There is no skill a child learns in school that is more important than being able to read competently.
If a student can’t read at grade level, almost every subject will be a struggle, including less literary subjects such as math and science.
Students have to master this skill early, or they don’t ever master it. That’s why Mississippi and a number of other states administer a reading test in third grade and expect most students to pass it before being promoted to fourth grade. If children can’t read at grade level by third grade, odds are they will be struggling readers who will turn into frustrated students at high risk of dropping out.
Thus, the poor performance of students in the Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School District on the third grade reading test administered this spring was troubling. Something is amiss when just 4 out of 10 students in the district were able to pass the test on the first try, compared to more than 7 out of 10 statewide.
It was distressing for the Greenwood Leflore district to have the fifth-lowest passing rate among the 138 districts and charter schools that were tested. An even worse distinction was for one of the district’s schools, Threadgill Elementary, to have the lowest passing rate among the more than 400 Mississippi elementary schools that were tested. Just 2 out of 10 students at Threadgill were able to pass the test on the first try, half as many as in 2019, the last time the test was given that it counted.
After the first retest, Threadgill’s showing and that of the district as a whole look much better, though not superb. Threadgill’s passing rate more than doubled to 41%, and the district’s rate was up to nearly 61%. Mississippi’s Department of Education does not release how much the state average has improved until after the second and final retest later this month, but odds are that it’s probably somewhere around 80%.
There is no doubt that poverty and family stability are major determinants on how well students do on this test or other standardized tests. Since Leflore County’s poverty rate is higher than the state average, maybe it’s to be expected that test scores would reflect that difference.
No matter how disadvantaged a background students have, though, they either become competent readers or they are likely to remain in poverty.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which initially shut down schools and later turned them into distance-learning experiments, may have played a part in why this year’s reading results could wind up lower. Many students, through no fault of their own, lost a year of learning to the virus. That’s a large deficit to make up, particularly for the younger grades.
Still, one has to wonder if the personnel drama the Greenwood Leflore district has been going through for more than a year also contributed to those lower scores.
Once the school board decided that it would not be renewing Superintendent Mary Brown’s contract after its three years were up in June, the district has been in what seems like a regular state of turmoil.
The board restructured the chain of command in the central office, taking some of Brown’s authority away, then later announced in a cost-cutting move that it would be downsizing from three assistant superintendents to one. One of Brown’s assistants filled in while Brown took a leave of absence for a couple of months last fall. There have been at least two closed-door grievance hearings involving top administrators, including one this past week that appears to be over Brown’s pending departure. Paperwork deadlines were missed, costing the district a chunk of funding. And the Mississippi Department of Education has been looking into complaints that the school board has been overstepping its bounds and taking on administrative functions that should be the province of the superintendent.
I don’t know enough about the internal workings of the school district to decide who has been at fault for the distrustful relationship between Brown and her board, but the situation has not been good.
Brown’s replacement, James Johnson-Waldington, will have a tall task ahead of him. At the same time that he will be trying to pilot the district toward a better academic performance, he will be dealing with unresolved issues from consolidation, now three years along. It’s only in recent months that the school board has begun to address staffing levels that are higher than the district’s enrollment justifies. The board still has not tackled merging schools or pushing ahead with a plan to start building some new ones to replace those that are in the worst shape.
Consolidation of the two school districts has not produced the desired results, either in operational efficiency or in academic improvement. For those goals to have a chance at being realized, the superintendent and school board are going to have to be on the same page.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
