HomeMy WebLinkAbout2016 02-26 More detailed student data seen as key to narrowing the achievement gap MINNPOST 2/29/2016 More detailed student data seen as key to narrowing the achievement gap I Minn Post
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More detailed student data seen as key to
narrowing the achievement gap
By Erin Hinrichs 02/26/16
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Weaver Elementary School, in Maplewood,serves a student body that's roughly 38 percent Asian.
wonder how Minnesota's Somali-American students are performing compared to their African-
American classmates? Or how Chinese-American students are faring academically compared to
their Laotian or Hmong peers?
Those looking for a more nuanced snapshot of the persistent achievement gaps won't find this
sort of data through the Minnesota Department of Education or in district reports.
That's because, in Minnesota, students are categorized under five generic racial or ethnic
umbrellas: Native American,African American,Asian American, Hispanic American, White
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American and Pacific Islander.
In many respects, it's an overly simplified system that blurs the diverse needs of an increasingly
diverse student body. For instance, current data tell us Asian-American and Pacific Islander
students in Minnesota are falling behind their classmates and their peers in other states.
Curious to see if certain subsets of AAPI students
1
were struggling more than others, the Council on
Asian Pacific Minnesotans and the Minnesota
Department of Education partnered in 2012 to
break this racial category into specific ethnic
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primary home language.
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ethnicities isn't perfect — since the home language
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ethnicity — the sampling showed there was a wide
range of MCA II reading proficiency levels within
the AAPI category in 2011.
They found that South Asian, Chinese and Vietnamese students were outperforming their Asian
peers, while Burmese and Hmong students were lagging the furthest behind.
These findings were highlighted in a report released by MinnCAN Wednesday. Using anecdotal
evidence captured at three area schools serving predominantly Hmong and Vietnamese students,
the report takes a closer look at culturally specific needs and what specialized support measures
seem to be working.
Fueled by these findings, MinnCAN will be advocating for more strident disaggregated student
data measures at the Capitol this session, along with a number of other local organizations. On
the legislative end, Sen. Susan Kent is authoring a bill that would require the Minnesota
Department of Education to further disaggregate all student data.
"The concern about our achievement gap is universal, and this is a very effective and relatively
straightforward way to evolve what we're already doing," she said. "I think nearly all of my
colleagues in the Legislature will see this bill as a way that we can strategically support our most
underserved communities and celebrate our rich cultural diversity in Minnesota."
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2/29/2016 More detailed student data seen as key to narrowing the achievement gap Minn Post
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MinnCAN
An incomplete picture
As required by state law, Minnesota schools track student demographic data by using five racial
or ethnic categories — to track things like graduation rates and test scores for the Minnesota
Comprehensive Assessment.
On the federal level, education data collection expands to a 7-category system. Students are
allowed to self-identify their ethnicity and race. They are also allowed to check more than one
category.
Beyond these two streamlined formats, the data landscape becomes rather piecemeal. In order to
better capture student diversity, some surveys, like the Minnesota Student Survey, include a
unique set of self-reported race categories. And many schools track students' home language as
they enroll.
But more granular categories like "Somali" or "Karen" don't always link up neatly with core
student data collected using state or federal systems. This is where, arguably, valuable insights
into some of the most marginalized student populations are lost.
Fortunately, this gap in student data seems to have finally captured the attention of state
lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
But why has it taken so long to get to this point?
Some speculate state data collection systems haven't adapted to the demographic shifts that have
taken place with the influx of immigrants in recent years simply because it's a cumbersome
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process. Others suspect the need for better disaggregated student data is now shaping up as a
priority because the urgency of the achievement gap has fully sunk in.
"I think now there's a greater sensitivity to learning what barriers there might be," Rep. Sondra
Erickson said, noting the Every Student Succeeds Act (formerly called the No Child Left Behind
Act) really put this on everyone's radar. "I'm for any way we can meet the needs of every single
learner."
`Natural next step'
"I just think it's a natural next step," Kent said. "This is something that states around the country
are addressing."
School districts in places like Hawaii, Washington and California have also been active on this
front. In fact, the state of California was on the cusp of passing an ethnic disaggregation bill that
would require all schools to expand the collection of AAPI data, which already tracks Chinese,
Japanese and Indian students, to include categories for Bangladeshi, Hmong, Indonesian,
Malaysian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai, Fijian and Tongan students. Despite
bipartisan support, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the bill last fall.
This puts Minnesota in a position to move the needle forward, Daniel Sellers, MinnCAN's
executive director, said.
"It's pretty clear that many people within those ethnicities are having different experiences
within our schools," he said. "Minnesota has a chance to become a national leader on this. I do
think this is going to become a trend."
Sen. Kent says her bill on disaggregated student data is currently in the final stages of drafting
and editing.
Offering a preview, she says it would require the Minnesota Department of Education to
disaggregate all student data — including graduation rates and outcomes from standard state
assessments — by race, ethnicity, homelessness, disability status, home language, migrant status
and foster care status.
"In doing this, we [would now] be in alignment with the new federal ESSA law, and it would
allow for cross tabulations," she said. "It would put us in a position to be able to really track and
report and effectively use the data to help our students."
With added state guidance, she's hopeful schools and districts can be more uniform in their
reporting of student diversity.
"Ultimately, we want the students and families to self-report their information," she added.
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"That's always challenging. We need to provide a framework, and hopefully it will make it easier
to capture and then use."
Potential hurdles
Staff with St. Paul Public Schools' Research, Evaluation, and Assessment team say they are
supportive of the push to further disaggregate student data, which would certainly support their
racial equity work.
However, as those who would be tasked with collecting and organizing this information, they
raised a number of logistical questions and concerns about adding new identity-based categories.
First, Joe Munnich, the department's assistant director, noted that while larger ethnic groups
like the Hmong, Karen and Somali would certainly show up prominently in new data sets,
smaller ethnic groups would still be hard to capture and accurately assess.
From a logistical standpoint, the district would incur costs for modifying its data input system
and survey forms. If there's an expectation that districts will backlog student data, Munnich says
the time and effort required to collect this info on students currently in school would place a
considerable burden on staff.
Even if they were able to reach all parents, research analyst Cindy Porter says it's unlikely all
families will respond, whether it be due to a language barrier or a lack of incentive to invest the
time in replying.
"That means we are left with the choice of removing [those] students from any analysis, or
guessing, or waiting until they graduate and they're no longer part of our data," she explained.
If the expectation is set that schools start collecting disaggregated data moving forward,
Munnich says the process would be much easier. But schools wouldn't have enough clean data to
assess anytime soon.
Also, as the data categories expand, things inherently become more complicated — a reality
those at the decision-making table will need to grapple with if any changes are to be effective.
"Who gets to decide who should be on the list?" he asks. "If you let families just fill in the blanks,
we couldn't actually aggregate that."
Diving deeper into the data
While any changes in data collection would involve some troubleshooting, advocates say there
are plenty of reasons to commit.
National groups like the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center have been framing the need for
disaggregated student data as an equity issue.
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Executive Director Quyen Dinh says the value of this data is more than being able to glean
insights from the numbers. It's about giving minorities a voice, allowing them to self-determine
their identities so they can be seen and recognized in a more authentic way.
Members of the Asian-American community are generally perceived as not being as civically
engaged, Dinh explains, but that doesn't mean their students' needs are any less urgent.
Tying this back to the value of data in illuminating ethnic subsets that are struggling, she
emphasizes the fact that Laotian, Karen, Vietnamese and other subgroups have different needs.
"Until we are able to simply have this visibility, have disaggregated data, these challenges and
disparities will continue to grow," she said.
Likewise, Latino and black students stand to benefit in similar ways.
In 2014, Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges and St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman pledged support
for President Barack Obama's My Brother's Keeper Community Challenge, to make a concerted
effort to improve outcomes for and perceptions of young men of color in their communities.
"Broad data doesn't always tell the full story," Mayor Hodges said. "I advocated for one of the
principles of the Twin Cities My Brother's Keeper Initiative to be `Make boys and young men of
color visible in the data' to ensure that policymakers, funders, and nonprofits will be able to help
meet our communities' specific needs through culturally-responsive strategies."
Generation NEXT, a task force aimed at closing the achievement gap in Minnesota, has already
begun dabbling in data disaggregation and the findings help give initiatives like My Brother's
Keeper a clearer direction.
According to a disaggregated analysis of data from the 2013 Minnesota Student Survey,
researchers found that Somali youth in St. Paul Public Schools rank higher in areas of
commitment to learning, positive identity and social competence than their white and black
peers.
"If you want your kid in a classroom with kids who value learning, you want them in a class with
Somalis," R.T Rybak told MinnPost in a prior article where he broke down the findings.
Once educators have a better handle on the ethnic diversity that exists within their schools,
they'll also be able to cross tabulate this data in more meaningful ways.
For instance, right now our data tell us how well black students are doing and how well Hispanic
students are doing. But what about those who identify as black-Hispanic male students? This
subset may be facing a unique set of challenges in the education system, but there's currently no
way to extract these findings from data sets that only track a student's primary race, Sen. Kent
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explained.
Spotlighting solutions
Perhaps even more valuable, stakeholders say, once we're able to identify where certain pockets
of minority students exist in our education system, we can home in on what supports seem to be
working.
At Noble Academy in Brooklyn Park, teachers have started conducting home visits at the start of
the school year to help bridge any linguistic and cross-cultural disconnects.
One teacher told MinnCAN that through her home visits, she realized that student with large
families at home are up against more distractions when it comes to finding quiet space to
complete reading assignments. So she adjusted the types of assignments she sent home with
these students, to help set them up for success.
At Weaver Elementary in Maplewood, Principal Pangjua Xiong has implemented a number of
best practices with the unique needs of her Asian student popluation, which makes up about 38
percent of the student body at Weaver, in mind. She knows the majority of her Asian students
are Hmong, followed by Vienamese. But she says she'd have to sort through student names to
know what, exatly, that breakdown looks like.
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MinnPost photo by Erin Hinrichs
Weaver Elementary Prinicpal Pangjua Xiong has implemented a number of best practices with the unique needs of her Hmong
and Vietnamese students in mind.
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As reported by MinnCAN, she encourage teachers and parents to embrace students' native
language, while also facilitating a growth mindset in both her students and teachers.
Having a clearer understanding of the ethnic demographics of her student population, she says,
would equip her team to be even more strategic.
"As a school, it'd be really useful for us. It'd help us target some of our classroom instruction
better," she said.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Erin Hinrichs
Erin Hinrichs is MinnPost's K-12 education reporter. She can be reached at
�p ehinrichs @minnpost.com, and you can follow her on twitter at
e @EHinrichsNews.
COMMENTS (6)
Not enturely convincing.....
SUBMITTED BY ALAN MULLER ON FEBRUARY 26, 2016-11:13AM.
Not so sure I believe all this. "Data"has become a sacred chant, to be repeated endlessly in every context. But it is
hard not to think that attention to the needs of every individual student must be more important.
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Challenging environment - Every student focus
SUBMITTED BY DENNIS CARLSON ON FEBRUARY 26, 2016-2:54PM.
Even if you just look at Hmong students, I believe it makes a great deal of difference where the child's family has
come from. If they come from a more urban, densely populated area versus a rural, sparsely populated
mountainous area-there will likely be a great deal of difference in their literary development even in their native
language.
We now have school districts with loo different languages being spoken in the students'homes. I question even
with all the data available how much it will help unless some added staff and support is given to this
challenging environment. Imagine all that valuable student data and class size being at 30-40 students. It will
remain a challenge even with the data.
One of my favorite memories in my education career was to be invited to see a group of teachers track individual
students progress over the course of a school year. They had all the students names on a wall and could visually
show the growth in their areas of math, reading, and writing skills. The teachers and instructional coaches
each spoke with pride as they discussed the individual students and how well they had done. They did not have
them disaggregated by race or ethnicity but simply used the name of each student. If you did look closely at the
names you would see that families had come here from all over the world.
It is a good and important article. I still believe that with the Boo,000 students that come through the doors of
our public schools (and all the uniqueness that is wrapped up in each and every child)it still boils down to
individual student learning, one-by-one.
Brain Research Data Transforms Instruction
SUBMITTED BY ANN KAY ON FEBRUARY 26, 2016-5:16PM.
For decades now, the data has been clear:we have a huge achievement gap in reading between students of color
and white students. Slicing and dicing this data in new ways is certainly interesting and informative,but it
won't lead to closing the gap. What will?Creating alternative forms of instruction based on NEUROLOGICAL
data. For example,brain researchers have found that poor readers often have inefficient processing in areas of
their brains, and children who can't keep a steady beat often struggle with reading. Research shows that making
music, moving, and creative play enable and remediate brains so they can better acquire language, read,
compute, plan, create and focus. Neuroscientists Dr. Nina Kraus (sound processing), Dr.Adele Diamond
(executive function), and Dr. Usha Goswami(dyslexia)are calling for schools to get students singing, moving
and playing daily. Here are two brain-based instructional practices: 1)A MN nonprofit, The Rock`n'Read
Project www.rocknreadproject.org is helping children read at grade level through singing with software.
Research shows 1 year of achievement in 13.5 hours over 9 weeks. 2)Minneapolis-area classroom teachers who
have investigated the effects of daily singing have seen dramatic boosts in letter sound acquisition, sight word
retention, and fluency. See www.lifelongmusicmaking.org. Using brain-enabling instruction is the key to
closing the achievement gap.
Achievement gap
SUBMITTED BY JOHN CLOUSE ON FEBRUARY 28, 2016-12:29AM.
The revelation that about 40% of African Americans are not graduating from high school seems to be the only
statistic that is necessary to move forward.
We should spend as much as we can and do everything possible to get these kids an education.
No matter what it takes. Now.
Coping with trauma--information is power.
SUBMITTED BY SAM KEATS ON FEBRUARY 28,2016-8:10AM.
as someone in schools every day, I strongly support breaking data down further, and not only in ethic categories,
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but with regards to trauma. Refugees, children whose families move every three months seeking affordable
housing that is safe, kids who witness or are victims of domestic violence,who witness neighborhood shootings
or gang violence, kids who are homeless--we have to step in and support not only these children but their
families.
This week I read with a little boy a month out of a Kenyan refugee camp. I heard a bright,helpful Somali girl
explain that her family only lost twenty people in the civil war.As a member of a holocaust-survivor family, I can
attest that trauma does ring down the generations.Addressing these issues during our students' early years,
giving their families support during those early years, can make a huge positive difference for our society. It's
hard to think when your brain keeps replaying images of violence over and over.
And I second musical education. It doesn't just boost brain power, the arts,like nothing else, exposes children to
the kind of metaphors they can use to absorb and transform traumatic experiences.
Data Doesn't Do It
SUBMITTED BY ANN KAY ON FEBRUARY 28, 2016-3:59PM.
Believing that more detailed data is the key to narrowing the achievement gap is "like saying that weighing a pig
will fatten him up"(quote from a friend of mine).
Why are people content to try to NARROW the gap?
Why not CLOSE it?
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