Annual study once again shows MPS students performing better than those who chose suburban districts

MINNEAPOLIS – For the second year in a row, a Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) report indicates that students in Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) performed better on achievement assessments than district-residing students who chose to leave the district.
 
On the whole, MPS students showed nearly twice as much gain in reading achievement as did suburban choice students.
 
The Choice is Yours report for the 2006-2007 school year, released Wednesday, was the third in a series of annual studies measuring the effects of a voluntary desegregation program implemented in Minneapolis and nine surrounding suburban school districts in 2000. Under the Choice is Yours program, eligible families in the Minneapolis Public Schools district are able to choose to send their children to an MPS school, a selected magnet school or a participating suburban school.
The evaluation uses reading and mathematics test scores for students in grades three through seven to determine whether school choice impacts student achievement. This year’s results showed that MPS students who chose to stay in the district fared better in overall achievement testing than those who chose to leave the district.
 
In the reading assessment section of the report, MPS students outperformed those who left the district in every grade level. According to the report, “Overall, suburban choice students made slight but significantly lesser gains in reading than the comparable non-participants.
 
“These annual ‘gains’ translate into reading scores for suburban choice students that were, on average, nine percentile points lower than those of comparable non-participants.”
 
Meanwhile, mathematics scores for those who stayed and those who left were comparable, with virtually the same overall composite scores.
 
After studying the results of the report, David Heistad, executive director of the Research, Evaluation and Assessment department at MPS, said, “The results of the Choice is Yours report for the past two years have shown great gains for Minneapolis Public Schools students. If I were a parent whose child qualified for the program, I would seriously consider keeping my child in a Minneapolis Public School.”
 
“What this tells me is the innovative approaches to education that our district has undertaken are paying off,” said MPS Superintendent Bill Green. “While this study may not be the final word on the subject, right now it’s one of the only tools we have to measure academic quality. For the past two years, the Choice is Yours report has indicated that Minneapolis Public Schools students are faring better on academic assessments than students who chose to participate in the Choice is Yours program.”
 
MPS has faced the loss of many district-residing students whose families have chosen to send their children to suburban and private schools, as well as charter schools, which on the average perform lower than MPS. The steady decline in enrollment at MPS has been attributed to a combination of many factors. For many parents, however, the overwhelming factor has been the perception that suburban schools inherently offer a higher quality of education.
 
Despite the growing level of competition, Green said the district welcomes the opportunity to show that MPS students are outperforming suburban and charter school students on academic assessments like this one.
 
“We strongly support the concept of choice in public education,” Green added. “It’s important that families have the opportunity to select the type of school that best fits their needs. But that choice should be an informed one, and we believe that the report released by the Minnesota Department of Education contains important information for families making these decisions.