Post in $60M School Referendum Proposal

May 16 13:01 UTC

james graham said:

> Additional money thrown at a terrible product we are asked to pay MORE for?
Did anyone hear about that waterfront property in the beautiful Louisiana
"wetland" that is for sale? I certainly hope the voters of Minneapolis will
finally say enough is enough. Throwing money at a failed system will not help.

..

> The Minneapolis school system needs to be thrown out and reorganized, not
have more money sunk down this rat hole. I do not mind paying a fair share for
a good product but I am personally insulted that I am asked to pay for
incompetence.

I have to say that now that I have a child (now 20 months), it seems to me
that there are a number of people who just are not prepared for parenthood
(I'm barely able to keep up and I have a lot of advantages other folks don't)
and as a result, a number of kids who are not prepared for school. These kids
start behind and stay behind.  This is about what parents do with kids when
they are 2 and 3 and not what schools are doing with kids when they are 17 or
18.

To quote a New York Times article:

"They (Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of
Kansas) found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and
that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose
parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children
whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The
childrens I.Q.s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q.
among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an
average I.Q. of 79."

This New York Times article goes on to talk about other research on class
differences in school readiness and how the things parents do with toddlers
affects their ability to succeed in school when they are fifteen years older.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=education+early+successful+&st=nyt&oref=slogin

The article also talks about some approaches that seem to overcome these class
differences in school readiness, one called KIPP in particular.  The problem
is that the types of approaches that seem to work are more expensive and more
labor intensive.

I don't know enough about the School Board budget to know if this referendum
is the right amount of money or not.  I also am not an expert on K-12
education.  But I do know that dumping the school performance issues of
Minneapolis kids solely on the shoulders of the School Board ignores what may
be the real source of many of these problems.

Carol Becker
Longfellow
Proud parent