Two impulses seem to have our schools in a vice. The first is a compulsion to train every child for college and the second is No Child Left Behind’s insistence that, well, no child be left behind.
Our Duluth kids seem to be doing as well as any other in terms of taking the college readiness test called the ACT. However according to this DNT story which deserves some comment we send a lot of kids unprepared to college.
Data from the Minnesota Office of Higher Education shows that in 2013 40 percent of Denfeld graduates who enrolled in a private or public Minnesota college needed remedial courses in their first or second years. That compares to a state average of 24 percent, and Duluth East’s 22 percent.
Several things jump out at me from this paragraph alone from a worrying and much longer story. First Denfeld’s students heading to college compare pretty favorably to Easts when you consider the fact that its percentage of free and reduced lunch kids is so much higher. Second it appears to me that our vaunted East population isn’t all that much ahead of Minnesota students state-wide.
The teachers (who, by the way, have been taken to task by our administration for speaking out of turn) echo a complaint I had when I was teaching at Morgan Park thirty years ago. Too many kids couldn’t read or write very well which made it hard to give them essay tests in my history classes. It had to be worse for English teachers.
Despite a ten-year regime of no child left behind too many elementary school kids are still advancing with out the requisite skills. It appears that it takes a million dollars a year to make improvements money that we in Duluth took out of the classroom to build new schools. By my reckoning we’ve moved ten million of the local levy (as of 1997) from operations to the repayment of building debt today.
Having to take some remedial courses is not a crisis and neither is it something new. It was happening when I got to college although in my case I did not need remediation. In fact, I was lucky enough to test out of one beginning writing class. I could have tested out of two of them if someone had brought this to my attention sooner but it would have cost Mankato State some much desired revenue.
I always liked the rhetoric of NCLB and Bush’s spin regarding “soft bigotry of low expectations.” However, rhetoric and results are very different animals.
