Re: [Mpls] dropouts

[Brobson34]

The problems facing the Minneapolis public schools doesn't take a rocket
scientist to figure out. Too often proposals for reform--or simply carping
about the "failure" of the MPS--miss the forest for the trees.
Recent census data has revealed an exponential increase in the number of
homeless people. The data also demonstrates a huge influx in the number of
immigrants coming to the city. Critics like Mike Atherton can talk all they
want about new techniques and methods, but the bottom line is that you are
not going to be able to educate people who can't speak English and/or don't
have a stable place to live as effectively as you are the students who know
the language and have a stable environment. The stress and deficiencies that
are endemic to poverty and addiction and familial abuse also come into play.
We can argue all day over whether people bring these problems on themselves
or are victimized by the way our society operates, but the children growing
up in these families have no control over it and are not to blame. They do,
however, bear the brunt of what their parents and guardians are experiencing
and that drastically affects their ability to learn, or even care about
education.
Matters of race are a factor in education, both in the MPS and elsewhere, but
not nearly so much as matters of class. Nobody breaks down the test scores
and learning proclivities of black, Latino, Hmong, whomever, who are members
of the middle class and have a stable home environment, but I would bet that
they aren't that much different from test scores or learning proclivities of
white kids in similar circumstances.
People want to criticize the MPS for disorganization or a lack of
responsiveness to certain segments of the population, be it
African-Americans, gifted students, special ed, etc. But when you're dealing
with a significant percent of student who are consistently transient, another
significant percentage who don't know the language and who have spent the
last ten years watching civil war kill off the families before being sent to
refugee camps, another significant percent whose parents beat on each other
or grapple with addictions--does anybody really think that expanding school
choice options and supposedly "weeding out the bad schools" is going to make
that much of a difference in the education of these children?
My child, currently in the 7th grade, has been enrolled in the Minneapolis
schools since the age of 4. I know the deficiencies and problems within the
system. But I know that it has much less to do with the way things are
administered than with the way things are in our society today. Dennis is
right--this is bigger than schools and encompasses the way we operate our
democracy. More socialistic systems tend to help those from the middle to the
bottom of the economic ladder more than the capitalistic system under which
we operate. The capitalistic system does encourage individual creativity and
initiative, and for the rare achievers who can overcome horrendous obstacles,
it is a better alternative. But capitalism is Darwinian by nature--good
businesses know to cut their losses, and a company's stock price goes up when
massive layoffs are announced. Atherton and others reflect this viewpoint
when they advocate tossing problem students out of the system, for
misbehaviors and disruptions, without a meaningful, realistic proposal of how
these kids get rescued.  Most middle class people in this society don't want
to look at this "cut our losses" mentality quite so bluntly, but tacitly go
along with it, so long as they can keep their kids away from the carnage.
Fine. But don't call the MPS a failure when they are the system left to try
and pick up the pieces.

Britt Robson
Lyndale