Sunday, Sep. 14, 2008

Use encouraging PACT scores as motivation

STUDENTS, TEACHERS, parents, school administrators: Take a moment to applaud your accomplishments on this year’s PACT — across-the-board gains, a remarkable thing for what is actually 24 separate tests, as well as a slight improvement on that nagging achievement gap that reflects public education’s greatest black eye.

It’s been a long time coming — an unequivocally positive showing, with improvements in every grade, in every subject — after years of mixed results and even occasional downward blips, on this important test as well as other meaningful and some not-so-meaningful (but more closely watched) measures. You’ve helped to reinforce the message that too often gets drowned out by those with competing political interests: that the children of South Carolina can learn, and that the public education system can teach them, if we spell out what we expect kids to learn, push relentlessly toward teaching all kids and refuse to settle for failure.

But one year’s results do not a trend make. And no matter how much scores have improved on the important tests, our state still has a long way to go. Our drop-out rate is still the worst in the nation, and while our scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are lurching toward the national average, we’re not there yet; besides, even if we never make it above average (mathematically, only half of any population can), we can’t set our goal at merely average.

It was just a bit more than a decade ago that our state decided it would try a new way of approaching education — by spelling out what we wanted kids to learn, testing them on how well they learned it and fixing the problems when they didn’t do well enough. We’ve stuck to the first two parts of that for what is by political standards an eternity. But we still haven’t gotten that last part down. It demands carrot and stick, and we’ve provided too little stick and practically no carrot. Instead, we’ve allowed ourselves to get bogged down in a distracting fight over whether we should even be trying to fix the problems.

It’s time to end that distraction. And after a brief moment of well-deserved self-congratulation, it’s time to get back to work. It’s time for teachers to get back to teaching, students to get back to learning, parents to get back to encouraging their children, administrators to get back to doing everything they can to make sure those teachers can do their jobs.

And it’s time for legislators and all the rest of us to get back to supporting all those efforts — or, in some cases, to start supporting them — through laws that make it easier to get the best teachers in front of the students who need them most and let them teach the way kids can learn, and through the resources needed to hire those teachers and operate after-school programs and, yes, to give poor kids a leg-up through early childhood education programs.

Largely because of our poverty, but also because of our state’s historic aversion to educating all children and the resultant low value that too many parents still place on education, we’ve got a lot more work to do than most states. That’s not fair, but that’s true of much of life. Successful people don’t let that stop them, and we mustn’t let the steeper climb become an excuse to give up. Instead, let’s use these encouraging PACT scores as that shot of motivation we’ve been needing to press ahead. Our kids can learn. Our schools can teach them. As long as we don’t give up trying.