Teaching Your Children Well

Public Schools Excel—Surprised?
There’s a war raging against our public schools. Conservatives want public funding for private and religious schools in the form of vouchers. Many distrust sex ed and the teaching of evolution and “secular humanism.” A lot of parents—conservatives, liberals, and those in the ideological middle alike—wonder if public schools can adequately prepare their children for the challenges of college and increasingly technical jobs in a global economy.

With schools attacked and criticized incessantly, many parents are afraid they aren’t doing right by their kids if they enroll them in public schools. Many are surprised to learn, therefore, that not only do Minnesota’s public schools work for the vast majority of kids who attend them, but the schools excel in exceedingly difficult areas, such as accelerated academics, the integration of immigrant populations, and the education of students with special needs. 

The good student from a good home, whatever his race or the language his parents speak, can succeed in public schools. In fact, contrary to widespread belief, most “normal” kids from stable backgrounds thrive there.

“Failure” and the Facts
So you think the public schools are failing?

Don’t say that to Nathan Wersal, Allie Hamilton, or Bariituu Adam. All three are attending prestigious colleges and universities. All three graduated from public high schools in the Twin Cities. Let these three students stand in for the thousands of graduates of Minnesota’s public high schools who every year go on to their dream colleges, technical schools, and careers.

And don’t say that to Pam Conway, Jill Manske, and Emily Lagace, whose special-needs children are prospering, thanks to the comprehensive special education programs in public schools. Let them stand in for the thousands of parents of children once shunted aside in what those parents do not fondly remember as the good old days.

And don’t talk about failure to Armando Camacho, principal of Whittier School for the Arts in Minneapolis. At last count, more than fifteen languages were spoken in the homes of his students, and he himself is a model of immigrant success. Let him speak for the current wave of immigrants in this nation of immigrants whose dreams and vigor strengthen our community.

Still, the perception of failure is widespread and persistent, and often repeated as fact by those who either have an ideological ax to grind or who simply don’t have an accurate measure of the public schools’ singular accomplishments. 

Despite the recent controversies surrounding leadership in Minneapolis’s public schools and elsewhere, despite the squeezing of the arts and other programs throughout the state, despite the very real questions of how to deliver and pay for education now and in the future—issues we will examine later in this series—Minnesota public schools lead the nation in education performance.

Because testing regimes vary from state to state—dumb, yes, but that’s how we do it in America—there is only one assessment that’s uniform across state lines: The National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results of its testing have been compiled annually since 1969. By NAEP standards, Minnesota’s public schools have done consistently well, and should be rewarded for their excellence, not dissed as failures.

According to NAEP numbers, among the very few states with as high or higher fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math test scores, Minnesota’s students were among the few who maintained their high reading scores and actually improved their high math scores from fourth to eighth grade.

And, last August, Minnesota high school students were tops in average scores on the ACT college entrance examinations among states where more than half the students took the test.