[kenberg]

I belong to the AARP (I don't jojn much of anything but Becky signed us up).

The latest issue of their newsletter talks about the livability of various cities. data on education are included. I am having trouble taking the data at face value, maybe someone out there knows something.


The AARP livability index starts Here

I grew up in St. Paul so I put that in, and then clicked on opportunity, which gets you Here.

Looking over in the column on the right I see that the high school graduation rate is 67.4%.
Really?

AARP gives their source as Source: U.S. Department of Education, The EDFacts Initiative
I find their site difficult to navigate.


The NCES has a state by state coloring by hs graduation rates Here.

It says over 80% for Minnesota but does not say how much over.

OK, it is not impossible that St. Paul has 67.4 and the state has over 80.

The given figure for Minneapolis is 52%.

OK, Bloomington (third largest city I think) has 84.7

But Duluth has 74.

I guess the farm kids are doing really well to bring the state up to 80+

I graduated in 1956 from what was probably about an average hs for the city. The graduating class was a little over 200, small enough so that if anything remotely like a third of the students had failed to graduate I would have known it.


I am finding the EDFacts Initiative really hard to believe.

For comparison, Baltimore, a place recently in the news, has a rate of 66.8. A little below St. Paul's, well above Minneapolis's.


I don't know exactly how to pose my question but something like this: Have our cities totally gone to hell or is there something fishy with these figures? Should we all move back to the farm?

[barmar]

I don't know much about cities in farm country, but in other metropolitan areas I would expect a similar disparity between urban schools and suburbs.

[kenberg]

I have always wanted to time travel to see if my memory is faulty, but I think,if the figures are righ,t then the Twin Cities have had a great comedown. The majority of the kids in my immediate neighborhood did not go to college. I am confident that they all finished high school.

But of course it was different then. Now we reach all of them algebra, back then we did so only for the college bound. So a third of them, or in Minneapolis almost half of them, don't graduate. but hey, they didn't learn algebra so what can we do? I hope that they never find out that I read the Classics Comic Book version of A Tale of Two Cities, they might take my diploma away.

I remain seriously suspicious of these figures. Growing up in St. Paul was terrific and it pains me to think of it as now being as bad as the figures indicate.

Incidentally, AARP places St Paul second among medium sized cities, second only to Madison Wisconsin, in their most livable category. Even if the kids don't graduate!

I'm sorry, or sort of sorry, but it just can't be right if we see that almost half the kids in Minneapolis are not graduating and we are simultaneously congratulating ourselves on everyone learning algebra. We once had a better perspective on this.

But I still just can't believe those numbers. They are stunning.

[cherdano]

I presume that just like college graduation rate, these numbers lose track of students who switch schools, say because their parents move.

[kenberg]

 cherdano, on 2015-May-12, 04:34, said:

I presume that just like college graduation rate, these numbers lose track of students who switch schools, say because their parents move.

Probably, and no doubt this is part of the problem. I went to some other sites, and in one case they were (somewhat) explicit: Students who move away are not counted one way or the other in the statistics, those who move in to the district are counted. It did not explain how they knew, when a student stopped coming, whether he moved or dropped out. I imagine for high school age this is a easier to track than it would be for college students. Records are sent to another school, or some checking is done to see why a sixteen year old is not showing up at school, or something. And for those moving in, it matters whether it is someone moving in at the end of ninth grade or someone moving in halfway through his senior year.

Becky also mentioned about the college students but I think it is fundamentally different. If a family moves say from St. Paul across the river to Minneapolis, the high school kids change school systems. The college kids wouldn't, and they often wouldn't even if the move were to Chicago.

Looking at the numbers, I find it hard to believe that the numbers for St. Paul, Minneapolis and Duluth are all correct and still the graduation rate for Minnesota (taken from a different source) as a whole is over 80%. At the very least, I would like to believe that this is not right.

My own years in high school were definitely a mixed bag. I can easily imagine how it could have been better. But I was sort of a mixed bag myself, as many adolescents are. The quite difficult job of the school system is to teach us something and get us through graduation reasonably prepared to at least do something. I have come to think of the inequality in education as being of far greater importance than the inequality in income, but of course there is a strong linkage, going both ways and perpetuating itself.

If I had the answer I would be rich and famous, but surely we can do better then these dismal rates of graduation.

[blackshoe]

 kenberg, on 2015-May-11, 18:23, said:

Incidentally, AARP places St Paul second among medium sized cities, second only to Madison Wisconsin, in their most livable category. Even if the kids don't graduate!

Is this placement for retirees, or for people with children? Or both?

[kenberg]

 blackshoe, on 2015-May-12, 07:33, said:

Is this placement for retirees, or for people with children? Or both?

The full title: "The most livable places at 50+" so, not surprisingly, they are concentrating on what (they think) their members want.

But these articles are always to be taken with a huge pile of salt (useful for icy driveways and sidewalks). I have very good memories of growing up in St. Paul. I joke (only partly joking) that I was shocked to discover that some cities don't have several lakes within or near their boundaries. I grew up half a block from a skating rink. Beyond that there was a large tree nursery where we could steal plums in the summer and sled in the winter. (Both activities were forbidden by the owners but not enforced.)

But there are these Minnesota winters. I don't mind, but some do and not all who do mind are over 50.

To each his own. I stay in Maryland because the kids are here and it's actually a pretty good place. It's as far south as I ever wish to be, farther really, but as I say the kids, and grandkids, are here. Mostly.

[barmar]

 blackshoe, on 2015-May-12, 07:33, said:

Is this placement for retirees, or for people with children? Or both?

Even if you don't have children yourself, it can be beneficial to live in an area that's attractive to families. Good schools raise property values. There's probably less crime and better shopping. If a community can't afford to run good schools, they probably can't afford other things that everyone needs.

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2015-May-11, 18:23, said:

I'm sorry, or sort of sorry, but it just can't be right if we see that almost half the kids in Minneapolis are not graduating and we are simultaneously congratulating ourselves on everyone learning algebra. We once had a better perspective on this.

The world has changed drastically since you were a kid. We live in an information economy, and STEM education is far more important in getting a good career.

The kids who graduated from your high school but didn't go on to college probably could look forward to very good careers in manufacturing, construction, etc. Most of our factories are overseas now, being manned by people earning pennies on our dollars, and manual labor is done by immigrants and poor people who are willing to work for minimum wages. So if you want a good job now, you need a better education.

[mike777]

 barmar, on 2015-May-12, 09:23, said:

Even if you don't have children yourself, it can be beneficial to live in an area that's attractive to families. Good schools raise property values. There's probably less crime and better shopping. If a community can't afford to run good schools, they probably can't afford other things that everyone needs.

In my local town the news for the 15 or so years we have lived here is all about the schools. We spend far more money and effort at the poorer area schools. Nothing seems to really change.

I note my neighborhood seems to always have the top performing grammer school with 100% or close to that at all grade levels or above. With that said most people on my tiny block with kids either home school or send them to private schools. btw our schools are run by the county not city so include all the suburbs with busing etc.

I just talked with a new neighbor about why he moved from the northern suburbs to the southern part of our town. He said he was unhappy with his school but I could not understand just what he was unhappy with.

Now he sends his kids to a private school after he moved here.

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2015-May-12, 09:29, said:

The world has changed drastically since you were a kid. We live in an information economy, and STEM education is far more important in getting a good career.

The kids who graduated from your high school but didn't go on to college probably could look forward to very good careers in manufacturing, construction, etc. Most of our factories are overseas now, being manned by people earning pennies on our dollars, and manual labor is done by immigrants and poor people who are willing to work for minimum wages. So if you want a good job now, you need a better education.

I think this view, very very much in favor, is mistaken. The unintended effect is to lump together a lot of kids at the low end. Not everyone is going to succeed in a STEM oriented curriculum. It still makes a difference, and I think a huge difference, whether they complete high school or not and whether, upon completion of high school, they have reasonable skills of the traditional sort. They can read instructions, they can handle mathematics such as being able to figure out the adjusted price if a $45 item has been reduced 20%, they can write up a report on what they accomplished, that sort of thing. With these skills, and with patience, they can move up. With the figures cited for Minneapolis (which I still am skeptical of) we have 48% of the kids not graduating from high school. I would be willing to bet that a fair share of the 52% who do graduate will never have a job that tests their knowledge of Physics or Mathematics beyond the basic skills that I indicate above. I would also bet that they are still in a much better position to support themselves than the ones who do not graduate.

I know a fair number of people with a modest education. Last summer, for example, I met a guy who had dropped out of school, late got a GED, and is now doing fine as near as I can tell. He is a wilderness guide, if you want to go into the Everglades for a few weeks, he's your man. Mostly the key to success for them, again as near as I can tell, is first that they show up and second that they don't too often piss too many people off too much. After that they need to be able to do something useful, and then they need writing skills, reading skills, and very basic math skills. They won't get rich, but they can be self-supporting in a way that neither kills them nor lands them in jail, which is a good deal more than can be said for most of these kids who do not finish high school. .

In the movie Peggy Sug Got Married, Kathleen Turner gets mapped back 25 years to her adolescence. After failing an exam in Algebra she tells the teacher "I will never need Algebra for anything, I speak from experience". The joke works because for a large number of people it is true.