PG-Politics: Education news summary: Results and alternatives

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Education news summary: Results and alternatives

(Posted 11 Feb 2006)

Schools want community to tackle achievement gap.

Gazette, 9 Feb 2006 (by Guy Leonard, Staff Writer).

The persistent achievement gap that divides African-American and Hispanic students from their white counterparts cannot be closed unless parents and community leaders work diligently with educators in preparing students for learning, school board member Dean Sirjue says.
[. . .]
While African-Americans, whites and Hispanics all made progress, white students attained proficient or advanced levels 71, 74 and 76 percent of the time. African-Americans attained the same levels only 44, 48 and 58 percent of the time, while Hispanics attained that level 37, 46 and 54 percent of the time.

The students went to the same public schools and shared the same curriculum, so the difference had to be outside the school system, Sirjue and Tompkins said.

Statistics from the school system show that only 50 percent of kindergarten-age African-American children and 33 percent of their Hispanic counterparts come to school ready to learn, compared to 58 percent of white children.

‘‘We need to look at those white students and ask, ‘what are they doing that we should be doing?’” Sirjue said. ‘‘This is a bigger problem than just fixing the school system.”
[. . .].

Black flight.

A Constrained Vision, 6 Feb 2006 (by Katie).

I [Katie] wrote my senior honors thesis about North Carolina charter schools. My advisor knew very little about charter schools, so when I showed him that the schools disproportionately served black students with low test scores, he was shocked. He kept repeating, "My priors were all wrong": he had assumed that school choice benefited white elites looking to flee the regular public schools.
[. . .].

The author goes on to report on "Black flight" from Minneapolis public schools, where "families can now opt out of troubled district schools, thanks to an explosion of school choice options, including charter schools and open enrollment in suburban schools."