Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/tag/achievement-gap/page/2/)
Having concluded our examination of racial gaps in National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores, we’re moving on to income gaps on the same tests. Then it’s on to graduation rates, and then we’ll move into some non-education equity gaps. Continue Reading
For the next few weeks at least, most Graph of the Day posts will highlight “Gaps of the Day.” These are areas of inequality in Minnesota, generally in comparison to other states. We’ll start in education, then broaden our focus. Continue Reading
The 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington will be recognized with a day of activities Saturday, August 24. Community residents, including several who participated in the historic 1963 gathering on the Washington Mall, will speak at Sabathani Community Center in South Minneapolis at 10:30 am.Left: Tracine Asberry (MSR file photo)“We are trying to bridge the gap between those who went on the original march — there are a number of [local] people who went on that march,” noted Mary Merrill Anderson, who was in junior high when the historic event took place in 1963. “We want to get their perspective on what was on their minds when they went, why they made the sacrifice to go to Washington, D.C., and what they hoped to accomplish.”At 11:45 am the “March to Close the Gaps” will commence at Sabathani and end at Martin Luther King, Jr. Park at 40th and Nicollet. There, 12:30 pm, retired historian Mahmoud El-Kati and others will reflect on Dr. King and the march.Right: Mary Merrill Anderson (Photo by Charles Hallman)The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Park Legacy Council is sponsoring the event. Anderson and Tracine Asberry are both council members and told the MSR last week in separate interviews that it is more than a remembrance of the occasion that took place 50 years ago this month.“Even though living in Minnesota, there was obviously discrimination [but] not in the same way [as elsewhere, especially in the South],” remembers Anderson. Continue Reading
Last week, we spoke with the leadership of the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development (CEHD) initiative to reduce Minnesota’s achievement gap. However, we cannot discuss students and their families without focusing on schoolteachers.Left: Jean Quam (Photo courtesy of U of M)According to CEHD’s Dean Jean Quam, there are currently 31 percent students of color in the U of M teacher preparation programs. She is hopeful that a new partnership with Teach for America (TFA), which is currently being discussed, will change that number.“They have 38 percent students of color in their teacher corps. We want to work with them to increase that number and improve their teacher preparation program,” she said. That plan includes lengthening and strengthening (TFA’s) five-week intensive training model.Misty Sato, associate professor of curriculum and instruction, and her team are creating incubators for this work in partnership with the Bush Foundation through the TERI (Teacher Education Redesign Initiative) program. The main priority is to diversify teacher-candidate pools.Left: Kim Nelson (Photo courtesy of General Mills)“The kind of program that we are running is working well for a particular population. Continue Reading
The Education Department released new high school graduation data November 26, and the news isn’t good. Overall, Minnesota doesn’t do well, with an overall 77 percent four-year graduate rate placing us in the lower 50 percent of all states. Even worse, Minnesota has the biggest graduation gap, with 35 percentage points separating the African American graduation rate of 49 percent from the white graduation rate of 84 percent. Only Nevada has a lower African American graduation rate than Minnesota.That’s really depressing news. It’s also inconsistent with previous years’ reports on overall graduation rates. I’m not sure what that inconsistency means. Continue Reading
About five years ago, Phalen Lake Hmong Studies Magnet, which was previously Phalen Lake Elementary, responded to the needs of their high population of Hmong students and parents by introducing programming that focused on Hmong culture. Like other schools that we’ve profiled here at TCDP in the past few months, the cultural programming was chosen as a means to improve the achievement gap. At Phalen Lake, that effort has succeeded. The school’s math and reading scores have gradually increased, and the school is doing especially well for their EL learners.
The problem: Twin Cities’ charter schools are failing to improve academic outcomes, while driving increased school segregation.Charter schools unhindered by the oversight and regulation of traditional districted public schools were hailed as part of the solution to the problems facing the American education system. With fewer restrictions, charter schools are supposed to provide the necessary innovation to address low performance, achievement gaps, and unmet specialized educational needs.However, Myron Orfield, co-author of a recently updated study: “Failed Promises: Assessing Charter Schools in the Twin Cities,” (Institute on Race and Poverty, January, 2012) has found that most charter schools underperform their districted public counterparts and are driving the re-segregation of Twin Cities public school systems.What is the Civic Caucus?The Civic Caucus is a Minnesota-based organization offering a new model for public affairs dialog, byoffering innovative opportunities to involve citizens in public affairs without making extraordinary demands on their timehosting a unique library of interviews with past and present political figuresencouraging participation (feedback) by citizens across political ideologyusing electronic communication to educate and involve participants from their homesarriving at recommended solutions to a variety of issues that affect us.inviting participants to sign on in support of recommendationsAnyone who would like to receive email reports from the Civic Caucus can send their email address to civiccaucus@comcast.net. No dues; no dunning; they don’t share their email list with others; anyone may have his or her address removed at any time. Who is Myron Orfield?Myron Orfield is the Director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and an affiliate faculty member at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.He teaches and writes in the fields of civil rights, state and local government, state and local finance, land use, questions of regional governance, and the legislative process.Orfield graduated, summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota, was a graduate student at Princeton University, and has a J.D. from the University of Chicago, where he was a member of the University of Chicago Law Review. Following law school, he clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit and then returned to the University of Chicago Law School as a Research Associate and Bradley Fellow at the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice. After working as an associate at Faegre & Benson (now Faegre Baker Daniels) in Minneapolis, he served as a Special Assistant Attorney General of Minnesota in the Solicitor General’s Division.In 1990, Orfield was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, where he served five terms, and to the Minnesota Senate in 2000, where he served one term.Segregation in the schools”I don’t oppose the principal of charter schools, but I have found problems with the way they have been administered by the State of Minnesota,” said Orfield. One of the biggest problems Orfield finds is that charter schools currently are exempt from state civil rights laws allowing the development of single race or ethnic group schools. Though these schools promise improved educational outcomes for students there is little evidence that supports this claim.Charter schools further have siphoned resources from traditional public schools. Continue Reading
“Standardized tests have not, are not and never will be an instrument to advance civil rights or to end poverty. They don’t do that,” Diane Ravitch told educators at the annual Education Minnesota conference on October 18. “High stakes testing is sucking the life out of American education.”
Education Minnesota, the state teachers’ union, kicked off its annual conference with a keynote speech aimed to fire up teachers fatigued by what reformers, policymakers and the media say about their profession. Of course, if the listening teacher happened to work for a charter school or Teach for America, they might not have been so pleased with what they heard. But those teachers were less likely to turn out in droves for the union-sponsored event. Continue Reading
Unless they’re striking or running for something, individual teachers rarely take center stage in election-year education conversations. Last Thursday, the League of Women Voters passed the microphone to five Minneapolis educators who described their conflicting perspectives on education policy in the classroom. The League is a non-partisan political organization that is hosting numerous events this election cycle to inform voters about issues like education policy and voter ID. Thursday’s event took place one day after the first presidential debate, and, although the event was presented as a forum, not a debate, the tone was at times more combative than conciliatory, especially on the theme of teacher tenure and “last in, first out” policies. Panelists responded to questions on topics ranging from teacher evaluation to testing, the achievement gap and student suspensions. Continue Reading
Hmong International Academy’s challenge is also its solution. The Minneapolis district school, which has struggled with low test scores from its inception five years ago, is a school, in part by design, that has an almost entirely minority population, and a very high poverty rate. But principal Andy Xiong sees the school’s focus on Hmong language and culture as a way to support its goals to improve what he calls “mainstream academics”— in other words, test scores in math, reading and science.