T his week’s paper features a story about how our public school students are faring based on statewide testing. Though numbers dropped a bit in a couple of areas, the good news is some really big improvements over last year’s test scores.
But let’s don’t miss this fact: There is not a single area tested in which the majority of students scored proficient, which was a rating of 4. So where does that leave our community? We could assume that the test standards are unrealistically high and that they should be dumbed down. But that doesn’t really help our students.
The facts for the story were taken from a 160 page report prepared by the Department of Education. While it was filled with “boring statistics,” if you read it carefully and compare student groups, it really tells us about the proportion of children who are not scoring up to standard. We devoted so much space to the report because without the specifics it is easy to hear and accept the fact that we had improvement and move on.
But the rest of the story is that we still have too many children who are not in the group that is performing at a proficient level.
The county’s biggest improvement scorewise was celebrated at Magee Elementary, which moved from 17.3 percent to 41.5 proficient in reading and had similar success in math. Mendenhall also celebrated increases though not as large because they were already scoring higher.
Simpson Central dropped a little but their scores had previously been some of the highest in the district and they did not falter much.
The eighth grade math scores for Magee, Mendenhall and Simpson Central all show that too many students lack proficiency in that subject.
Too often we hear that students are not getting what they need at home. But it is the purpose of the school to supply what the student cannot learn at home. Is Simpson County so different from other rural communities? We don’t think so.
There is enough blame to go around. As parents we could do a better job with our children. Our churches can help where our families are failing. Our community can step up, and there are those who are willing to do so.
If the blame lies within the schools for whatever the reason we need to work to resolve those issues. Blame also lies on the community. Sometimes instead of making things better where we are, we change the environment. That may work temporarily but not long term.
It is time for this community to elect a new school board. We need to get involved and correct this situation while there is still an opportunity to do so.
