New state School Superintendent Dr. Michael Martirano’s plan for improving public education in West Virginia has a towering title: “One Voice, One Focus: All Students Achieving. Creating a World-Class Educational System for the State of West Virginia.”
That’s a huge bite out of the education apple, but Martirano was not hired to maintain the status quo. He has been challenged to improve test scores, and some of the latest scores indicate there are at least some building blocks.
The state Department of Education says West Virginia SAT scores improved in core subjects, while nationally, students either had no gain or dropped a couple of points.
“West Virginia public school students showed across the board improvement on the 2014 Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and are outperforming their peers from other states on the SAT in reading, writing and math.”
Students across the country who take the SAT are typically the most serious about their post-secondary education. So in an apples-to-apples comparison, West Virginia students do better than the rest of the country, despite some of our socio-economic challenges.
This is encouraging because it indicates many of our West Virginia schools are succeeding in delivering a quality education, at least for children who are interested in learning. So the product is there.
The struggle, however, is to get more students to accept the challenges that accompany a rigorous education. Too many students still come from homes that do not value education, which contributes to the twin problems of absenteeism and an unacceptably high dropout rate.
Also, not all of the test data is encouraging.
West Virginia falls short of the national average for students taking Advanced Placement courses and the accompanying exams. Just 15 percent of our 11th and 12th graders took at least one AP exam, compared with 22 percent nationally. Forty of 116 West Virginia high schools had no students taking AP exams.
One of the challenges here is finding enough qualified instructors to teach these classes. Teacher organizations support higher across-the-board pay to fill those vacancies, but that would be prohibitively expensive. The state should first try more creative methods, such as paying bonuses for hard-to-fill positions.
Dr. Martirano’s drive for all students achieving has somewhat of a Lake Wobegon ring to it. In Garrison Keillor’s fictitious Minnesota town, all the students are above average. However, no substantial progress was ever made by setting the bar low.
The SAT scores are a specific indicator of the possible. Now comes the challenge of extending that quality education to a majority of West Virginia students.