall
performance, what is the bottom line performance of MPS relative to its national
peers?Finally, let me throw out a couple of issues that I believe get at the most
intractable dilemmas facing the MPS. One is the not-so-covert discrimination of
underperforming school children, which too often corresponds to the endemic racism and
classism that infects the community at-large as much or more than MPS officials. To
put it bluntly, to what extent does the MPS risk losing its higher performing students
if it doesn't engage in the ability-grouping and preferential teacher assignments that
are seemingly designed to placate the parents of higher-performing students? I
understand the right, politically correct response, which is, for that matter, the
legal response: All students should be given an equal chance to obtain a quality
education. But that and discussions over the need to secure affordable housing for all
who need it strike me as the two great disconnects between what we espouse and what we
do--the areas where lip service reigns supreme. And I suspect it is because we don't
have the polit
ical will and moral fortitude to back up our rhetoric. Put simply, any attempt to try
and live up the ideal of quality education and affordable housing runs into
bigotry--expressed through the abandonment of the school system, the lack of funding,
or whatever--that threatens to make the problem worse. This is what politicians are
loath to acknowledge but compelled to confront as they make their public policy
decisions.
Let me offer up two examples of this. Because we have decreed that equal education
should be available to all, there are a host of federal mandates regarding special
education in our schools. But the federal government refuses to fund those mandates to
the extent it legally says it will. In the MPS, this shortfall adds up to $27 million,
a tremendous amount of money that could be spent in myriad ways to improve education.
The second example is the $5 million in desegregation monies that were originally
earmarked to be part of the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the NAACP against the
MPS. It is my understanding (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) that during
the last legislative session, those monies were deliberately removed from the MPS
budget. Why did the state, which approved the settlement, then remove the monies? And
why has the NAACP, which properly made ample noise about segregation within the MPS,
not raised a similar ruckus about those monies being taken away by the state? Here
again, there is a disconnect between what we espouse and what we do.
Britt Robson
Lyndale
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