Chamber Lists Education Ideas
By CHARLES LUSSIER
Advocate staff writer
Published: Sep 13, 2006
The Baton Rouge area’s leading business group on Tuesday suggested 28 ways public schools can improve student achievement, ranging from changing teacher tenure to hiring tutors for all at-risk students in the early grades.
In releasing this “menu” of recommendations, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber has completed a five-part examination of public education in the nine-parish metro area. The chamber released it during its monthly meeting.
Stephen Moret, the chamber’s president and chief executive officer, described it as a “mostly comprehensive” list with which some will “vehemently disagree.” He said the chamber will follow up the reports with updates.
“We hope this report will contribute heavily to the public education debate,” Moret said.
He said he and other chamber researchers called upon a wide array of people in developing the recommendations, including current and former state leaders, national policy experts, nonprofit executives, district superintendents, principals, teachers and parents.
Of all the suggested changes, the chamber considers five to have high impact, 15 medium impact, and five low impact.
“If implemented with sustained and aggressive impact over time, we estimate a high-impact initiative could bring more than 10 percent of our underperforming students up to basic levels in reading, writing and mathematics,” the report concluded.
In the Baton Rouge region, the chamber said about 40 percent of children are not performing at basic levels.
Medium-impact initiatives, the chamber said, would bring 5 percent to 10 percent of these students to basic levels, while low impact ones would bring less than 5 percent up to basic levels.
The chamber also tried to estimate the annual cost of all of these initiatives if they were applied throughout the metro area.
For instance, increasing the autonomy of principals would cost almost nothing, but increasing the hours in school would cost between $50 million and $220 million annually, depending on how much time was added to the school day and school year.
This final report follows four previous ones comparing Baton Rouge area public school systems to each other, comparing the region to others in the South, examining the reasons students do poorly in school and surveying public opinion across the region.
The reports are part of a larger chamber campaign to inform voters in this fall’s area school board elections. Fifty-two school board districts are holding elections in the nine-parish Baton Rouge metro area. Sixty percent of races were no contests, with no one challenging the incumbents.
The primary is Sept. 30 with runoffs, if necessary, Nov. 7.
Tuesday’s report divides its recommendations by which group they would affect the most: students, parents, teachers, principals and administrators.
The student section is the longest, with 11 recommendations, followed by six in the teacher section and five each for principals and administrators.
East Baton Rouge Parish Superintendent Charlotte Placide said a key group was left out.
“The community is really a vital part of the whole puzzle,” she said.
Moret agreed that the local community has a big role in improving public education, but said the chamber wanted to emphasize things that school leaders could do on their own.
A four-person panel discussed the report briefly Tuesday.
Pat Cooper, superintendent of schools in McComb, Miss., did the most talking. He said that two of the recommendations, improving early childhood education and improving school-based health care for young children, are musts.
“If you don’t do those basic things, it doesn’t matter how many good principals you have,” he said.
While the report recommends improving basic skills in reading, writing and mathematics, one audience member questioned whether more arts and music education would not also help.
Moret agreed, but said the area needs more research. “We didn’t find a specific music or art initiative to recommend,” he said.
Cooper said arts education is a good way of getting low-income children interested in school.
Paying for some or all of these recommendations could cost plenty. Moret suggested school districts pick a few things to focus on, tailoring changes to their local needs.
Jennifer Pike, research director with the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, said financing these changes is a big problem, but said the list is good.
“We have to start somewhere, and this is a good set of reforms to get behind,” she said.
ON THE INTERNET:
http://www.brac.org/education/research.html
Story originally published in The Advocate
