Minneapolis schools aim to close achievement gap

The 4-year-olds sat quietly, in rapt attention, in the school's atrium as teacher Nancy Norris-Weber read the story of the hermit crab, a lesson about cooperation and inclusion disguised as a story.

The 19 members of her audience at the Mona Moede Neighborhood Early Learning Center were all children of color -- Hmong, black, Hispanic -- who live in or near the center's north Minneapolis neighborhood pockmarked with vacant and abandoned buildings and houses. Most are what educational policy experts term "high-risk" because they come from low-income homes and are prime prospects in the coming years to populate the low end of the achievement gap.

About 60,000 children enroll in public school kindergartens every year in Minnesota. State officials say 10 to 12 percent of them do so without being adequately prepared. In places with concentrations of poverty, one in three children may not be ready for school, Minneapolis officials say.

Those children are the focus of local, state and federal educators and politicians who currently are using federal stimulus plan funds to boost spending on early childhood education and calling for more sharply focused teaching. The administrations of both President Obama and Gov. Tim Pawlenty have made early childhood education an important part of plans to close the achievement gap.

Minnesota is set to receive $95 million in federal stimulus funds to aid in improving the education of children from low-income backgrounds. The Minneapolis School District plans to spend $2.2 million of stimulus funds it will receive through the state to boost early childhood education.

The tangible results in Minneapolis will be that 220 more children from low-income homes will be able to attend all-day preschool, increasing the number of kids from 560 currently to 780. This year the district had to turn away about 500 children because it didn't have room for them.

"Early childhood education is a priority in our district," said Maureen Seiwert, executive director of early childhood education for the district. She said the district and in fact the entire early childhood learning establishment is working to improve how they prepare children for school.

The Mona Moede facility has two people who serve as coaches for teachers, showing them how best to use information about individual kids to develop lesson plans.

More broadly, the state is moving ahead with expanding the Parent Aware program, which rates child-care facilities according to how school-like they are, for example, by tracking student performance and providing training for teachers.

"There are significant levels of children arriving not ready for school," said Amy Susman-Stillman, co-director of the Center for Early Education and Development at the University of Minnesota. "There's a lot of focus now on what can be done in the early years particularly to minimize the achievement gap."

It's not just poor children who are the focus of intense efforts to expand early childhood education. The Stillwater School District also is bidding to expand its services. But for that mostly middle-class district it's as much about competition as service.

District leaders are considering replacing a smaller facility with a larger one, which would allow them to serve 50 percent of area families instead of the current 16 percent. The move could help prepare more children for school, but also help the district keep families in traditional public schools, which has been losing many to private and charter schools. Some 25 percent of children who live in the district do not attend its public schools.

What both districts have in common is an effort to link early learners with school-age children. At Rutherford Elementary in Stillwater, preschool kids occupy classrooms next door to kindergartners. From time to time they are invited to see what life is like with the "older" kids through a "sneak-a-peak" program that introduces them to their future kindergarten teachers, school principal and others.

At the Mona Moede center in Minneapolis, fourth-graders from the adjacent elementary school come by twice a week to read to the kindergartners.

"We don't want to leave any kids behind," said Karen Klinzing, assistant commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Education. "We want all the kids to have the opportunity to succeed. To put them all on equal footing to get a good education, they need preparation."

Gregory A. Patterson • 612-673-7287