Today’s headline in the Trib’s testing story was right. I try not to get to nervous over test results. Every school tested swings forward and backward year by year. However, there is no doubt that western Duluth School’s students have lower scores than student’s in Duluth’s eastern schools. At this latest testing the Edison schools don’t strike me as having knocked ISD 709’s socks off as they have some years.
I find it particularly maddening that the tests given students when I was on the school board nearly twenty years ago have so changed that there seems no way to compare our children’s achievements today with the achievements of past years. We can only go back a handful of years to see if we are making headway.
Nonetheless, It is obvious that our poorer and minority children have a lot of catching up to do. I say this as someone dedicated to the idea that our poor and minority children are born with intellectual powers roughly equal to those of children born into middle and upper class comfort. No Child Left Behind didn’t change this but there are schools who are much closer to raising these children up. If I could turn my attention to this issue next year, after last year’s embarrassmenst, it would be like crossing into heaven.
