Our Views: Target Efforts on Possibilities
By OPINION PAGE STAFF
Published: Sept 18, 2006
TIn the Baton Rouge Area Chamber’s new “white paper” on education reform, the list of 28 specific recommendations for change is daunting — even in the larger context of the social problems, such as poverty, that feed so many of the ills in schools.
The chamber not only listed specific proposals but presented cost estimates for achieving them in the 11 public school systems in the nine-parish Baton Rouge area. The idea is to recognize the need for different remedies in different school situations, and to propose specific ways for specific schools to improve. The full Chamber reports on public education are at http://www.brchamber.org.
Cost estimates provide a yardstick against which the energy of school officials can be measured. As Stephen Moret, the chamber’s president and chief exedutive officer, noted, the region spends about $800 million a year in public schools. That amount of money, with outside support from businesses and foundations — East Baton Rouge schools received $3 million in a recent Gates Foundation grant — shows that schools have the money to deploy carefully targeted initiatives on struggling students.
Moret said the Chamber will consult the business, community and education officials to find one or more recommendations to focus on for action in the next year. The result of a study, after all, must be action. We’d like to see school boards look at the Chamber report and tell the public what the schools may already be doing, and explain what they can do more of, to improve student achievement.
The bottom line of the Chamber’s analysis: When adjusted for the impact of poverty on student achievement, there remains a lot of room for improvement in every area system, even those doing better than the others on LEAP tests or other measures.
Moret said that the Chamber does not underestimate the challenge facing schools, and the larger community, in boosting achievement of students in the poorest families. “That is something that none of our peers have been able to achieve,” Moret said of the systems across the South that the Chamber studied.
That’s a big goal, but it should not be one that is by definition impossible. If we give children the school environments they need to succeed, they’ve got an immensely better chance at a better life than if we write them off as “below basic.”
Story originally published in The Advocate
