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7/14/2010 12:00 AMRochester Post-Bulletin Editorial Kids' end-of-year report cards require very little interpretation. With nine months' worth of grades and teachers' comments recorded on one or two sheets of paper, it takes an awfully smart child to "spin" the data. Report cards for schools are another matter. For a few weeks now, the Rochester school district has been trying to make sense of the 2010 MCA-II scores earned by students in grades 3-11. It's a mountainous collection of data — we've crunched the numbers ourselves — and when all is said and done, the results can be summarized thusly: • Students in Rochester's choice schools — Washington Elementary, Lincoln K-8, Friedell Middle School, Longfellow Elementary and Montessori at Franklin — are doing very well indeed. At Washington and Lincoln, for example, all third-graders were proficient in math. • The seven "Tier 1" schools, where at-risk students have received special interventions in math and reading for two years, are showing few measurable signs of broad-based improvement. (The exception is Ben Franklin Elementary, which has made substantial gains in both reading and math.) • If we continue to close the achievement gap between white students and minorities — specifically blacks and Hispanics — at the current snail's pace, then we'll still be talking about it in 2030. We'll give the school district credit for not trying to spin the data this year. The numbers are what they are, and there's no shame in admitting that we haven't found a fix for the achievement gap. It's a national problem, and no one else has figured out how to solve it, either. (We do, however, wish the district would remove the "Closing the Gap" graphics from the district's home page on the web. Let's celebrate when we actually have something to celebrate.) We're not ready to give up on the math and reading interventions. As Superintendent Romain Dallemand has correctly pointed out, many of the students who need special help are 2-4 years below grade level, and it could take several years to see tangible increases in proficiency rates. Realistically, however, we're afraid that the deck is stacked against any major gains in the near future. A quality education is a function of a variety of factors, including teacher morale and continuity, manageable class sizes, in-class paraprofessionals, up-to-date technology and "non-academic" offerings including phy ed, music, art, and industrial technology. So, given that we've slashed $13.8 million from the budget in the past two years — a toll measured in eliminated teaching positions, bigger classes and reduced course offerings — perhaps we're asking the wrong questions. Rather than wondering why we're not making more progress, we should be asking ourselves why things aren't getting worse. How have our Hispanic students made substantial gains in both reading and math in the past two years? How have our how black students gained nearly 4 percentage points in their reading proficiency rate? How have low-income students achieved a reading proficiency rate of 56 percent, compared to 53 percent in 2008? We're happy that these students are making gains, but this "addition by subtraction" trend is unlikely to continue. Sooner or later, if Minnesota remains unwilling to adequately fund its K-12 schools, we'll start getting exactly what we pay for. http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=12&a=460990 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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