Education

This is what a kegger looks like, Mom and Dad

Filed under: Education

Binge drinking, as evidenced by the lines of empty cups and tapped kegs littered throughout Dinky Town, is an ever-emerging problem among college students.

And the University of Minnesota has decided one way to stop it is to tell Mommy and Daddy on you.

For just $20, the school is offering parents an online course with tips about how they can help stop binge drinking. The idea developed three years ago, but interest has been so great the school recently started outsourcing the product to other universities, says Marjorie Savage, the parent program director at the U who helped design the course.

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Posted by Beth Walton at June 7, 2008 8:52 AM | Comments (4)

 

State Graduation Rates: Two wildly different takes

Filed under: Education

In a new state by state ranking of high school graduation rates, Minnesota comes in...well...it's complicated.

Consider these two local headlines on the rankings, both published on June 4th:

From the Star Tribune:
Minnesota's graduation rate is among highest in the United States

And from the Minnesota Public Radio website:
Minnesota ranks at bottom for black graduation rate

The Strib story continues its sunny-side approach past the subhed ("In 2005, 78 percent of Minnesota's seniors graduated; a new study showed that that rate was ninth in the nation.") and well into the story itself.

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Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel at June 5, 2008 4:45 PM | Comments (0)

 

Minnesota's students (barely) above average

Filed under: Education

Minnesota has long prided itself as a leader in higher education. The government-issued Minnesota Measures report released last month calls that perception into question.

One barometer of success in higher education is the rate at which students complete their degrees. In 2005, 34 percent of students attending Minnesota's two-year schools graduated within three years. While that's good for 24th place overall (we did mean barely above average), it's nearly 30 points lower than first-place South Dakota, as noted here.

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Posted by Jonathan Kaminsky at May 23, 2008 9:53 AM | Comments (0)

 

Military recruiters and Minneapolis schools

Filed under: Education

In 2006, in the midst of his successful run for a seat on the Minneapolis Board of Education, a concerned delegate pointed Chris Stewart to a little known provision in the No Child Left Behind Act that makes some federal funding to school districts contingent on access to military recruiters.

"I didn't know then what a reasonable response would be," Stewart says. "But I just knew there had to be something that addressed or challenged it in one way or another."

In recent weeks letters have been landing in the mailboxes of every principal in the Minneapolis School District notifying them of new restrictions on military recruiters--the result of a Stewart drafted resolution that passed unanimously in March.

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Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel at April 21, 2008 3:34 PM | Comments (0)

 

U of M: Worldwide leader in ethanol debunking

Filed under: Education

Time has a great story debunking the clean energy myth. Several studies at the University of Minnesota are cited to show the impact of widespread Ethanol demand.

One of the studies revealed that we're digging ourselves a 400-year-hole with ethanol:

A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil; clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years. The result is that biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests.

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Posted by Kevin Hoffman at April 6, 2008 1:49 PM | Comments (10)

 

Denied in Edina

Filed under: Education

Steve Groen, the superintendent of Edina’s Calvin Christian School, felt pretty good heading into the Edina City Council meeting last night. A month earlier, the council had voted unanimously to consider issuing his school $1.5 million in non-profit revenue bonds to go toward expanding the school’s library and classrooms. Tonight was the big vote and there was reason to feel confident.

But there was one thing standing in the way of the coveted funds: the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

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Posted by Matt Snyders at March 4, 2008 3:17 PM | Comments (3)

 

Twin Cities Can Read Good

Filed under: Education

Minneapolis has reclaimed its ranking as "America's Most Literate City" -- and St. Paul has jumped from 11th to 3rd.

Residents of St. Paul "show evidence of stable or increased literate behaviors, be it reading newspapers or magazines, going online, library use, or buying books from a local bookstore," according to researcher Jack Miller. In this, St. Paul bucks a disturbing nationwide trend -- it's the only city nationwide where Sunday newspaper circulation has increased per capita.

The rankings are based on several metrics within six categories, including "newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources." Last year's literacy champion, Seattle, slipped to second.

Verily, I think I speak for all us learned and sagacious denizens of these dual metropolises when I say: Suck it, Seattle. I hereby challenge Seattle Weekly's talented and debonair web editor, Chris Kornelis, to a read-off. Alternative weeklies at 10 paces.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at December 27, 2007 3:10 PM | Comments (3)

 

Black like you

Filed under: Education

The Strib and others carry reports today about six Hamline University football players who have been suspended for dressing in blackface for Halloween. John Strausbaugh's extremely interesting 2006 book Black Like You, scrutinizes the history and role of blackface in American life. One curious fact that Strausbaugh points out is that the use of blackface has become surprisingly common in the last decade--especially on college campuses.

Indeed a quick Nexis search of the terms "blackface," "controversy" and "college or university" yields 188 stories in the last five years. This Halloween, for instance, four white students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sparked controversy when they painted their faces brown to imitate the Jamaican national bobsled team, while four Colorado College hockey players (including two Minnesotans) were suspended after donning blackface to imitate the characters on "Family Matters." In January students at Clemson University marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day by hosting a "Ghetto Fabulous" party featuring white students in blackface swilling 40s and sporting fake teeth grills. In 2005 it was students at Stetson University raising eyebrows when they painted their faces black in imitation of the school's basketball squad.

Posted by Paul Demko at November 5, 2007 1:20 PM | Comments (4)

 

Anti-Levy Mercenary on the Loose in Robbinsdale

Filed under: Education

Minnesotans in 99 school districts will vote Tuesday on $229 million dollars in school levy money. The Robbinsdale district keeps popping up in the news because of organized opposition to its levy, fueled in part by Paul Dorr--an Iowa-based consultant and a sort of mercenary who hires himself out to defeat exactly the kind of levy Robbinsdale is trying to pass. City Pages took a close look at Dorr in 2005--turns out Molly Priesmeyer's profile was quite prescient.

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Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel at November 5, 2007 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

 

Tutu's "anti-Semitic" speech

Filed under: Education

As we report in this week's issue, University of St. Thomas administrators derailed plans of hosting Archbishop Desmond Tutu next spring amidst concerns that his past criticisms of Israel veered into anti-Semitic territory.

Critics point to one speech in particular--"Occupation is Oppression" delivered 2002 in Boston--as evidence of Tutu's anti-Semitism. Below is a transcript of the speech. (Courtesy of Julie Swiler of the Jewish Community Relations Council) Was Tutu out of line? Share your thoughts in the comment box.

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Posted by Matt Snyders at October 4, 2007 11:30 AM | Comments (15)

 

Banning Desmond Tutu

Filed under: Education

Matt Snyders' excellent piece detailing the University of St. Thomas' bewildering decision to rescind an invitation for Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu to speak on the campus was picked up by both daily newspapers today. While the Pi Press went the classy route by citing the original CP story, the Strib simply stole the scoop.

Posted by Paul Demko at October 4, 2007 11:06 AM | Comments (1)

 

U of M strike over; workers blink first

Filed under: Education

U of M administrators are no doubt breaking out the bubbly this afternoon.

Union negotiators decided today to end the more than two-week strike by clerical, technical and health care workers at the school, and to take the administration's offer to a vote of the membership. Union leadership is neither endorsing nor opposing the current offer.

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Posted by Jonathan Kaminsky at September 21, 2007 1:46 PM | Comments (17)

 

The Little School That Could

Filed under: Education

Only in Prospect Park would news that the neighborhood's pride and joy, Pratt Elementary, is slated for merger with another Southeast Minneapolis school be greeted with vows to redouble the amount of community elbow grease being applied.

In other quadrants of the city, the kind of news Pratt's absorbing would touch off a stampede to get little Charlotte and Dylan into the Waldorf school. But Pratt's parents--half Somali immigrants, half university staff and other middle-class types hopelessly prone to civic do-goodism--are apparently responding by e-mailing one another to make sure there are enough volunteers on the roster to bring all the new students up to speed.

Sure, make the rest of us look all self-interested and unwilling to sacrifice our pocketbooks for our principles. We ought to come TP your precious watchtower.

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Posted by Beth Hawkins at March 22, 2007 11:49 AM | Comments (0)

 

What if a School Closed and Nobody Hollered?

Filed under: Education

Perhaps Hell has in fact frozen over. Last night at Minneapolis Public Schools HQ, the school board discussed the likely closure of a number of city schools and the transfer of their students to other schools. And no one screamed. No names were called. Nary an accusation of indifference or ineptitude was floated. We can't say for sure when last there was so much quiet discussion at 807 Broadway, but it's probably safe to say there are middle-schoolers who couldn't say the alphabet last time this happened.

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Posted by Beth Hawkins at February 28, 2007 3:22 PM | Comments (1)

 

Incoming Minneapolis School Board: Attend

Filed under: Education

Two items the fresh meat for the MPS mill might want to read carefully

What a bummer we didn't elect Carla Bates to the Minneapolis School Board earlier this month. Not that she was running: According to her bio at Twin Cities Daily Planet, Bates is an instructional technology coordinator at the University of Minnesota and the mother of three MPS students. She's also the site's education editor, in which capacity she's penned an agenda for the new board's first 100 days that's ambitious and sensible--if politically sticky. You can read it here.

The gist: Bates proposes tackling the rest of the to-do list rejected superintendent candidate David Jennings laid down on his way out of his interim posting, most notably closing 10 half-filled schools and doing something about the Dickensian teacher-student ratios at the others. She also just comes right out and says a few things that seem obvious to most of us but don't seem to be appropriate topics for discussion among many educators and district administrators: Someone needs to help foot the bill for shipping erstwhile MPS kids to charters and for the disproportionate amount of special ed the district provides. Oh yeah--and pay some serious attention to in-school disciplinary issues.

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Posted by Beth Hawkins at November 29, 2006 11:33 AM | Comments (4)