Integration Does not Close the Gap---unless it also delivers an adequate education

Proficiency Percentages 2018 Minnesota's Report Card

School integration and school busing is back in the news, as a result of the Harris-Biden dust-up in the recent debates.  So-called "forced busing" is a hot-button deeply emotional issue, easy to exploit politically, but its an issue from the past that side-tracks our attention from solutions for the major crisis in education, our failure to provide adequate resources for the education of students of color, English language learners, students with disabilities, and lower income students.  Integration is an important value, of course, but 50 years after Brown v Board of Education, we aren't meeting our constitutional responsibility to educate children wherever they are. 

In his recent article in Atlantic, Wil Stancil, a prominent and respected advocate for integration, touts the integration of American suburbs.  That integration is a good thing, of course, but the most pressing educational issue in Minnesota's suburbs and in the metro area, by far, is our failure to provide an adequate education to children wherever they are.  At the top of this blog, we've posted  the last published Minnesota Department of Education proficiency statistics for selected Minnesota suburbs, for Minneapolis and my own district, St. Cloud.  I've also included proficiency percentages for an all-black charter school, Higher Ground Academies.  We've removed English language learners from the reported black scores to achieve comparability.

The proficiency percentages are symptoms of our failure to meet our constitutional responsibility to students of color, whether in integrated schools or not.  A similar gap exists between higher and lower income students, and native English speakers and non-English speakers.  There is an ongoing technical debate as to whether integration is statistically associated with (or even causes) better education.  Possibly, some of the 11 percentage point difference in reading and 7 point difference in math between Minneapolis and Osseo is accounted for by integration, but that would be averting our gaze from the central feature of what these statistics display.   Integrated or not, Minnesota is failing these students, and it is high time we looked at whether we are too comfortable in Minnesota in delivering education to the students that Minnesota is leaving behind with too little resources deployed in the same old way. 

Higher Ground is serving entirely black students.  Their poverty rate is high.   The school's special education rate is quite low, that is true.   But if we examine what Higher Ground is doing, we find a school that has adopted many of the strategies that research calls for to address the needs of their students.  Big ideas, collaboration, supervision, meaningful professional learning communities, significant extra learning time offered for students to accelerate learning and to catch up, a dedication to students as leaders and scholars and a school wide aspiration to reach post-secondary education. While the organizing principle at Higher Ground is different, in many respects it is using the techniques we described in our post about Brooke East Boston, the respected charter in Boston. 

Higher Ground is telling us something: Minnesota is failing students of color, lower income students and English language learners because of systemic failure.  These are students who can learn far more successfully than we recognize.  We aren't deploying enough resources to these students, and we aren't using the strategies that actually work in a robust and systemic way.   Its not that Higher Ground is a charter school, and its certainly not because it serves a single race, its because they are implementing policies, practices, and procedures that actually work.   Minnesota has become too comfortable with doing things the same way, and letting kids fall behind.    If we are prepared to brag about the integration of our schools, while we watch them fail too many students, there is something deeply wrong with Minnesota's education community and the those who advocate for children.

If Minnesota wants to abide by its constitutional responsibility, we must do three things.  We must comply with the constitutional mandate of providing all students with sufficient resources necessary to meet all state standards.  We must make sure that when adequate resources are provided to the districts and schools that serve them, those resources are actually deployed to implement necessary change, to "go big" with change, as former superintendent Peter Hutchinson called for.  We must use fix the institutional straightjackets that prevent Minnesota's public school districts from implementing the instructional strategies utilized by schools like Higher Grounds, so that outstanding charters no longer have a monopoly on systemic change.  We have in Minnesota public school districts some leaders who recognize the need for this change, leaders who are trying to implement necessary change that works, with one hand tied behind their backs. 

Minnesota needs to start putting these children first, and while integration is a laudable objective, we need to face the fact that without systemic change, we are going to continue to fail far too many children whether they are integrated or not.

A word about using Proficiency Scores

Proficiency scores provide a one window on student performance.  One must avoid jumping to conclusions based on a set of scores, especially without studying the context deeply.   The scores provided above do certainly tell us something about achievement gaps, for example.  They do invite us to question whether it would be wise under current circumstances to undermine the success of schools like Higher Ground Academies.   However, it would be a mistake to compare the test scores for students from one school to another and jump to conclusions.  Special education students are not extracted from these scores, and there is a significant difference among schools in that category.  The poverty rates for white students vary from one school district to another.   And so on.  A set of test score reports is a starting point, not the ending point, for a longer inquiry.