Incarceration rates
affect black students
Wednesday's article about the wide racial gap in state schools calls for a wide range of action.
Since the 1970s there has been an exponential growth in incarceration rates for lesser offenses and drug offenses. This has been due to policy, not a higher crime rate.
In the United States, African Americans are imprisoned many times more often than white Americans. This has incredibly negative social consequences for black families and their children.
In Dane County in 2006, an estimated 47 percent of black men were under the supervision of the Department of Corrections, and 15 percent were incarcerated, according to the Wisconsin Racial Disparities Project.
Study after study shows that parental involvement is key to a child's success in school. Children need parents involved in their lives. If we want to close the educational gap, we also need to do something about racial disparity in other areas.
-- Maureen McCarty, Prairie du Chien

Close gap with time,
attention, responsibility
Regarding the achievement gap between blacks and whites in Wisconsin, raise consciousness and test scores will follow.
It stands to reason that if Wisconsin has the highest rate of incarceration of blacks in the nation, it would have a corresponding gap in achievement. People who advocate for and run prisons have a certain mentality, and people who go to prison have another. Quality education could change minds and hearts.
Department of Public Instruction spokesman Patrick Gasper said the data revealing the gap is nothing new. Right! No Child Left Behind was meant to address the problem, but it only brought the problem into the light of day. And as they tend to do, bureaucracies made it worse.
The stupefying focus on test scores is a boondoggle. Tests are tools for weeding people out, not for measuring the progress of things that really count, such as one's level of commitment, persistence, respect, responsibility, loyalty, love, talents.
If the people in power focused more time, attention and resources on developing human capital in people of all races, and if blacks take responsibility for going backward as a people in the last 30 years -- never mind Obama -- this nation would close the achievement gap and ensure the empire doesn't fall anytime soon.
-- Dana Spell, Ed. D, Oak Park, Ill., urban youth educator
 

Try residential program
for underperformers
First I'd like to acknowledge the terrific job the teachers, parents, aids and Schools of Hope volunteers are doing at Madison's Leopold Elementary School to eliminate the racial achievement gap. I have had the pleasure of observing classes as well as participating in a first grade field trip there.
Second, I'd like to suggest a practical, effective solution to solving this problem. Since most folks, including teachers, believe that most poor performing and unmotivated students come from dysfunctional families, and since the schools are providing meals for poor students (many of whom are very good students), why not take the next major step and develop a residential school for underperforming students?
Students who are consistently truant or late and refuse to do their work would be required to attend the residential school where a consistent routine of nutritious meals, class, study, chore time, fitness, recreation and bed time would be established. Non-complying students would be referred to the juvenile court system, and students who improve to the level where they can function in the traditional school environment would be allowed to return home.
This additional early investment in education would close the racial achievement gap in a hurry.
-- Jerry Darda, Madison

Transplant issue frames
U.S. health care debate
Wednesday's front-page article on UW Hospital and OptumHealth, a Minnesota-based insurance company, perfectly frames the health care debate.
Here we have UW Hospital, one of the best transplant clinics in the country, and their patients are being denied health care by OptumHealth.
If you listen to chirping from the GOP, you'd think this is an anomaly, that what we have to fear is the big, nasty government standing between patients and doctors as health care decisions are being made.
UW Hospital's kidney transplant rate is only 92 percent. The reason that it's lower than some other clinics is because UW Hospital takes the sickest patients and tries to save lives.
I know first-hand what an excellent facility UW Hospital is because they made a great effort 11 years ago to give me a liver transplant and save my life. Thank God for the women and men who work there!
-- Don Smock, Middleton