The Strib Editorial Board acts like a blindfolded man examining a cow, and declaring what he’s prodding at to be two powderhorns, a dusting broom, a walking cane and a fur rug.<\/p>\n
Sometimes a cow is just a cow.<\/p>\n
And sometimes a financial scam is just a financial scam.\u00a0 In this case, it’s the state’s “Alternative Learning Centers” – schools for kids who are having trouble in the traditional school system.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nToday, almost 150,000 — nearly 20 percent of state public school students — go to Alternative Learning Centers (ALCs). But a May 13 story by Star Tribune reporter Jim Walsh looked behind those numbers to reveal some troubling issues.Yes, students are going to the schools in droves, but what happens after they get there? A majority of them never take standardized tests or graduate. A quarter to a half of them are absent most days. So is it good enough that only a tiny number of alternative students are being educated — or are the schools too often holding areas that delay the dropout process for a few years?<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe Strib feels about the cow, and finds a wet sloppy thing that it figures is a leather washcloth:<\/p>\n
\nThose and other questions raised in Walsh’s story deserve answers. The state and school districts should do a better job of tracking and evaluating ALCs and students. And more should be done to find effective ways to assess and educate the most challenging students. Tens of thousands of youth are involved; if they fail to get a basic education, their earning capacity and quality of life are imperiled. Moreover, the state’s future workforce and economy will be negatively affected.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It notes a smell – and, in noting “something smells like bulls**t”, comes perilously close to the truth:<\/p>\n
\nNow some observers worry that enrollments have swelled because district officials use the schools as “dumping grounds” for the worst students. There is also concern from some quarters that districts keep the students in the system because of the $200 plus million in state funding they attract.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
…but then notices the long legs with the hard ends, and figures it’s part leather dining room table:<\/p>\n
\nOne of the original and strongest arguments for the learning centers is that they keep students in school who would otherwise drop out.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
They\u00a0came so <\/em>close to the truth.<\/p>\n
School Funding 101:\u00a0 Schools get an amount of money for every day a student attends.\u00a0 If the student is absent – or drops out – that money doesn’t go to the district.<\/p>\n
The beast doesn’t like being starved.<\/p>\n
Schools have ample tools – including the cooperation of well-funded departments of local County Attorney’s offices – to keep “truant” kids (defined as kids whose absence or tardiness jeopardizes that per diem <\/em>payment).\u00a0 But thanks to No Child Left Behind, schools have also become obsessed with test scores.\u00a0 Students who\u00a0can’t, or won’t, excel on the standardized tests that have become\u00a0public schools raison d’etre\u00a0<\/em>since NCLB need (although they’ll never say it) to get rid of the problem kids…<\/p>\n
…but if those kids drop out of\u00a0school, the districts lose the\u00a0per diem <\/em>that they get for each student attending.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
ALC’s solve this Catch 22, giving districts a place to continue mandatory attendance (and collecting of the per-student per diem<\/em>, naturally) while firewalling all those inconvenient bad test scores in a place where they won’t be held against all the other schools.\u00a0 Not unlike a grocery store that hides rotting merchandise under and behind the fresh stuff, except that the “rotting merchandise” is the student body.<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0The idea is that with more time and individualized attention, students who couldn’t make it in a traditional school can still earn a high school diploma. Then, after achieving that goal, some will be inspired to go on to higher education.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Except that “extra attention” really doesn’t exist – ALC is basically an unstructured hodgepodge, and graduation is entirely subject (at least in Saint Paul) to the individual students’ motivation to get that diploma – a goal that doesn’t mean much to everyone who is sent there).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nAt most alternative schools fewer than 25 percent of the students took the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment; among those who did, only 22 percent passed the reading exam and 4 percent passed the math test.<\/p>\n
That’s not good enough. State, district and alternative school officials must work together to evaluate ALC programs and find ways to raise their success rates.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Yeah, that’d be nice – but that’s not the point of having ALC.\u00a0 And the Strib should know that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Strib Editorial Board acts like a blindfolded man examining a cow, and declaring what he’s prodding at to be two powderhorns, a dusting broom, a walking cane and a fur rug. Sometimes a cow is just a cow. And sometimes a financial scam is just a financial scam.\u00a0 In this case, it’s the state’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","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=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}