Governor Tomblin’s education reform bill passed by the legislature earlier this year requires all children to read proficiently by the third grade. A…
Governor Tomblin’s education reform bill passed by the legislature earlier this year requires all children to read proficiently by the third grade. A strategy to make sure that happens will be discussed at an education summit Tuesday, November 5.
From grades kindergarten to third grade, children learn to read. By fourth grade, they must read to learn.
Dr. Amelia Courts, the President and CEO of The Education Alliance in Charleston says it takes more than a law on the books to do that. It takes support from the school community.
“Obviously Governor Tomblin has made it very clear that he views the improvement process for education to be a long term commitment and that’s where our organization stands as well. There were some legislative changes this past session,” said Courts.
“We would envision that some additional changes will occur this coming session and we want to continue to engage the community as we move through that process. Also as we work with individual schools and school districts we hope to take some of these lessons learned from the summit and work with them as they are implemented in programs at different schools.”
The summit includes speeches, panel discussions and a town hall meeting hosted by former governor Gaston Caperton. It convenes Tuesday morning at the Charleston Civic Center.
A new radio documentary from Trey Kay (producer of “The Great Textbook War”) delves into the culture war battles over public school curriculum content in Texas. Listen to The Long Game: Texas’ Ongoing Battle for the Direction of the Classroom on Thursday, Nov. 7 at 9 p.m. on West Virginia Public Radio.
Prior to the broadcast, the public is invited to a listening session and discussion at the University of Charleston on Monday, Nov. 4 at 6:30 p.m. Panelists will include Kay and Dr. Calandra Lockhart, chair of the Education Department at University of Charleston. The presentation will take place in the Erma Byrd Art Gallery located in Riggleman Hall. The public is invited to this free event.
“The story of the Kanawha textbook controversy was an example of where the nation was in the early 1970s regarding culture wars and education,” Kay said. “Texas is a great example of where those battles are today. For more than a half a century, citizens of the Lone Star State have had intense, emotional battles over what children should and should not be taught in public school classrooms. While there have been fights over just about every academic subject, debates over history, evolution, God and country generate the most heat.”
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Trey Kay accepting the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton award for his 2009 radio documentary “The Great Textbook War.” Kay grew up in Charleston, W.Va., and lived through the controversy as a student.
The hour-long Long Game begins with a focus on the recent controversy over an online set of lesson plans widely used in Texas schools. Tea Party parents believed these lessons to be pro-communist, anti-Christian and pro-Islam. Earlier this year, they successfully pushed to remove the lessons from Texas schools. The program then discusses how an unlikely conservative, religious couple created an organization powerful enough to force textbook publishers to alter books. The documentary closes by examining the battle over what science textbooks should teach about evolution in public school classrooms.
“The debate in Texas is something that plays out in communities throughout the nation, and highlights some of the controversy surrounding the new Common Core Curriculum standards,” Kay said. (Common Core Curriculum standards are to be fully implemented nationally by the 2014-15 school year.)
“These are fundamentally different mindsets pitted against one another in deciding how we are to educate the next generation,” Kay says. “Is it possible for Americans to ever agree on ‘common’ essentials to teach the next generation?”
Kay’s documentary The Great Textbook War, a radio report about the 1974 Kanawha Textbook Controversy, was honored with Peabody, Murrow, and DuPont Awards. In addition Kay has contributed numerous reports to national programs, including This American Life, Marketplace, Morning Edition, American RadioWorks, Studio 360 and Frontline. In 2005, Kay shared a Peabody for his contribution to Studio 360’s “American Icons: Moby Dick” program.
Long Game is a project made possible by the Spencer Fellowship for Education Reporting at Columbia University’s School of Journalism with additional funding provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Marist College, the CRC Foundation and Friends of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
Only days into the 2013 Legislative session, it became obvious to those eyeing the halls of the state Capitol it would be the year of Education Reform. With the passage of the governor’s bill, immediate steps were taken to improve student achievement, but some steps couldn’t be implemented so quickly. Legislators are still learning how they can help improve early childhood education in West Virginia.
The most critical years in learning come from birth to the third grade. That’s what members of the National Governor’s Association’s Division of Education told state lawmakers this week.
They presented trends and data showing just how crucial these years can be and suggested they become the priority for West Virginia’s education system moving forward.
Albert Wat is a senior policy analyst for the division.
“All of this is to say that the first 8 years, based on these data and trends and based on what we know about brain development, is extremely important in terms of setting a foundation, either weak or strong, in terms of success,” he told lawmakers Wednesday.
Wat presented data on early education from across the country to the Joint Committee on Education, starting with graduation rates. Nationwide, Wat said 22 percent of low-income students fail to graduate by the age of 19.
“The good news is that if kids of any income levels are proficient at reading by third grade, so for low income kids if they’re proficient in reading by third grade,” he said, “their rates of not graduating by the age of 19, so the failure rate if you want to call it that, basically is reduced by half.”
Wat’s data shows the rate drops to 11 percent for low income kids, and from 6 percent to just 2 percent for children from higher income families.
The data supports the importance of meeting that benchmark, unfortunately, Wat said it’s not being met across the country. At least not yet.
“The bad news is that even though that’s such an important benchmark, in our nation two-thirds of our fourth graders are not performing at a proficient level in terms of reading,” he said.
That very benchmark, for a child to be proficient in reading by the third grade, was set forth as a goal for the state by Governor Tomblin earlier this year when he signed the education reform bill.
Even though there is a strong focus on reading, Wat said STEM—science, technology, engineering and math education—are still priorities.
“There’s a little bit of a lag in terms of policy, but there’s a lot of research about how much kids can learn in the early years, before third grade even before kindergarten, in terms of math that we’re not taking advantage of,” Wat said.
“The way that we’re training teachers and the curriculum we’re using is really dumbing down the content that kinds can learn.”
It extends beyond the reading, writing, and math that are traditionally taught in school. Wat said today, effective teachers are learning to teach kids at these young ages more cognitive, critical thinking and even emotional lessons to educate the whole child.
So how do we provide children a strong education base at a younger age? Wat said it starts with the teachers.
“I think that the notion is that these grades are easy to teach. If you know how to add one plus one, then you should be able to teach math in the first grade which is not true,” he said. “So, I think we need to really need to pay more attention to the quality of instruction in these grades.”
The way to do that, Wat said, is with a proper teacher evaluation system, one that is adapted to focus on the needs of early education, and continuous professional development that allows teachers to learn nationwide best practices for young students and put them to use.
But it’s not just teachers. Sarah Silverman, program director of the NGA’s Education Division, said principals play a crucial role as well.
She suggested those overseeing pre-K through third grades should have clinical experience with early grade levels and should be evaluated on how well they are able to assist their teachers in continuing focus on those critical ages.
The state Board of Education learned more Wednesday about the search process for a new state Superintendent of Schools. At their October meeting, the board heard from an outside attorney hired to oversee the process.
Victor Flannigan of the Charleston law firm Pullin, Fowler, Flanagan, Brown & Poe is heading up that process and told Board members they are now looking to hire a consulting firm to compile candidates nationwide for the job.
Flannigan said they expect to have the search firm chosen by January and from there, that firm will take 6 to 8 months to accept applications, narrow down candidates and conduct interviews with a hiring committee made up of Board members and Department of Education staffers before a new superintendent will be in place.
The person hired will replace Dr. James Phares, who was given the position when Dr. Jorea Marple was fired by the Board in November 2012.
The law firm conducting the search is also representing the state Board in the legal case filed by Marple claiming wrongful termination.
The state Board of Education voted to take a year to study the possible the implications of the closure and consolidation of a small Fayette County High…
The state Board of Education voted to take a year to study the possible the implications of the closure and consolidation of a small Fayette County High School. Meadow Bridge houses students grades 7 through 12 and was set to be closed within the next three years, but the Board’s decision is now forcing the county to reassess that plan and also reassess their upcoming school bond.
Talk of consolidation can be a tricky thing for any county. Whether it comes down to a decreasing school population, aging buildings that can no longer be kept up, or poor rates of student achievement, there are multiple factors at play.
But for Fayette County, it comes down to money.
“Whether we can reduce high schools, the number of high schools or not, we will need to reduce the number of employees we have at the secondary level,” Fayette County Superintendent Keith Butcher told the Board.
Butcher addressed the funding issues the county is facing—issues the county has addressed by planning to consolidate three high schools.
Butcher said each year, the county has seen less and less of a surplus in their budget to the point where next year, they’re expecting to go into the red.
As a part of their ten year Comprehensive Education Facilities Plan, a plan each county is required to submit to the state Board, Fayette was set to combine Meadow Bridge, Fayetteville and Midland Trail High Schools into the existing Midland Trail facility with some additional renovations. That way, the county only had to staff three high schools instead of the current five, saving significantly on personnel costs.
But with a vote of 6-2, the Board amended the county’s facilities plan, also known as their CEFP, and pulled any future plans for Meadow Bridge High School off the table and out of consideration for another year, essentially saving the school from consolidation. At least for now.
“When you pull Meadow Bridge out of that consolidation then we need to go back to the drawing board and see if the plan still works or if we need to reconfigure how we’re looking at things,” Butcher said after the vote. “We’ll also need to realign costs.”
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Dozens of Fayette County residents, both supporters and detractors of the consolidation plans for Meadow Bridge High School, packed the state Board of Education meeting at the Department of Education in Charleston.
While the vote was at least a small win for Meadow Bridge supporters, dozens of which showed up to the meeting to speak against consolidation, members of the Board, in particular President Gayle Manchin, see this as a time extension.
Basically, let’s take a step back, study the implications of closing the school, and see if that’s the best option for the county. With the state currently in control of Fayette County Schools, Manchin said they want to get it right.
“The parents that I heard get up and speak about Meadow Bridge, their concern was the travel time on extremely treacherous roads in the winter from Meadow Bridge to Midland Trail and yet in every report that was given never addressed that. Ever,” Manchin said. “It was always about; Midland Trail is a good high school. I never said that Midland Trail wasn’t a good high school.”
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Carolyn Arritt, a retired Fayette County educator, holds up a map of Fayette County as she addresses the Board. Arritt was concerned with the travel time students face at consolidated schools.
“We want what is best for our kids. What I asked for on behalf of the Board at our last meeting was that we remove Meadow Bridge from this argument right now because feelings were very high and I felt without trying to address people’s feelings in this that Fayette County had no hope in passing a bond.”
And with that statement, Manchin got to the real issue in Fayette County: a bond proposal set to hit the ballot in May of 2014.
Ask anybody on the street in Fayetteville, Mt. Hope, Milburn or Spring Dale, a lot of community members are saying the bond won’t pass. A bond hasn’t passed since the late 1970’s.
County officials planned to add the consolidation plan into their bond proposal along with other vital facility updates.
“The current capitol improvement plan includes submittal of a School Building Authority project to replace Collins Middle School at a total cost of $24.4 million,” Butcher told the Board. “Our match for that would be a bond that needs to be approved and supported by the voters of Fayette County.”
Butcher said the bond would also include renovations for the consolidated Midland Trail and two brand new elementary schools the county desperately needs.
By tabling the plans to consolidate Meadow Bridge, Butcher and the county are essentially back at square one and will now have to reassess their bond proposal before its submittal date in January.
“It will take money from the School Building Authority from the state of West Virginia and also that support from the voters so we will need to go back to the drawing board and find a plan that the citizen’s can agree on so we can move Fayette County forward,” he said. “Their facilities are in grave need of repair and we still need to accomplish that job.”
Over the next year, the state Board of Education plans to study the impact closing Meadow Bridge High School would have on travel time for students, participation rates in extracurricular activities, student achievement and also the possibility of sending kids to high schools outside of the county instead of the consolidated Midland Trail High School.
The state’s largest teacher’s union announced a new initiative pushing for a competitive salary for teachers and school personnel. Union leaders call the…
The state’s largest teacher’s union announced a new initiative pushing for a competitive salary for teachers and school personnel. Union leaders call the pay increase the next step in improving public education and student achievement across West Virginia. The West Virginia Education Association kicked off the “Competitive Pay Campaign” at their Charleston headquarters.
West Virginia currently ranks 48th in the nation in teacher pay at an annual salary of $45,000.
While WVEA President Dale Lee declined to put a dollar amount on what the union considers a competitive salary, he said it should be a major priority for lawmakers despite a struggling state economy.
“It’s not our job to find the resources for them, but it is their job to place a priority,” Lee said during a press conference. “This has to become a priority and anything up at the Capitol that they make a priority they are able to find the funding for it.”
Lee said every $1,000 raise for teachers would cost the state more than $26 million.
He said implementing a multi-year program would allow the state more time to find some of that amount while catching West Virginia teacher up with the national average of $55,000 a year.
