{"id":50956,"date":"2015-01-29T06:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-01-29T12:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50956"},"modified":"2015-01-29T06:22:56","modified_gmt":"2015-01-29T12:22:56","slug":"the-news-isnt-nearly-bad-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50956","title":{"rendered":"The News Isn&#8217;t Nearly Bad Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Saint Paul Public Schools Superintendent Valeria Silva is giving her state of the district address later this morning, down at the SPPS&#8217; Stalinesque fortress headquarters at 360 Colborne Street.<\/p>\n<p>As the\u00a0<em>PiPress<\/em>\u00a0notes, most of Silva&#8217;s goals remain unmet. \u00a0It looks pretty bad, but for one little bit of silver lining &#8211; or so the\u00a0<em>PiPress\u00a0<\/em>(or perhaps the SPPS&#8217; press release) would have you believe:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>By 2014, she said, her overhaul of the school district would lift student proficiency on math and reading tests to 75 percent; four-year graduation rates would climb to 75 percent; and by signing up a greater share of the city&#8217;s students, enrollment would jump by 3,500 to 5,000 students.<\/p>\n<p>Four years later, only the graduation goal has come close to fruition &#8212; up 8 points to 73.3 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, enrollment is up just 64 students, and math and reading scores have fallen further behind Minneapolis and the rest of Minnesota.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And that&#8217;s not all:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>42% of St. Paul \u00a03-8 graders hit the state&#8217;s math targets in last year&#8217;s standardized tests &#8211; down a point in the past year. \u00a0 The figure statewide jumped from 58 to 63 percent; even benighted\u00a0Minneapolis&#8217; scores, somehow, leapt from 37 percent to 45 percent.<\/li>\n<li>Reading proficiency for same sample was 38% in Saint Paul last year &#8211; versus 42 percent in Minneapolis and 59 percent in the parts of the state that vote GOP.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>\n<p>But notwithstanding the fact that Saint Paul&#8217;s students are performing worse and worse on every other test, at least the graduation rate &#8211; up from 65 to 73%. \u00a0So that&#8217;s good news, and a vindication for Silva &#8211; right?<\/p>\n<p>Well, no. As we discussed last year, graduation rates throughout Minnesota jumped last year. \u00a0They did it immediately after the DFL-dominated legislature removed graduation testing requirements. \u00a0If a student puts in 12-ish years without formally dropping out, trying to stab a teacher or saying anything Republican, they&#8217;re pretty much going to get a diploma and a handshake. \u00a0And while I can not prove that the correlation leads to a causation, the complete lack of evidence that anything else is improving in the SPPS seems to be evidence in the affirmative.<\/p>\n<p>But notwithstanding the fact that she did nothing that couldn&#8217;t be attributed to &#8220;political pennies from heaven&#8221;, she&#8217;s in line to get a raise, to over $200K, plus the kind of perks that&#8217;d make a corporate CEO blush.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;ll tell you what, SPPS; if you want, I&#8217;ll take a run at it. \u00a0Pay me the relative bargain rate of $160K. \u00a0I&#8217;ll make a bunch of promises that I (likely) can&#8217;t possibly keep. \u00a0At the end of the contract, you&#8217;ll have gotten precisely the same results &#8211; for a 20% discount!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saint Paul Public Schools Superintendent Valeria Silva is giving her state of the district address later this morning, down at the SPPS&#8217; Stalinesque fortress headquarters at 360 Colborne Street. As the\u00a0PiPress\u00a0notes, most of Silva&#8217;s goals remain unmet. \u00a0It looks pretty bad, but for one little bit of silver lining &#8211; or so the\u00a0PiPress\u00a0(or perhaps the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50956"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50967,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50956\/revisions\/50967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}