Jen-Opportunity Gap

The speaker, Jennifer Nimi, discusses her experience with the Opportunity Gap. She mentions working for a college that received a grant to recruit and support Native American teachers under the No Child Left Behind policy. However, she highlights the problem of the intent versus the impact of the policy, as it lacked the necessary infrastructure to support its goals. This led to struggles for students and educators, with some schools being negatively affected by funding and teacher shortages. Jennifer also shares her experience as a committee member for the Minnesota Teacher of the Year, where she heard about the achievement gap and the disparities in funding between schools. It wasn't until she encountered a teacher who talked about the opportunity gap that her perspective shifted. She realized that students were not lacking in potential, but rather were not being provided with equal opportunities to succeed. She emphasizes the need for systemic change and a shift in the narrative fro Hello, my name is Jennifer Nimi and I'm going to be talking about my experience with the Opportunity Gap. My experience started in 2001 when I took my first big position after leaving college and I worked for Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College who had received a grant through the Bush administration recruiting Native American teachers, like recruiting, retaining, graduating Native American teachers. And so the focus was on No Child Left Behind. The problem with this is the intent versus the impact. The intent was great, right? It wanted to hold schools accountable for children's achievement and how they did on national test scores. The problem was it didn't have the infrastructure to support the process. And so right away, I remember standards changing for states and trying to keep ahead of them and our students struggling in a teacher education program with how do you meet all of these standards and not really looking at the fact that schools, some schools have and some don't. And that is the systemic issue and that is the impact portion of my talk. So immediately we started talking about this achievement gap, that students weren't achieving to their potential or achieving to meet standardized test scores and schools were being impacted this by funding or losing teachers because of it. And so it put a huge impact on the process of how children learn. Their educators were stressed out. Of course, they're going to be stressed out through it too. It wasn't until 2006 that I became a selection committee member for the Minnesota Teacher of the Year that I kind of stepped into another dimension of the impacts of No Child Left Behind and this supposed achievement gap. And listening to teachers talk about, especially teachers that came from schools that didn't have the financial stability that other schools in their district had. And so I think of this in my own community of Duluth, right? We have East High School and we have Denfeld High School. And there's a very large discrepancy in what those students receive regarding funding, right? It's all based on tax dollars. So here we go back to the impact. We're not really looking at systemic change. We're looking at slapping a Band-Aid on something and hoping it works out in the end. So anyway, going through the Teacher of the Year selection process, we get teachers that would put forth portfolios. And these are the best of the best, right? Minnesota has 80,000 teachers in Education Minnesota Union. And again, these are the best of the best. But time and time again, I kept hearing about this achievement gap. And it just pulled a string as somebody who was not a student destined for college. My parents never talked about it. I was first gen. And now I'm working on my doctorate. Aside from that, thinking about my own experience in education and how I needed things that other kids didn't require, right? I needed help with reading that wasn't available. Now we have Title I that helps students with reading and provides additional support. But at the time, you were just kind of thrown in. It was like sink or swim. So really struggling with this idea and hearing teachers talk about the achievement gap. And again, it really struck me, struck a nerve. And it wasn't until a few years in that we had a teacher, Mr. Rademacher, who talked about the opportunity gap. And this was a teacher who worked in a male, white, man educator that worked in a predominantly mostly, I think, over 90% black, lower income school. And he talked about the opportunity gap. And the minute he said those words, my whole world blew up. And I'm like, yes, that is what's happening. These students are achieving to the best of their ability. What's the problem is we're not giving them opportunities to succeed. We're allowing tax dollars to determine who gets and who doesn't. And so when he spoke those words about the opportunity gap, that blew my mind. And I still think about that, and I'm so glad finally the narrative is changing where we're not talking about achievement because these students can achieve. But if you give them a footstool and expect them to reach 20 feet, that's never going to happen, right? If you give them the tools to build their own ladder and to make their life and their education system as strong as it can be, that's where the opportunity gap is going to close. And so it looks, it doesn't look, it's about a paradigm shift. And I don't know that we're ready for that. I mean, I think we're ready for that. I don't know that the federal government who funds education are states who set standards that aren't really reflective of students' learning. And their ability to really think creatively and critically about life. Until that shifts, like this feels like stuck in the mud and in the weeds. So that has, so this has been my experience with the opportunity gap. Thank you.