From Jerry over here
MDE School and District Accountability
MDE Schools Recognized for Success
MDE Resources for Struggling Schools
Just a quick reminder...
Jerry thinks that the status quo public schools own ~100% of the academic achievement gap problem and that school vouchers and free choice will in some way work miracles. (ie lower costs, increase performance, eliminate the gap, end poverty, etc)
Where as I believe the status quo public schools own maybe 30% of the academic achievement gap problem, and that it will take holding irresponsible, incompetent and/or neglectful parent(s) AND Schools / Social Services accountable to turn this around.
Anything is possible, given the right mix of Parent, Student and School Qualities. However we need systems that start before age 5 and do not leave out the truly unlucky kids. Remember that race and poverty are not the cause of poor academic performance... The cause is incapable or neglectful parent(s)...
Here are some links from the Desegregation Post Comments for your convenience.
Best results are Whiter and Wealthier...
Best Performing MN Schools
Struggling Schools
This is a very interesting link
Poverty is correlated to Low Kindergarten Readiness
Another interesting source.
Great Schools Changes Criteria
Great Schools New Criteria
Harlem Children's Zone first failures...
Whatever It Takes
It looks like Obama did try.
Promise Neighborhoods
"I don't know where you get your ideas of "the religious right." I doubt you will find many child abusers, and certainly not those tolerant of such, among them. What is fascinating here is that you seem to suggest that the 1% of kids who are abused by their parents are somehow a good reason to ignore the 99% of kids abused by the government's education system. Both are unnecessary and wrong, and even government itself finally recognizes their efforts are inadequate.
Star Tribune MDE Accountability Review Results. Not sure what this "extra help" consists of-- probably high-sounding phrases-- but at least we are identifying the problem and putting blame where it belongs, on the schools.
By the way, one of your citations on the incidence of abuse says that poverty only accounts for something like 20% of cases (on 1% of kids). Schools account directly for 100% of educational failures. We should be looking at proximate causes of education failures, not secondary determinants."
MDE School and District Accountability
MDE Schools Recognized for Success
MDE Resources for Struggling Schools
Just a quick reminder...
Jerry thinks that the status quo public schools own ~100% of the academic achievement gap problem and that school vouchers and free choice will in some way work miracles. (ie lower costs, increase performance, eliminate the gap, end poverty, etc)
Where as I believe the status quo public schools own maybe 30% of the academic achievement gap problem, and that it will take holding irresponsible, incompetent and/or neglectful parent(s) AND Schools / Social Services accountable to turn this around.
Anything is possible, given the right mix of Parent, Student and School Qualities. However we need systems that start before age 5 and do not leave out the truly unlucky kids. Remember that race and poverty are not the cause of poor academic performance... The cause is incapable or neglectful parent(s)...
Here are some links from the Desegregation Post Comments for your convenience.
Best results are Whiter and Wealthier...
Best Performing MN Schools
Struggling Schools
This is a very interesting link
Poverty is correlated to Low Kindergarten Readiness
Another interesting source.
Great Schools Changes Criteria
Great Schools New Criteria
Harlem Children's Zone first failures...
Whatever It Takes
It looks like Obama did try.
Promise Neighborhoods
37 comments:
I have been thinking about how incorrect this sentence is...
"What is fascinating here is that you seem to suggest that the 1% of kids who are abused by their parents are somehow a good reason to ignore the 99% of kids abused by the government's education system."
My point being of course that the public education system did and does great by most of us who have responsible capable parent(s). Per the MDE Report Card:
- 82.7% of kids graduate
And they have these challenges
- 85.6% of kids reliably show up to class
- 37.2% of kids are on food programs
- 15.7% of kids are special needs
- 8.3% are Learning English
- 1.0% are actually homeless
So what percentage of our children are being FAILED by Poor Parent(s) and Poor Education system? Maybe...
100% - 85.6% Grad - 3% (severe special ed) = 11.4% ?
Off topic... Now that is what I call a White House photo... :-(
So much for trying to help the unlucky kids succeed...
So I was browsing MinnPost for new topics when I stumbled an ad for Close Gaps by Five.
Something that I whole heartedly believe needs to happen. The science supports this as does simple logic. If kids come to school with large differences in capability, it is likely that:
- those who are ahead Kindergarten ready or ahead will stay ahead
- those who are behind will stay behind, especially if their first five years of reduced neuro development handicaps them into their K-12 years. And especially if these kids have little or no academic support at home.
Here is their explanation and proposal
Well they certainly are smart people...
"Achievement Gaps Must Be Addressed Early. To combat this problem, we have to
start early in life. Research shows that about eighty percent of brain development
happens by age three, and gaps open as early as age one. Given that research, if we
hope to close achievement gaps, we can’t wait until kindergarten or even preschool
before we begin investing in early learning help for our most vulnerable children."
I gave you a lot of links above, however this one explains well why children born to poor / high risk homes suffer delays most.
" Parents need choices to ensure their early learning program fits their location, work schedule, culture, language and other preferences. Programs of various types and sizes, including those based in centers, homes, schools, churches and nonprofit organizations, can adopt kindergarten readiness best practices.
Children in traditional publicly financed programs often lose learning continuity, because they get cut off from early learning programs when their parents move, change jobs or when their family’s income changes. "
" Early Learning Scholarships help low-income children access high-quality Parent Aware-rated programs that their families otherwise couldn’t afford. Scholarships empower parents to choose from a wide variety of programs based in centers, homes, schools, churches and nonprofit organizations, as long as the program is using kindergarten-readiness best practices, as measured by the Parent Aware Ratings."
Translation: Public schools generally fail, and vouchers/school choice succeeds. And schools should be using what works.
I will also point out that the GOP legislature took Dayton's "pre-K for all" (in the public schools) and put that money into these preschool scholarships, for poor kids.
Just what evil are these conservatives plotting? :-/
I support pre-k scholarships as you know.
Unfortunately conservative do not like spending much money here, as the site notes.
There is not enough funding to support all the kids who need this extra help.
Also note, that parent aware stuff sets up a lot of rules for pre-k educators.
I hear a lot about it from the Mrs. :-)
I wouldn't say "rules," I would say "best practices." Big difference. The public schools have rules and /preferred/ practices. They are not best, or they would be doing better.
According to your cite, again, there is enough money for about 57% of the kids. And I think that was before the last GOP legislature essentially doubled the money. I'll agree it seems well spent and, if there really isn't enough, then we should take it OUT of the K-12 budgets of the local schools because they won't have all the "problems" their well-padded budgets supposedly address. Target the spending more effectively, IOW.
And THEN can we have K-12 reform? Even if this is your "miracle," we still have kids who have already entered the K-12 failure factory. What do we do with them?
Failure factory... Deficient inputs yield deficient products...
That is why the public schools succeed with most of the kids.
It seems they only fail the kids with poor parent(s) who do not ensure they are ready for kindergarten and/or support them adequately while they are in K-12.
Raising children is a partnership between parent(s) and the teachers, if the parent(s) fail to fulfill their responsibilities... The kids future is put at risk.
Now if we can enable and/or force incapable and/or neglectful parent(s) to fulfill their responsibilities.
That will be great.
You keep saying that, yet there are schools which "succeed" with kids from the same (poor, black) demographics that you assume are doomed to failure. You simply cannot tell me that schools are doing the very best they can with the kids they have. Yes, it's harder, but that is why we give those schools so much more money. And then we let them use the excuse that the kids are poor and black as the reason they cannot educate but that they need more money. Then nothing changes.
As we discuss over and over... Poor and Black are not the causal factors.
Good capable parent(s) can be Poor or Rich, Black or White, Muslim or Christian, etc...
Unlucky kids are not unlucky because they are poor and/or Black... They are unlucky because their parent(s) are not mature, not capable, and/or are neglectful...
Now please show me a school that can compensate for a dead beat Parent(s)?
See the few successful charters are unique in that their student bodies are made up of parent(s) who are engaged and smart enough to get their child enrolled... And stable enough to keep their child attending that school.
Now if all of the North Mpls parent(s) were like that, I am certain they would be doing much better also.
Here is an interesting review of Mpls Student Mobility. And how it adversely impacts the kids.
So do we as a society want to provide more housing support so kids can live a normal child's life?
This conclusion sounds familiar...
"This study, and others, point to a critical need to improve attendance. The whole
community has a stake in school attendance. Schools must lead the effort, but
they must involve the whole community in helping students and their families
understand the importance of attendance and act on that knowledge.
New to the discussion of mobility is the force of the housing issue. Without
more housing – adequate, safe, and better distributed housing – programs to
strengthen families and neighborhoods are working with a great handicap. If
families can experience stability in one aspect of their lives such as housing they
have a better chance to begin, with the help of their communities, to build
personal and family stability in other areas. Family stability also can be improved
when social services and housing are linked.
Better housing, efficient delivery of social services and better school attendance
are things that can be changed with focused interventions and integrated service
on the part of multiple agencies. "
And this one is also relevant...
"In Minnesota as in the U.S., chronic absence tends to follow poverty. Across the state last year, 24 percent — nearly a quarter — of students enrolled in the free or reduced priced meal program in Minnesota school districts and charters, used as a proxy for poverty, were chronically absent, data from the Minnesota Department of Education show.
Since median household incomes are lower for most minority groups than for whites here, and people of color disproportionately live in poverty, it should come as no surprise that rates of chronic absenteeism in Minnesota last year were higher for all minority student groups (with the exception of Asian students, a group that also has lower levels of poverty and higher median incomes), than they were for white students."
Now I think we can all agree that if kids are often changing schools or missing class...
Their grades will suffer and their is little a school can do to help the student...
This a parent(s) or lack of social services / charity problem.
How the Family has Changed
Don Lemon says it Straight
Here is Don's whole piece
"parent(s) who are engaged and smart enough to get their child enrolled.."
Exactly. And putting a universal voucher in every parent's hand would FORCE them to be engaged, at least to the point of signing that check over to a school. And having done that, would they be more or less likely to "want their money's worth" from the school? More or less likely to insist that the child "get what we paid for"? See the "value of an education"?
Whoa up. We seem to be equating student absenteeism with family mobility, and I don't think you can say that. You need to separate truancy from non-resident, and if we had non-public schools without defined boundaries, movement would be less of a problem. And if the cost of housing is the problem, look at the many ways city governments RAISE the cost of rental and owner-occupied housing.
Nor can you blame "lack of social services" for the underlying poverty problem. We are spending vast sums of money, it is just grossly inefficacious and sometimes counterproductive.
Those complexities are why I say we need to reform the schools first, something relatively easy to do.
If the schools are engaging students, they are less likely to skip out.
As usual that is a lot of “faith / belief” with no sources to back it up.
Please remember that MN has many charter schools and yet most do as bad or worse than the publics. And their student body is making a choice and taking effort to get there...
Not just handing over a slip of paper.
Maybe city wide cross district transportation would solve the mobility problem...
Then city kids could enroll and get to those high performing suburban schools...
Oh I forgot... You don’t believe in busing kids to better schools with better student body demographics. Or now do you?
Charter school parents are happier than public school parents. Why would you deny anyone that choice? And in Mpls, at least, charter schools are public schools, with many of the same restrictions, so I am not sure you are doing apples and oranges, which you should, but maybe crabapples and rotten apples?
As for cross-district bussing, in NO place has that been proven to raise academic performance. In general it is a detractor for the simple reason it is resources out of place. That is, in the inner city schools where disadvantages predominate in the student body, the schools can ADAPT to that reality with extra tutoring, tougher discipline, improved curriculum and pedagogy practices. Scatter that out amongst the generally advantaged and you create chaos-- a great two-tier system where only one group works reasonably well and the other gets frustrated, angry, and disadvantaged further. No good can ever come from taking a child that is a grade level behind, putting them on the bus for an hour, and putting them in a classroom where they are TWO grades behind.
And you haven't shown there IS a mobility problem, just a lot of truancy. I've got a "slip of paper" here, worth $11,000. Do you want it or not?
You really should read my links...
Kids Mobility Project Report
And of course we know putting unlucky kids in the Wayzata schools works wonderfully for them... I mean they have some poor and/or unlucky kids there... However they have lots of smart capable lucky kids there to help provide great role models. And the teachers only have a few struggling kids in the class... Not a majority...
Your links either confirm common sense, my view, or somehow seem not relevant. In this case, we prove that students who don't attend school don't learn as well. Duh. And the other says that Wayzata has fewer minorities but obviously, these are those "lucky kids" who can afford to, or have chosen to, put their kids there. By your lights, that does NOT argue for bussing kids from failing parents and failing schools out to someplace equipped for educating only "lucky kids."
So you support vouchers which I am assuming support cross district busing, which allows kids to stay in the same school as they become homeless, move between apartments, move between family members, and all the other reasons unlucky kids have high mobility. I mean as we have discussed, these poor parent(s) can not drive their kids.
From one side of your mouth you are saying, kids should be free to go to the best most challenging schools. From your other side you are saying there will be no benefit to them if they attended the best most challenging schools in MN.
Peers and resources matter, when only 3 kids in a the class need extra help / discipline... It is easy to give it to them... Not so when 15+ of the kids need that extra help / discipline and they have almost no academic support at home.
I am saying that there should be competition for public education dollars, just as we have competition for public highway funding. One of the Florida initiatives-- hated by the public school monopoly, surprise-- is that the school district runs the buildings but contracts out the education therein to private/charter schools. Best of both worlds; problem solved. Given universal vouchers, OTOH, competition for those vouchers would soon flow into facilities close to the most glaringly failing schools. Again, problem solved.
And I don't think there should be ANY classroom with 15+ kids that need "extra" help. If that is the case, the teacher/curriculum/school is failing to provide an education that the kids can "reach." You cannot assign "Pride and Prejudice" to a 9th-grader that reads at a 3rd grade level. Picking that kid up and sending him to Edina isn't going to help; it's going to make him feel and perform relatively worse.
Well let's see...
Some kids show up for Kindergarten ready...
And some show up with the physical, academic, social, emotional and cognitive capabilities and capacities of a 3 year old.
Of course many kids in Minneapolis schools come ill prepared. The links I have provided above clearly explain what single parent households, poverty, fear, uncertainty, stress, lack of positive role models, etc do to a pre-schoolers brain.
"Picking that kid up and sending him to Edina isn't going to help; it's going to make him feel and perform relatively worse."
It seems you are falling into the Liberal trap of soft bigotry. Aren't you the one who demands rigorous academics, strict discipline, one on one support, etc. That is exactly what Wayzata and Edina can offer their unlucky kids because they make up a smaller percentage of the student body.
Where as Minneapolis get a bunch of ~3 year olds who keep changing schools, and you wonder why they struggle to accelerate their learning.
I mean the vast majority of kids who go to Wayzata have been trained and conditioned by their Parents to be ready for school. They show up and start learning...
Example Kindergarten Readiness Checklist
CDC Developmental Checklist
You are getting cause and effect reversed, IMHO. You are saying that because Mpls schools get too many unlucky kids they cannot teach them, KNOWING they are unlucky (and by the way I am using your objectionable terminology only for convenience), so therefore the schools in Edina can do better? If the schools in Edina can do better, then why can't the schools in MPLS???
Look, I've had some experience here, with these students that arrive from the inner city. They don't academically "fit in" very well, despite all the help we can give them. They need to get the basics wherever they started, and these kids have not. Remember the "two bad teachers in a row rule"?
And I'm all for your suggestion of pre-K scholarships (vouchers) for poor kids, but I am curious whether you believe that all of these new "Kindergarten ready" kids can really learn any better in the current K-12 schools? Remember the scientific evidence shows that any incoming advantage, like Head Start, disappears in 1 or 2 years, and that the more years kids spend in our public schools, the further behind they are compared to international competition.
As discussed over and over...
The density of unlucky kids within a school is the challenge.
Please remember that I have no issue with improving schools as part of the solution. I just don't see vouchers as the solution.
Actually, density is the opportunity. Just like in Mississippi, if we group kids by ability, we can assign the best teachers to the "slowest" group, and adapt the curriculum to that demographic/cultural/whatever group. Mixing the groups creates chaos for the teacher.
Interesting that your citation shows no regard for improving the schools as part of the solution, except for a vague reference to "public employee unions." Given that, it would seem that vouchers might be a very quick and easy solution, permitting attendance at non-union schools.
And if you don't see vouchers as the solution, what else can you suggest that would be as quick and effective as competition? "Lucky" parents can afford to, and do, move to a new home near "good schools." Why would you deny poor people that same opportunity?
For improvement proposals here are an abundance of ideas.
Now the SCOTUS hopefully weakened the funding of Education Minnesota, so maybe more improvements will be forth coming.
As for why vouchers are not the answer...
You always ask me for sources, yet when you quote sources you use your own posts? Yes, reducing the power of EdMN is a good idea, but certainly no panacea or even close to adequate. Universal vouchers would create an opportunity for that and so much more. Yes, this may now happen, yet I would bet that 80% of black kids will STILL not read at grade level.
I am not resposting all the ideas and sources on this link for an issue we have been talking about for 10 years.
You said my "solution" was vague. I gave you tons of links to where I have proposed many improvement ideas.
Same with vouchers... See our past discussions if you want a reminder as to what I have against vouchers.
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