[Mpls] Dave Jennings hit the nail on the head...

[Socialist2001 at cs.com]

...when he said something to the effect that big problem is that we are 
serving some students very well, but not others. 

Would you want to keep your children in the Minneapolis Public Schools if 
they were not making satisfactory progress academically, such as falling one 
grade behind for every two years enrolled?

People with school age children are moving to the suburbs because of high 
rents and lousy schools. The district fails to educate and points its finger at 
the undereducated. And for those who didn't get the message that the district 
regarded them as the problem, an attendance policy was enacted a few years ago. 
The district expected that policy to push a lot of those problem students out 
of the district, and it did.

Remember CJ's refrain, "if they show up, they will learn." It didn't work 
that way. The attendance policy may have closed the "test score gap" to a small 
degree, but it is likely that the curve was raised by getting rid of students 
with low test scores, not by doing a better job of educating them.

The failure of the board and broader school community to seriously consider, 
identify and correct systemic problems will be the undoing of the public 
school system in Minneapolis. Business as unusual at 807 NE Broadway is destroying 
our school system.  

-Doug Mann, King Field
Author: Flight from Equality: School Reform in the US since 1983
http://educationright.tripod.com
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