Schools stack up on many factors. Report: Home lives poor for BR students
By CHARLES LUSSIER
Advocate staff writer
Published: Aug 9, 2006
Public schools in the Baton Rouge metro area compare well with those in other Southern cities in how they spend money on students, pay teachers, employ high quality educators, and in class size.
Those traditional measures, however, have limited value because students are in school little of the time, compared to their hours outside of school.
In Baton Rouge, students’ home lives are poorer and full of more of poverty-associated ills than those in most other metro areas across the South. For instance, 61 percent of Baton Rouge-area children qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of poverty; only the Mobile, Ala., and New Orleans metro areas have higher student poverty rates.
The Baton Rouge Area Chamber makes the observations in the third of five planned reports on public education in the region.
Data on out-of-school factors are limited, but “our region’s relatively high poverty levels suggest that we compare poorly to our peer regions on most non-school factors,” concluded the report.
The chamber is measuring Baton Rouge against 11 other metro areas in the South.
Previous reports have focused on how the Baton Rouge metro area has more minority students, more living in poverty and more attending private schools than many other metro areas in the southeastern United States.
Meanwhile, 40 percent of the students in the 11 school districts in the region cannot demonstrate basic skills in math and English on state standardized tests.
The chamber is publishing the reports as part of a large campaign to inform voters in this fall’s school board elections throughout the area.
Fifty-four school board districts are holding elections in the nine-parish Baton Rouge metro area. The remaining 60 school board districts elected incumbents without opposition.
The primary is Sept. 30. Runoffs would be Nov. 7.
Stephen Moret, the chamber’s president and chief executive officer, said the reports drive home how important improving the local economy is to improving student achievement.
“We’ve really got to take a holistic approach,” he said.
The latest chamber report details how the Baton Rouge area compares relatively well with other Southern metro areas using a number of traditional measures, including student spending, teacher quality, teacher pay, and how safe students feel in school.
One area where the Baton Rouge region falls behind its peers is in the quality of its school buildings. That is especially true in East Baton Rouge Parish schools, where facilities are more than 40 years old on average and, despite some recent renovations, still need some $600 million worth of work.
The new report also examines how little of their waking life children spend in school. It cites a 2002 Arizona State University research summary showing that until 18 years of age, only about 13 percent of a child’s time is spent in school. The remaining 87 percent is spent outside of school.
Education researchers have long considered out-of-school factors important. These include parental involvement, family mobility, summer activities, books in the home and single-parent families.
The report has less data on these factors, but includes information on the differing level of parental involvement and after-school activities within the Baton Rouge region. For instance, according to one survey, 74 percent of Zachary’s high school seniors say they have good quality after-school options, compared to 42 percent who say the same in Baker.
“We should strive to expand our conception of education in the Capital Region to include the critically important out-of-school hours, including after-school hours and ‘summer vacation,’” according to the chamber report.
Some out-of-school factors hamper the school itself.
Mobility, where students move from school to school, apartment to apartment or city to city throughout the school year, is especially disruptive to children.
Schools see that in their mobility rates. This is a rough measure that takes all the times students enter or leave a school during a school year and rolls them all into one number. It’s a way for educators to gauge how much coming and going a school is experiencing.
By this gauge, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system had a 42 percent mobility rate during the 2004-2005 school year compared with a 25 percent mobility rate in Ascension Parish.
“High turnover rates cause a ‘chaos’ factor, according to educators, negatively impacting the school climate, classroom environment, teacher morale and even the achievement of non-mobile students, while creating an administrative and financial burden for the school in general,” according to the report.
Between now and Sept. 12, the chamber plans to release two more reports:
- Results from a nine-parish telephone poll, conducted by pollster Verne Kennedy with the help of political consultant Roy Fletcher. The poll gauges perceptions of student performance and school quality throughout the region.
- A “menu” of proposed education reforms, complete with pros and cons, for residents to consider as they assess school board candidates.
ON THE INTERNET:
http://www.brac.org/education/research.html.
http://cabl.org/
Story originally published in The Advocate
