Teachers facing achievement gap try cross-race connections | Minnesota Public Radio News: ST. PAUL, Minn. — All the bleak statistics about Minnesota's achievement gap became personal to fifth-grade teacher Jen Engel, when she realized that gap was playing out in her own classroom.
"It stares you right in the face. It's real."
Engel teaches at Echo Park Elementary School in Burnsville, where about half of the students are racial minorities, many of them struggling academically. The 43-year-old, who is white, has heard about the factors that can contribute to the racial achievement gap, including poverty, unstable living conditions and troubled families.
But she says those are no excuses for educators.
So Engel is one of several teachers who are learning how to be what educators describe as "culturally responsive" to her students as part of a Twin Cities program offered by St. Mary's University of Minnesota, whose main campuses are in Winona and Minneapolis.
