How the Twin Cities tackled kindergarten readiness


  • November 19, 2015
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   education

Brayson Smith talks with Aaliyah Gundy while working on numbers in La’Tris Sykes kindergarten class at Lincoln Park Elementary School Thursday, Sept. 23, 2015.(Michael Spooneybarger/ Studer Community Institute)

Change came to Minneapolis-St. Paul because of what was missing.

— Fewer than 30 percent of the 762 early childhood programs in the Twin Cities were rated as high quality.

— One-third of 3-year-olds received a state-mandated screening that tests a child’s social and emotional development, a key factor in whether they will be ready for kindergarten.

— 40 percent of Minneapolis kindergarteners were ready for school.

— 62 percent of students graduated high school in four years.

— Research showed the best predictor of a student’s likelihood of graduating on time wasn’t race or income. It was whether they failed a class in ninth grade.

In 2012, a group of leaders in the African-American community decided enough was enough.

Thus was born Generation Next, a coalition of business, education and political leaders who work to change those numbers. Here is their annual report.

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Jeremiah Ellis is the director of partnership and outreach for Generation Next.

“The story is the African-American community in Minneapolis-St. Paul was interested in ending the disparity in education outcomes,” Ellis said.

Some locals learned about an effort in Cincinnati led by a consulting group called Strive. There, Strive brought together community leaders to pool resources and act on creating change in their community.

“We’re modeled after Strive, we don’t follow them exactly,” Ellis said.

Generation Next includes big players at the table: the president of the University of Minnesota, the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the superintendents of the school systems and the teachers union, and corporate vice presidents at 3M, Target and General Mills.

“For them (Target, 3M and General Mills) it’s more that we want to remain a competitive community, we want to grow workers and consumers for our products,” Ellis said. “We want to have a great city and a lot of talent to choose from.”

After meetings that included lots of diving into data and talks from experts that lasted through 2013, Ellis said the community came to five areas they wanted to focus on:

— Kindergarten readiness.

— Third-grade reading.

— Eighth-grade math.

— High school graduation.

— Post-secondary degree attainment (of an associate’s degree or higher).

It is similar, Ellis says, to Promise Neighborhood efforts, which are modeled in cities across the country, including San Antonio, Savannah, Ga., Macon, Ga., and Buffalo, N.Y. They are built on the model of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which used a multi-agency, multi-generational intervention approach to improving education outcomes in what began as a one-block area in Harlem in the 1990s.

“They’re very tested benchmarks,” Ellis said. “I think this a growing national movement to look at these as benchmarks that every community should be measuring.”

Three of those metrics — kindergarten readiness, high school graduation and college degree attainment — are included in the Studer Community Institute’s Pensacola Metro Dashboard.

The dashboard metrics were built with the University of West Florida as a snapshot of the educational, economic and social well-being of the community.

As a reminder, here’s how Escambia County fares on those three metrics:

— Kindergarten readiness: 66 percent.

— High school graduation rate: 66 percent.

— Adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher: 23.7 percent.

‘This is the pot of the ocean we are going to boil’

Ellis acknowledges that Generation Next and the Twin Cities had a lot of work before them.

They refused to be paralyzed by analysis.

“The community decided we’ve got to start doing something now,” Ellis said. “We’ve got to start somewhere, you know, this is the pot of the ocean we are going to boil.”

Generation Next partnered with the United Way, which already tied into the programs and partners in the community.

After meeting with experts in health and early education, the “Screening at 3” strategy emerged in August 2014, Ellis said.

Experts identified several issues, including prenatal visits and access to health care, as factors that influence a child’s readiness for kindergarten.

Ellis said there is a screening the state of Minnesota requires that is done by school districts that covers broad health issues and social and emotional development.

“Health care providers say it’s not as comprehensive (as a medical exam), but it is a measure of social and emotional preparedness as well, which are the skills a child needs in school,” Ellis said.

Their expert panel said knowing whether a kid is screened at age 3 was important because 3 is far enough from kindergarten that those interventions can be successful.

School nurses in Minnesota do the screenings. They said for $50,000 could pay for a part-time nurse to go to the neighborhoods where screening rates were low and reach families.

Ellis said Generation Next took that proposal to its funding partners and ask for help toward that goal.

The result: Screenings are up 13 percent this year over last.

Building a team

Ellis said much of what they do is get the right people in the room together to try to make an impact, much like a soccer coach tells one player to play goalkeeper, another to play midfielder and another to play defense.

Together, you get a team. Apart, you get everyone running toward the same spot on the field and getting nowhere.

In the Screening at 3 effort, for example, they not only helped get funding partners to the table, they helped the school district identify neighborhoods where screening rates were low and they helped develop a strategy to help let families know what the screening is and why it’s important.

For example, in some neighborhoods, parents use the “friends-family-neighbors” network of childcare, as opposed to a formal childcare center.

Many of them weren’t getting the word about the screenings that parents with children in formal centers did get.

Public and private leadership at the table together is an important key to Generation Next’s work.

“If your business leaders don’t move the dial what happens to them? What can the mayor do? What can university systems do to help more kids be ready for kindergarten?”

“We looked at what do we have control over and what can we start to move on,” he said. “A lot of work happens in silos.”

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