OP-ED: School outcomes are on the decline
Parents and others concerned about educational outcomes and the rising generation may want to take a look at the Belle Vernon School District. A national survey released Wednesday suggests the district is doing something right while many others are not.
According to the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Belle Vernon, with students from both Fayette and Washington counties, is testing above the national average.
A summary of the data collected by the Stanford scholars for Belle Vernon shows that “learning rates are higher… test scores are improving faster … learning rates are improving faster” than other school districts.
It’s not that BV is at the top of the heap. The district’s test scores are just 0.19 grade levels above the U.S. average.
Even so, districts socially and economically similar to Belle Vernon, including Laurel Highlands and Southmoreland, are in a hole – minus 0.87 at LH and minus 0.21 at Southmoreland.
As for an over-the-horizon comparison, Peters Township and Canon-McMillan students are scoring much above the national average both in reading and math. Both districts are well-heeled financially.
To come up with the figures, the Stanford group examined reading and math scores in grades 3-8 for the three-year span starting in 2022. It also looked longer range at the 2015-2025 period
(A fuller examination of the numbers is available at the online home of the Educational Opportunity Project. Alert: be sure to set aside some time. The numbers and graphs can be a slog.)
The big national news coming out of the study was as alarming as what’s going on locally: nearly all students everywhere are performing worse today than their peers did 10 years ago. Even high-performing school districts are losing ground.
Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute told the New York Times, “This is an enormous problem that is not getting enough attention.”
Harvard’s Thomas Kane laid only part of the blame on COVID, when classroom learning gave way to online classes. “The pandemic was the mudslide that followed some years of steady erosion in achievement,” he said.
It’s possible to pinpoint multiple reasons for the decline in public school learning and test scores. However, most of the focus has been on the pandemic and its lingering impact, such as persistently high absenteeism rates, the aborted federal No Child Left Behind initiative, which ground to a halt in 2015 under intense political pressure, and the emergence of social media and its ubiquitous use by students.
No Child Left Behind enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress when it was proposed by the George W. Bush administration. The House passed the measure in spring 2001 by a count of 384-45. The Senate followed suit by an equally emphatic 92-8 vote.
The eventual knock against No Child Left Behind was that it required schools to “teach to the test” while ignoring larger education goals.
It was replaced in 2015 during the Obama administration by the less stringent and more flexible Every Student Succeeds Act.
Brian A. Jacobs of the University of Michigan told the Times that No Child Left Behind may not have been a “cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement.”
In the same instance, many critics take as a given the harmful impact of social media on student achievement. Pew Research recently reported that nearly half of U.S. students say they are now online “almost constantly.”
According to the Stanford survey, students in a third of school districts across the country are reading a full grade level below their counterparts from a decade ago. Pennsylvania students on average have gone from above the one grade-level standard to below it. The state results mirror the conditions in many local school districts.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.