Reinventing Our Community: Three urgent challenges for education
Published: Sunday, September 18, 2011, 5:32 AM
By Jeff Hansen — The Birmingham News
Emergency medicine has three priorities — keep the airway open, make the patient breathe, check the heartbeat.
Education also has three urgent issues:
• Provide quality pre-kindergarten education for 4-year-old children.
• Make sure reading is successful by third grade, the year when students transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn.’
• Decrease the number of high school dropouts.
Each is crucial to decreasing educational disparities in metro Birmingham, reformers say, and all offer large potential gains for their investment.
Pre-kindergarten
“The best way to improve schools is to improve the students you send to schools,” said Karen Rolen, senior vice president for grants and initiatives at the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham. In 2006, the foundation helped an effort by children’s advocates to form the Alabama School Readiness Alliance.
The goal is to offer quality, universal pre-K education for all families that want it for their children.
Alabama already has one of the highest-quality voluntary pre-K programs in the nation, but it is limited in size, serving only 215 classrooms last year, according to ASRA. It is the third smallest pre-K out of the 38 states that offer it.
Benefits from quality pre-K education are profound and needed, advocates say. Over one-half of the gap in school achievement is present at the usual school entry grade of kindergarten, according to ASRA, and if children are not reading at grade level in first grade, there is a 90 percent chance they will not read at grade level by fourth grade.
“There is no question that research shows the benefits of quality pre-K,” Rolen said. But without it, “when students get to kindergarten, the teacher has no idea of what the children know.”
Michael Luce is a Birmingham businessman who wants to boost Alabama’s pre-K effort. Luce, who moved to Birmingham in 1995 to become president of Harbert Management Corp., started volunteer work tutoring students at Cornerstone Schools and Restoration Academy.
But as Luce learned about pre-K, he said it made “so much sense we needed to invest in this if we were going to have any success in improving outcomes like the dropout rate, crime or producing educated, employable people.”
Luce now heads an advisory board for ASRA that begins to meet this fall.
Leaders from business and industry, education, the community, law enforcement, the military, and the judicial system will all learn about the benefits of quality pre-K education. By next year those leaders hope to start influencing legislators.
“The fact is there’s not enough money to go around, and we have to deal with that by prioritizing,” Luce said of the state education budget. “But I think pre-K is a leverage point.”
Early reading
Bill Smith was thunderstruck in 1990 when Leadership Alabama spent three days examining the public school systems in Alabama.
Smith learned Alabama was dead last in the amount of local financial support for K-12 schools, that the state had the most trailer classrooms in the Southeast, and there was only one computer, on average, for every 26 students.
Some high schools offered no foreign language, he learned, and at some schools, general math was the most advanced math students could take — which meant college was out of the question. Many high schools had no labs for biology, chemistry or physics.
“We learned how the education system had forfeited its responsibilities,” he said. “If you didn’t live in Mountain Brook, if by some act of God you didn’t live in the right place, you didn’t get a good education.”
So Smith, the head of Birmingham’s Royal Cup Coffee, helped found the grassroots organization A-Plus Education Partnership in 1991, to help people demand that reforms be made.
A-Plus has two main areas of focus:
• A-Plus College Ready, a statewide initiative to boost the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses in reading and math.
• Alabama Best Practices Center, for teacher and administrator professional development.
Smith said he is proudest of the role A-Plus played to launch the Alabama Reading Initiative.
The initiative is now in every K-3 school in the state, with the goal of having every child reading at grade level by the end of third grade.
Linda Tilly, executive director of the children’s advocacy group Voices for Alabama’s Children, calls it perhaps the best reading program in the country.
Dropouts
Pre-K education and third-grade reading may also influence the third crisis in metro Birmingham education — high school dropouts.
In the past, Alabama has used a formula that said 87 percent of high school students in the state graduated in 2008-09. But a new formula approved by the National Governors Association in 2005 looks at how many ninth graders will graduate on time four years later. This formula drops the state graduation rate to 65 percent.
Exact numbers for dropout rates in Alabama are slippery, but the Southern Education Foundation says multiple studies show that Alabama has one of the worst dropout rates in the nation, and that dropout rate is a major economic blow to the state.
The Birmingham city school district is launching a new effort to keep teens in school and get them ready for good jobs — the creation of career academies at six of the system’s seven public high schools.
Superintendent Craig Witherspoon turned to the Birmingham Business Alliance to help choose career areas with the best job prospects — engineering, health sciences, business/finance, hospitality/tourism, urban education, and architecture/construction design.
The idea is to have high schools that students want to attend, but also train them for life outside of the classroom. The grassroots Birmingham Education Foundation, started through support of the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, is helping this career academy push.
Michael Froning, executive director of the Birmingham Education Foundation, said that the dropout rate is a an urgent problem, both statewide and in metro Birmingham.
“Even if our graduation rate (in Birmingham schools) was 90 percent,” he said, “10 percent of (Birmingham’s) 26,000 students over a generation is a lot of people.”
In the end, all of these reform goals — quality pre-K education, reading at grade level by the third grade, and finding ways to keep teenagers in schools — are seeds of possible change.
To decrease education disparities in the Birmingham area, metro leaders need to sow those seeds and help them grow.
News staff writer Marie Leech contributed to this report.
Join the conversation, add a comment or email: jhansen@bhamnews.com
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