Why Our Children Fail

In January, we showcased some of the public schools’ major successes: high academic achievement, immigrant integration, and nonpareil services for students with special needs. Paradoxically, those very strengths can undermine traditional classroom balance as public schools triage mainstreamed “special needs” kids, the “gifted and talented,” and those who show up for class utterly unprepared. With the meager crumbs left after budget cuts, teachers must attempt to provide a solid educational experience for the “normal” kids, who usually have no organized constituency other than their parents and the PTA.

Against this checkered backdrop, we present our rundown of the ten most serious problems facing the state’s K–12 public education system. We also present the “top ten” lists of three outside experts with extensive knowledge of and experience with Minnesota schools. (We asked four experts for contributions, but Minnesota Commissioner of Education Alice Seagren declined.) Our intent is to help readers identify and focus on the real problems that vex our schools instead of the familiar myths, half-truths, and misconceptions that hinder improvement and progress.

Many problems on the lists, you’ll notice, exist outside the school building—in our homes and neighborhoods, among local school boards, and in the state and nation’s capitals. The truth is, we can tinker with curricula all we want, but if a child lives in an unsupportive home and chaotic community and her school lacks the resources to shrink class size and provide enough instruction days to counter the external dysfunction, her teachers will swim upstream and the odds are strong that she will fail.

In April, we will present the experience, good and bad, of a public school parent and her children. In the series’ conclusion in May, we will suggest constructive responses to the problems enumerated below. We believe that much still can—and must—be done, and that the solutions require common sense as well as money.

1. Misguided expectations
The biggest problem is not dysfunctional schools, but dysfunctional families and communities. It is unfair and counterproductive to insist that our public school systems fix rising poverty rates, the loss of accessible, good-paying jobs, and self-destructive behaviors, such as drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, and gang violence—all major indicators of miserable school, and life, performance.

We have failed our schools—not vice versa. State and federal governments have made matters worse by ratcheting up accountability with draconian mandates and then failing to fully fund them. The case of twelve-year-old Sidney Mahkuk, who was found frozen to death in south Minneapolis last winter, her body full of illicit drugs, tragically illustrates our point. Contrary to the hand-wringing in the media, the culprit in Sidney’s short, brutal life was family and community breakdown, not a cold-hearted bureaucracy. Her family had spent nearly as much time at social service agencies as Sidney had in school. The sad fact is, there are way too many Sidneys for the schools to cope with, given the resources they currently have. Not to mention way too many gangs, guns, and drugs waiting outside the school doors, particularly in certain urban neighborhoods and, increasingly, around the state.

Washington Post columnist William Raspberry points approvingly to what William Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, has called his “favorite statistic”—“that finishing high school, reaching age twenty-one, and getting married before having the first child dramatically reduces the odds that the child will experience poverty.”

Community leaders and parents need the guts to talk to our kids about shunning drugs and gangs, finishing school, putting marriage and jobs before having children, and then raising their children in a stable home full of respect and responsibility.