MPR: Schooling Poor Kids in Minneapolis

Schooling Poor Kids in Minneapolis
By John Biewen, American RadioWorks
May, 1999


	17-year-old Brian Johnson says his Minneapolis high school was dangerous. He dropped out in 1998. (click for larger view)

Despite enjoying an 8-year run of economic growth, the United States has a higher rate of child poverty than most developed countries. One in five American children is growing up in a poor household. And a growing body of research shows poverty is not just a condition, but often a trap. The high school drop-out rate among poor American children is twice that of middle-class kids, and ten times that of wealthy children. In Minneapolis, the majority of public school students are poor, and most are failing standardized tests.

MINNEAPOLIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE CITIES where the inner-city schools are plainly, visibly, inferior.
"Don't you look pretty today," principal Donna Amann says, stepping from her office into the bustling hallway of West Central Academy. A small girl in a white dress smiles at the compliment. "Have a good day!" Amann adds.

The girl is one of 570 students hurrying toward their classrooms. They'll spend the next 90 minutes immersed in one task: learning to read. And they will do so in handsome surroundings. West Central is one of the Minneapolis's newest public elementary schools. It boasts architectural touches like high Cathedral windows and curved hallways, as well as an up-to-date computer lab. The teachers appear fully-engaged, even passionate.

"One more time!," shouts Ann Cummins-Bogan to a dozen children seated in an oval in her 3rd-grade classroom. She points at a list of words on the chalkboard as she and the children launch into a rapid-fire exchange.

"Glanced," Cummins-Bogan says, pointing at the first word on the list.

"Glanced!" the children reply.

"Wondered."

"Wondered!"

"Imagine."

"Imagine!"

And so on, through such ten-dollar words as "slackening," "anxiously," "jauntily," and "smothered." Cummins-Bogan then leads a discussion of how the words were used in the kids' reading assignment.

"Something else he was imagining," she says, "about a person in his life that went away."

"Oh! His Uncle Hawk," says a boy.

"His Uncle Hawk. And what was he trying to imagine?"

"What it be like when he climbed the mountain," says the boy, confidently.

West Central was the first school in Minnesota to adopt "Success For All", an aggressive reading program designed especially for urban schools with lots of students who need extra help. West Central fits the description. Almost all of the school's 3rd- and 5th-graders got below-average scores on standardized reading tests last year. And virtually all of the school's 570 students are poor, says Susan Schuff, who oversees the reading program.

"I think I would have did a lot better in a school way out [in the suburbs], just because it's not in the innter city, to where there's a lot of negativity brought to school."

- Brian Johnson

"We have 98% free and reduced lunch at this school," Schuff says, using a common indicator of low-income students. "We have a 40% mobility rate, meaning that in any given year, 40% of our children leave. So we have a very high turnover. We have a 100% minority population; it's approximately 80% African American and 20% Latino."

The concentration of poor and minority children is exceptionally high at West Central. But overall, 70% of Minneapolis public school students are racial minorities. Two-thirds come from low-income families. The two groups are largely one and the same. Their growth represents dramatic change in this historically prosperous – and white – city.

Starting in the 1980s, thousands of poor African American families moved to Minneapolis from Chicago and elsewhere. Meanwhile – or, some would argue, as a result – white and middle-class families put their kids in private schools, or moved to suburbs, in droves. The result: Minneapolis schools have quickly become some of the most racially and economically segregated in the country.

It's hard to teach a classroom filled with poor children, many of whom display the stress of living in unstable homes, says Connie Overhue, a teacher and social worker at West Central Academy.

"One [thing] is, the kids are falling asleep. Literally falling asleep as we're teaching. Or two is, I had one young boy in my class, for example, today, who just started to cry. It's like 'are you OK?' And it's like, 'I'll be okay, I'll be okay.' Or you'll see the violence erupt very quickly. Somebody may say something and it's, like, really blown out of proportion – almost like an explosion. Again, I think some of what's coming from home is coming into the classroom," Overhue says.

Over half of the city's students get sub-par scores on standardized tests. Two-thirds of black students fail to graduate on time.

Yet Minneapolis school officials say they're making progress. The percentage of eighth-graders passing a state reading test increased by 15% over the past two years.

Critics are unimpressed.

"The Minneapolis schools are a comprehensive failure for two-thirds of all students in the entire city school district, and that's almost 50,000 kids," says attorney John Shulman, who is representing the Minneapolis NAACP in its lawsuit against the state of Minnesota. The group says the state is shirking its obligation to educate Minneapolis children – despite spending extra money on the city's schools.

Evelyn Eubanks, a mother in north Minneapolis, is so disenchanted with the public schools that she teaches her children at home.

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"We're spending approximately $11,000 per student in the Minneapolis public schools, compared, for example, to about $6,000 or $7,000 in the suburban schools around Minneapolis," Shulman says. "Yet the suburban schools have extraordinary success. [They're] very, very highly ranked nationally. And the city schools are at the very bottom, for kids of color in particular. They do worse than most of the major cities – including Detroit, Cleveland, Oakland – that one associates with problem urban schools."

Schools populated overwhelmingly by poor children almost never succeed, Shulman says, and educators know it. In its lawsuit, the NAACP demands a metropolitan-wide busing plan – to, in effect, sprinkle low-income children throughout the region.

The Minneapolis district is moving in the opposite direction. It has cut back on busing within the city, in favor of neighborhood, or so-called "community," schools. That has further increased the concentration of poor kids in some buildings.

But top school and city officials say they're not convinced busing does any good.

"Kids of color sitting next to white kids does not necessarily lead to achievement," says School Board Chairman Bill Green. "If you don't have a secure home life, and if the parents can't get to the classroom because the transportation system doesn't take a parent in one section of the city to another section of the metropolitan area, it's no use."

School officials and the NAACP do agree on one thing: bad neighborhoods hobble many Minneapolis children.

From Knives to Nunchucks

In one of the poorest sections of South Minneapolis, Brian Johnson and his girlfriend Tina watch TV in the upstairs bedroom of his mother's house. Their new son sleeps beside them.


Brian Johnson says the birth of his son, Brian, Jr., has given him a new sense of purpose. (click for larger view)

"This is my baby," says Brian, a wiry young man with scattered wisps of facial hair. "He's 2 months old. Brian Louis Johnson, Jr."

Brian, Sr. Turned 18. He dropped out of school last winter, even though, he says, he usually got B's and C's. He might still be in school if he could have ridden a bus to the suburbs, he says.

"Me personally, I think I would have did a lot better in a school way out there just because it's not in the inner city, to where there's a lot of negativity brought to school."

By "negativity", Brian means the threat of violence. He's been wounded by gunfire twice in the last two years. The first time was a drive-by shooting in a neighborhood park. He says the shooters were neighbors, getting revenge after Brian and his brother fought with them. Not long after the incident, Brian quit school. He didn't feel safe there, either, he says.

"Weapons is all in the schools, from knives to nunchucks to all kind of weapons. It's just something scary, something you don't want to be around because you feel uncomfortable. If you get into an argument with this person, will he stab you?"


	Sue Johnson has watched her sons turned "hard" by their South Minneapolis neighborhood. (click for larger view)

Brian's mother, Sue Johnson, moved to South Minneapolis from New York City 10 years ago, when she was on welfare. She now works at a suburban Minneapolis factory. She says it's been painful to watch her two sons turn "hard."

"They're still good kids, they're not bad kids. They just have a certain attitude that they have to walk with."

She blames the neighborhood.

"If they're seen as weak or show themselves as weak, they'll get beat up every day. They can't even go to the corner store," Johnson says.

Schools are quick to put a "bad kid" label on boys like Brian, says his mother. She and other parents maintain that in schools filled with young men from similar circumstances, education soon gives way to behavior control. The NAACP cites examples: one middle school threatened to charge students with theft if they took textbooks home without permission.

Ultimately, the NAACP insists, the state of Minnesota must fix its poor urban neighborhoods before it can educate the children who live in them. On that point, school board Chairman Bill Green agrees.

"If we're going to do what's right for kids, we've got to be willing to push the envelope in terms of solutions," Green says. "If we want to have a series of policies that result in a concentration of kids of these needs, then what are we prepared to do to assure them of the quality of the education that they deserve?"

Minnesota is making a rare attempt to answer that question. The state agreed to a mediation process to try to settle the NAACP lawsuit. So far, agreement is elusive. The state rejected an NAACP proposal to let Minneapolis students attend the suburban school of their choice.