Dive Brief:
- The city of Minneapolis is making efforts to minimize the achievement gap between black and white students with the creation of a Black Male Student Achievement office, which aims to raise test scores, minimize suspensions, and see higher graduation rates.
- In 2013, only 15% of the district's black eighth-graders were deemed proficient on the state test, while 54% of white eighth-graders hit the proficient target.
- The program, which is being run by Michael Walker, a former principal, requested $1.2 million for the district's school board to make its goals a reality.
Dive Insight:
Minneapolis has one of the greatest disparities when it comes to test scores by subgroups. There are 36,000 kids in the district, and while 24% of the black students passed the 2014 state reading, over half of the white students passed.
While these gaps are of course worrisome, the issue has received more attention in recent months as the nation's painful racial history was brought back to the forefront with the controversy surrounding the police-related deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed black men.