Policymakers discuss state educational system

Education leaders need to focus their attention on students who care about school and forget about those who don’t, a senior associate with the Institute for Higher Education Policy told about 175 policy education leaders Wednesday at the Radisson University Hotel .

At the morning session, titled “The Graduation Gap in Minnesota: Providing Opportunities for All Children,” that associate, Clifford Adelman, suggested ways to improve educational policy in Minnesota.

Adelman cited several educational “gaps” in which students lag behind acceptable learning standards, including in attitudes toward schooling, the academic intensity of high school curriculums and in timing of entering college.

Susan Heegaard, director of the Minnesota Office of Higher Education , acknowledged that Minnesota’s leaders need to examine these problem areas and figure out how to address them.

“We have a terrible achievement gap that we have to focus on,” she said.

Adelman criticized the use of the category “students of color” in evaluating student performance.

“That doesn’t work in Minnesota. You’ve got distinct groups here that you’ve got to look at separately,” he said.

Policy leaders should examine different racial and ethnic groups more closely, Adelman said, separating them by personal qualities like generation, the languages they use with their families and the ZIP codes in which they live.

This helps guard against doing big-scale evaluations that tell little about specific groups and that won’t lead to better policies, he said.

State Rep. Carlos Mariani, DFL-65B, said educational leaders looking to target programs to specific groups, often according to race, run into difficulty with state educational policies that limit highlighting such populations.

Adelman said dividing student populations by ZIP codes would help target the demographics that need help while avoiding explicitly targeting certain racial groups.

While policy leaders want to encourage a better educational system, they can’t reach out to all students, Adelman said.

Schools shouldn’t devote their resources, which are becoming increasingly strained, to those students who skip school and fail to engage with their classes, he said.

“We cannot micromanage specific communities and get them to grow up,” he said.

Leaders should instead focus on students who are already mature and have positive attitudes about education.

“We’re going to miss part of the population,” he said. “It’s a matter of finding the people we’re going to win.”

Mariani said most students care and hope to continue their educations after high school graduation.

Previous studies have shown that a fairly high number of students aspire to go on to college, with little difference between demographics, he said.

Theresa Battle, a project director for the University’s Ramp-Up to Readiness program , said coordinators in her program see this in their work in 11 Minnesota middle and high schools.

Coordinators for the college prep program say a lack of information and assistance for students is the biggest problem they see, she said.

When they started the program, coordinators found that many students were discouraged by a daunting list of tasks that they weren’t being helped with.

To address those issues, Ramp-Up to Readiness teaches students about how to prepare for, select and pay for a college education.

“The kids aspire to go to college, but they really don’t have the information of how to get there or how much it costs,” she said.