Equal opportunities short in Iowa
Quad-City Times
DES MOINES – Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, a deep divide still exists between white students and students of color, even in Iowa, Gov. Tom Vilsack said Monday.
“We may have integrated schools, but we still have a lot of work to do in terms of making sure that youngsters have a great opportunity to achieve their potential,” Vilsack said at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the court decision that desegregated the nation's schools.
The governor is hoping new state-funded programs will help the Sioux City and Waterloo school districts identify the reasons why minority students have lower test scores and graduation rates than white students in those districts. Lawmakers, at Vilsack's request, approved $500,000 for programs that attempt to reduce the achievement gap in Iowa schools.
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Percentage of college-educated people in Iowa drops
Quad-City Times
A new government report shows that Iowa has dropped to 40th in the nationwide ranking of states whose 25-and-older population holds four-year college degrees.
The report released by the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that during 2002, 22.2 percent of Iowans older than 25 had earned at least a bachelor's degree. That is down from 22.6 percent the year before, when Iowa ranked 38th in the nation.
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