More choice will benefit African-American students
Star Tribune | February 21, 2007
Mitch Pearlstein

Why is Nick Coleman (Feb. 18) so determined to convince readers that African-American students are doing significantly better than they really are in city schools? And why is he so hellbent on limiting their educational options? Does he really think they and their families are well-served by overdosing on overstatement and underdosing on freedom?
Coleman quotes the head of an African-American organization who suggests that his counterparts really don't like vouchers. Maybe that's true, and maybe it's not. But the same can't be said about rank-and-file African-Americans across the country.

For example, David A. Bositis of Howard University has written that 57 percent of blacks in a 2000 survey supported vouchers, but "only" 49 percent of whites did. The proportion was fully 75 percent among blacks under 35. Actually, I've never seen a survey about vouchers in which a majority of blacks didn't support them. For that matter, I've never seen a survey in which black enthusiasm for vouchers wasn't stronger than that of whites.

Nevertheless, Coleman suggests the voucher movement is propelled by "right wingers" doing mean-spirited things such as funding scholarships for low-income kids. Real cads, they are. Implicit here is a sense that people of color who favor vouchers are not only in cahoots with very powerful and very bad people, but they're probably being used, too. Minneapolis Council Member Don Samuels, according to Coleman, is a "stalking horse for a movement that wants to torch public schools." Let's just say the accusation can be read as a tad patronizing.

My all-time favorite response to such insults is Howard Fuller's, who, among other things, is a former superintendent of Milwaukee schools, a voucher advocate, not a Republican, and for good measure, black. "If you support something that so-called conservative people support," he has written, "you're duped. If you support something in this country that so-called liberal people support, you're brilliant. I consider myself to be brilliantly duped."

Coleman also doesn't seem to appreciate open enrollment very much, and he really doesn't like charter schools.

According to a close observer of local charter schools, there is only one Minneapolis charter -- Minnesota Transitions School -- that ends at 12th grade, that also has been in existence for more than a few years, and that also has a majority of black students. Three more charter schools in St. Paul meet these criteria: Higher Ground Academy, the High School for Recording Arts, and the Skills for Tomorrow Charter School. Hard and convincing data are hard to find, but he reports that graduation rates for black students are higher in each of these four schools than in the Minneapolis district as a whole (granted, if alternative schools are included in the mix). Nevertheless, Coleman berates the very existence of charter schools and wants to short-circuit their growth.

Coleman claims that African-American students in Minneapolis are graduating at higher rates than critics (and friends of public education) like Samuels and me say is the case. But if he's correct, how does he reconcile two fundamentally conflicting facts?

First, according to Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas, "Graduating high school with a regular diploma is little more than a fifty-fifty proposition for African American and Hispanic students nationwide." As noted, figuring graduation rates is a much trickier business than people usually assume, but Greene has studied the subject intensely, and my confidence in his numbers is high.

Second, substantial data show that African-American students in the Twin Cities do less well than their socioeconomic counterparts in the United States. For example, as reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2005, low-income black fourth- and eighth-graders in Minneapolis and St. Paul had lower reading scores than their counterparts in each of eleven other major American cities that were studied.

Question: Is it reasonable to assume that graduation rates for African-American students in Minnesota's biggest city are higher than average for blacks across the country, when those very same students are doing less well academically than their peers nationally? I suspect not, though Coleman strains to differ.

I appreciate Nick's passion in rallying for kids who deserve as much support as we can give them. But he's doing it all wrong, inaccurately, and counterproductively.

-- Mitch Pearlstein is founder and president of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.