At last week’s Education meeting, which was a short two hours long because we had to end at 6pm because townships were holding elections,we got an important presentation about graduation rates. It caught my eye because it showed numbers for graduation rates the year I left the school board in 2004 that were far lower than I recalled. That’s important to me because I’ve been a little high and mighty in saying that the graduation rates seem to have fallen in our mad rush to finish the Red Plan.
It was explained to us that the MDE (Minnesota Dept. of Education) had changed the statistical system going back. I guess that meant that the rates might not have been presented as so dismal to me back in 2003. I’m not sure I buy that as an excuse for my past ignorance especially because I got elected after making a big deal about the obverse of a graduation rate – the dropout rate.
According to the figures presented in June of 2004, six months after I’d stepped off the Board we had a 75.09 graduation rate and in 2013 Duluth had a 78.55 graduation rate. While some of the obverse statistics would not have been dropouts if the students died were sent to prison or a half other categories of things generally between 21 and 25% of our ninth graders failed to graduate from the Duluth public schools.
I certainly asked a couple of questions about this in our abbreviated meeting and when I got pretty nitpicky our stats person offered to give me the Education Department’s 17 page explanation of how to read the stats. That’s what I spent the morning doing yesterday. Then yesterday afternoon I went up to my attic and rummaged through the old files from my school board days that I had filed under “data” and looked to see if those numbers were echoed in the statistics from my Era on the Board. Long before my three hour’s of going through them I realized the current numbers seemed good as gold.
So, if its not clear where I’m heading this is it. The Red Plan does not, counter to my claims, seem to have hurt our graduation rates in Duluth. I’m not finished digging, however. I have the sense that we have large numbers of rootless kids not attached to our schools and my sense is that its worse than when I served. If I am right, and there is no proof of this yet, I’ll be very interested in figuring out how this came to pass.
There is one more crow eating stat I should acknowledge. The numbers of our minority children graduating are pathetic to be charitable. I note this because I have pointed to an early criticism by a former Board colleague of mine who argued that Dixon had a terrible record educating minority children in his Faribault district. Well, I guess we shouldn’t have gotten so high and mighty about that seeing how dismal our own record was.
I’m glad I spent the time going through my old files. I found some interesting things in them. I guess that’s why I couldn’t bear to throw them out when I retired from the Board a decade ago. Its the archivist in me.
