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.

Consider also:

Using 2002 data (the latest available at this writing), 24,578 Minnesota students took Advanced Placement Program exams, and 63.9 percent scored 3 or better on a range of 1 to 5. Our students beat the national average of 63.1 percent.

Minnesota ranks twelfth in the nation in number of International Baccalaureate Programmes that prepare and test students aiming for college. Well-established programs at Central High School in St. Paul and Southwest High in Minneapolis rank among the top 100 IB schools in the world in terms of students taking the greatest number of IB exams.

More than 90 percent of U.S. colleges and universities have policies granting incoming students academic credit for qualifying AP and IB grades; many of those students could enter college at the sophomore level. That bodes well for Minnesota public school students—and their bill-paying parents—because of Minnesota’s high AP and IB participation.

But statistics tell only part of the story. Most important is what parents really want from their children’s school experience. A shot at a highly selective college. The opportunity to be a productive member of the community. A chance for a full life, regardless of a child’s native abilities or disabilities. By all of those standards, Minnesota’s public schools deliver handsomely, equal to or better than any private or parochial institution, and generally at a lower cost to the family.

The College Track
On the subject of academic success, let’s first look at the International Baccalaureate Programme, a rigorous, comprehensive curriculum geared to the entrance requirements of the world’s most selective colleges and universities. Families in Minnesota can take advantage of this unique program only in a public school.

That’s right. The toughest academic curriculum in the world is available to any family who seeks it out—in the school districts of Minneapolis, St. Paul, South St. Paul, St. Louis Park, Robbinsdale, Minnetonka, Fairmont, and Grand Rapids. The success of this program in serving academically motivated students has been so dramatic that it is expanding into middle and elementary schools as well.

The IB curriculum was developed at the urging of diplomats who wanted their children to be on a uniform track to attend high-quality universities anywhere in the world. IB schools go through an elaborate certification process, which includes training teachers, establishing “areas of inquiry,” developing a curriculum, and administering a testing regimen that is the eighth wonder of the academic world. Tests are taken during a three-week period, then sent to and graded at international sites, ensuring fairness across the board and comparability of grades across all schools everywhere, from London to St. Louis Park.   

But IB stands for much more than intensive training, certifying, and testing. The program’s exceptionally motivated teachers and students speak with energy and excitement about learning, discovery, and intellectual adventure. IB programs are designed to draw out what’s best in both teachers and students. The result is a student who knows how to write and think at the highest level. The testing “simply” measures the results of an intense, personal, and rewarding educational experience.

You don’t have to take our word for it.

Nathan Wersal, from Golden Valley, is a 2004 recipient of an IB diploma through Robbinsdale Cooper High School. This fall he began his sophomore year at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. After taking what was then called the “pre-IB” curriculum during his first two years, Nathan embarked on the entire intensive IB diploma sequence, including the required Theory of Knowledge course. “I wanted to challenge myself,” he says of his choice of IB, “and [the program] was portrayed as the most thorough and challenging curriculum the Robbinsdale district offered.”

At Dartmouth, Wersal’s writing skills have been equal to the challenge. He tested out of the school’s freshman writing program and entered a two-semester humanities seminar. When the professor met with him to discuss his first paper, Nathan recalls, she asked him what he had studied in high school. When he mentioned IB, she said that he and a student from Colorado had written the “most highly developed papers” in the class—and that the Coloradan was an IB grad as well.

This fall, Allie Hamilton began her junior year at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Allie is a graduate of Minneapolis’s Southwest High, where she took the entire IB curriculum, but chose not to seek the IB diploma because she wanted to pursue other academic interests and extracurricular activities, including volleyball and singing the lead in several school musicals.

As did Nathan, Allie found the academic preparation she received from the IB curriculum “excellent, particularly the writing,” and at Northwestern she has maintained close to an A average.  She too says the quantity and pace of the required reading in college has been a surprise. But, clearly, her IB work at Southwest prepared her well for the challenges of college.

Bariituu Adam, a 2005 graduate of Robbinsdale Cooper High, attends Columbia University in New York. She started the venerable Ivy League institution this fall, embarking on its premed track, intending to become a physician and eventually work for the United Nations. Bariituu’s parents immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia, ending up in Minnesota.

Bariituu says she sought out the IB program because she was “motivated” to take her school’s most accelerated classes. She chose IB over Cooper’s Advanced Placement Program because of her “international perspectives.” She says she “wanted to learn from many different areas.”

And what do colleges think of IB and IB graduates?

Jimm Crowder, director of admissions at Macalester College in St. Paul, says, “Personally—and many colleagues in admissions agree—I know of no other academic curriculum that better prepares high school students for a selective college. [IB] students will have better writing skills and superior critical-thinking skills.” Asked how he would compare an application from an IB student with one from a prestigious private college preparatory school, Crowder replies, “That’s difficult to say, because there are so many different academic models in private schools. But IB is certainly academically comparable.” He says IB’s “standardized, well-formulated curriculum” is a plus.

Macalester gives advanced credit for a number of high school experiences, including IB and Advanced Placement courses. “But when I’m evaluating an application,” Crowder says, “I’m drawn to an IB candidate because I’m confident of the academic background the student has been given. When we see graduates of IB, we know what those grades mean—they meet the highest international academic standard.”

IB programs operate within their individual schools somewhat the way private schools work—by a self-selection process that attracts academically motivated students and their families. Holly Lewis, the IB coordinator at Robbinsdale Cooper, reports that IB students commonly form study groups and attend the same challenging classes and activities throughout their entire IB experience.

Of course, IB is only one among many roads to academic success in Minnesota’s public schools. Many more schools offer the Advanced Placement Program—the more traditional path of high school academic rigor, created by the College Board. Nationally, far more public school students take AP classes and exams than private school students do. (Sadly, the Ventura and Pawlenty administrations reduced state support for both AP and IB programs, which had included paying test fees for students who can’t afford them. But because of growing public interest in both programs, some of that money was restored during the 2005 legislative session.)

Nor does academic excellence in our public schools include only the traditional “book” subjects. Our schools are big and open enough to include myriad programs for artists and performers—though due to a shortage of funds and the influence of the “anti” crowd with its rigid three-R mentality, the programs have been slashed in recent years. For students seeking careers in dance, sculpture, painting, theater, and other art forms, for example, there’s the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, nationally acclaimed for its dynamic, competitive curriculum.

Finally, in addition to the schools already mentioned, there are many excellent public institutions in the Twin Cities alone—among those often cited by parents, educators, and college admissions officials are South High in Minneapolis, Central Senior High in St. Paul, and the public high schools of Edina, Lakeville, Apple Valley, White Bear Lake, Wayzata, and St. Louis Park.

The area’s excellent private schools are always an attractive option. But parents are mistaken if they think their child would be getting a better academic opportunity than what is available through the public schools, where rigorous curricula and broad-based opportunities make dreams come true, beginning with admission to first-rate colleges, universities, and technical schools.

The Immigrant Experience
Question: How many languages and dialects are spoken in the homes of the students who attend Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools?

Answer: More than ninety in Minneapolis, more than a hundred in St. Paul. 

It fires the imagination to think of this flavorful immigrant stew—unless you happen to be a teacher trying to get a math or social studies concept across to students listening in a half-dozen languages. The Upper Midwest may be undergoing the greatest wave of immigration in a hundred years. Now as then, public schools serve as the essential portal into America’s social, economic, and political mainstream. Facing a bewildering array of immigrant backgrounds, our public schools perform this task amazingly well. And not just the big-city public schools, but, as immigrants rapidly disperse to where the jobs are, suburban and rural public schools as well.

The public schools’ immigrant programs are no longer called English as a Second Language, but rather English Language Learners, because many of today’s immigrant students speak more than one language when they arrive here. English may be their third, fourth, or eighth language. Yet some have never held a book or pencil, much less interacted with a laptop computer. Such are among the huge challenges the public schools face serving the immigrant community.

Contrary to what we like to believe, our German and Swedish grandparents and great-grandparents did not melt into the American mainstream when they arrived here a century ago. In fact, they usually tried hard to stay with “their kind.” Remember the heavy accents and fractured grammar? They rarely learned English well if they came to the United States as adults. Their immigrant children did much better. And their children’s children rarely spoke German or Swedish at all.

That’s how it went then, and that’s pretty much how it goes now—with two significant differences. Our European immigrant ancestors could quit school after the eighth grade because they could earn their living busting sod on land they homesteaded for free. And they came from a literate culture and usually could at least read and write in their native language. Many immigrants today come from nonliterate societies. What’s more, immigrants today need school-based skills because they’re going to have to function in an information-based, not agricultural, economy.

Considering those constraints, today’s school-based successes are all the more remarkable.

Paula Palmer, an elementary school teacher for twenty-four years and now coordinator of the IB Programme for the Minneapolis public schools, recalls a couple of shy Hmong girls she taught at Hamilton Elementary in North Minneapolis more than ten years ago. They were “shining stars,” she says, yet faced “huge language and cultural challenges” and struggled to read even at less than grade level. Last year, Palmer happened to bump into the girls while observing an IB high school senior classroom. Mai Yer Xiong and Ellina Xiong have become young women—“eloquent, mature, and articulate.” Watching them interpreting a passionate piece of poetry, Palmer had goose bumps, she says, and then shed joyful tears when Mai recognized her and proudly reported that she had received a full, four-year scholarship to the University of St. Thomas.

Armando Camacho is the dynamic principal of Whittier School for the Arts in South Minneapolis, responsible for 350 prekindergarten through fifth-grade students, more than half of whom speak one or more languages other than, or in addition to, English. (Last year, one Whittier student spoke seven different languages.) At Whittier, the two largest language groups in addition to English are Spanish and Somali. But, in a school known for its arts program, Camacho says immigrants have an opportunity to show their talents in various ways besides speaking and writing. His school and Elizabeth Hall in North Minneapolis are the first in the city to implement an IB Primary Years Programme. (St. Paul already has one.) He says the program’s international flavor will enhance the student experience even more.

Camacho, who’s thirty-one, is a risk-taker and an optimist. He sent his staff to IB training even before he was assured of funding (which the school later received). Now parents and students seeking a prekindergarten-through-fifth-grade academic education equal to that offered by the most prestigious—and expensive—private prep schools can find that curriculum at Whittier.

Camacho has a special feeling for immigrant students because he is an immigrant himself, having arrived in 1980 with his grandparents on St. Paul’s West Side from Puerto Rico. Family members were not able to speak English, and, at the time, he recalls, it was “not cool” to be from another country. He went back to Puerto Rico with his homesick grandparents when he finished eighth grade, then returned to St. Paul at fifteen and connected with teachers and football coaches at Humboldt High, who later urged him to go to college. Camacho eventually graduated summa cum laude from St. Cloud State University, where he played football, and became a teacher. Then, in short order, he earned a master’s degree from St. Mary’s University and, at twenty-six, became a school administrator. By twenty-nine, he was a principal with a school—Whittier—of his own.

“I love the immigrant experience,” he says. “I know some of the challenges these kids face. It’s dear to my heart to create a school welcoming for all children. With arts and now IB, Whittier provides a doorway to education not available anywhere else in the state.”

Special Kids, Special Ed
Last June, the Star Tribune reported that the Academy of Holy Angels in Richfield had rescinded admission to a qualified applicant with muscular dystrophy while accepting his “normal” twin brother. The student’s rejection was unusual only in that it was publicized. Such decisions are made by private schools all the time. 

Private schools have every right to make difficult choices about educational capabilities. What’s remarkable is how the public schools must by law not only accept special-needs children, but do so with open arms and a mind-bending array of services to ensure that the children learn and are treated fairly. And as the numbers of these children increase, the public schools continue to take them in. For example, from 2000 through 2005, while the total enrollment in St. Paul public schools declined from 45,128 to 41,051, the number of special education students increased from 6,067 to 7,339 and is now 18 percent of the total.

Since Congress enacted what’s now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, state and local school boards have made massive adjustments and accommodations to meet the law’s requirements—in spite of the federal government’s consistent failure to fully fund them. The result has been nothing short of revolutionary.

But, again, don’t take our word for it. Ask parent Pam Conway.

“How many times have I said ‘wonderful’?” she asks in the middle of an interview about her experience with the St. Paul public schools.

Conway’s journey began when her son Tom, who’s now twenty-one, was born with Down syndrome. He entered St. Paul’s public school system in preschool and was one of the original participants in the special ed inclusion program at Hayden Heights Elementary. He spent mornings in special ed classrooms and afternoons in regular classrooms, all the while accompanied by a special ed teacher. Pam Conway says she will never forget a conversation she had with Tom’s junior high homeroom teacher. “I told her who I was and thanked her for accepting a special-needs child in her classroom,” she recalls. “She hugged me and said, ‘All children have special needs.’ ”

High school was an especially positive experience for Tom because he became part of the school community. According to his mom, he took shop classes, was involved in a “wonderful” special ed program, and played in a “wonderful” adaptive sports program. Tom even played on a championship floor hockey team for Humboldt High. Now Tom attends a program called Transition to Independence, also run by the St. Paul schools. He has done well at several jobs and looks forward to moving to his own place.

It angers Pam Conway when people say special ed takes money away from regular classrooms. “My son is a contributing member of society,” she points out. “Years ago, you were told to put such a child in an institution.”

Jill Manske is a professor of biology at the University of St. Thomas. She and her husband, Michael Klutho, an attorney, learned that their son Kevin was autistic when he was about three. Their pediatrician immediately sent them to the St. Paul public schools for an assessment of Michael. “From that moment,” says Manske, “almost without exception, every teacher and department has been amazingly professional, going way beyond what one would expect, to care for these kids and their families.”

Kevin entered kindergarten basically nonverbal and remained a nonreader until third grade. By the time he left elementary school, he was reading at grade level and was almost there in math. Now sixteen, Kevin attends St. Paul Open School and is doing “just great,” his mom says. “This is a kid who talks about college now,” she says. “Things we never dreamed for him we now think about, thanks to this army of angels who helped support him. Watching them has made me a better teacher too.

“It’s not an overstatement to say the public schools saved my kid,” Manske continues. “We didn’t move here for the schools, but we were certainly lucky to find them.”

Emily Lagace is a doctor, as is her husband, John Faughnan. Two of their three children have some areas of developmental delay. Both boys—one eight, the other six—started in St. Paul’s special ed program when they were two. The schools have been “absolutely helpful,” willing to listen to parents and treating special-needs families as a resource rather than regarding them as a nuisance. “The boys are coming along as well as they possibly could—happy and learning in their school settings,” says Lagace.

The family recently moved, but to another home within the city, thus keeping their children in the St. Paul system. Their daughter, who is three, will also attend the city’s public schools. “We could not consider doing otherwise,” Lagace says.

An “A” for Our Public Schools
For both effort and accomplishment under extremely trying conditions, our public schools deserve top marks.

Immigrants. High achievers. Impoverished, even homeless, children. Special ed kids. Hockey, soccer, and volleyball stars. Artists and chess whizzes. All of these and many more create the richness of our public schools, and public schools all over the state are success stories too.

For all the criticism, both specious and deserved, we must remember this: Our historic investment in public education has paid off, handsomely, in stellar academic achievement, social integration, and economic success. Turning our back on that tradition would be a colossal blunder. The current wave of students—including more poor children, more persons of color, more immigrants from nonliterate parts of the world, often with more special needs—will succeed here just as our own immigrant ancestors succeeded. But only if we hold the school doors open wide, as we’ve done for previous generations.

We’re not naive. We know public education faces significant, often staggering problems, here as well as around the country. We will discuss those problems later in this series. Yet none of the problems diminishes our pride in what’s so obviously good about Minnesota’s public schools.  

James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Star Tribune. Marcia Appel is this magazine’s editor at large.