South Carolina public school bus (File Mary Ann Chastain/Special to the SC Daily Gazette)
South Carolina continues to make improvements in education with the predominant publicized change being the increase in the minimum starting salaries of teachers. That’s intended, in part, to encourage more people to consider education as their profession.
While this is a necessary first step, there is much more that needs to be done. So much of a person’s life revolves around their level of education.
This is not to say that one cannot have a healthy, successful life without a certain level of education, but one’s education is a big factor in determining the opportunities one will or won’t have to earn a living. Unfortunately, many either don’t understand this at a relatively early age, or the people around them aren’t encouraging them to work hard to develop the skills necessary to achieve certain educational goals.
Add to this poor-performing school districts with less-than-adequate educators, and we continue to not achieve our goals of adequately educating many of our population.
None of this is a secret.
The question is why are we not doing more to improve the situation? What is our responsibility to help?
In no order of priority, here are a few things I believe will help us in South Carolina continue to head in the right direction:
1. One issue is the condition and types of facilities available in the poorer school districts. They are not adequate. I believe the state has a responsibility to upgrade facilities to meet a minimum state standard. There needs to be much discussion on what we expect those minimum conditions to be.
2. Teachers should receive adequate pay: first-year minimums and pay raises based upon the teacher’s performance, rather than by the years of experience and level of college degree. Pay for working in the poorest of school districts should be increased to whatever it takes to incentivize teachers to work in these areas. The idea is that we must get very good teachers in those areas.
3. Grades should be eliminated. No, not scores on papers and exams but grade levels as we now have them. When a student is good in some subjects and struggles with others, in lower grades they are frequently just moved up to the next grade level with their classmates.
For example, a third grader could meet the third-grade requirements in all subjects except maybe math. At the end of the school year, that child is promoted to fourth grade in all subjects. Now they are in fourth-grade math whereas they might only be on a second-grade math level, which only gets them further and further behind. Students should pass from one subject level to the next rather than the grade.
4. More schools should have after-school programs to support students who are behind. This would entail additional expenses for snacks, teachers, and transportation. It might only be a
90-minute program. And maybe the program would still allow the student to participate in after school sports or other activities prior to the 90-minute program. In either case, the objective is to help a student struggling in one or more classes.
5. My last suggestion, and the one I feel is the most unfortunate, is that the school needs to assist parents in understanding their role in supporting their child. I know most schools have regular parent/teacher conferences, especially when a child is performing poorly. There is no way every single parent is going to accept responsibility that the child does their homework, gets proper rest, studies for exams and otherwise keeps up with their classwork. But maybe these conferences need to be held more frequently depending upon how the student is performing.
Education is so important for our children and our society. We cannot expect every child to finish K-12 school, but we have to give them the best chance possible to be successful. Education impacts how they will live out their adult lives.
Last year, South Carolina had 86.7% of students graduating on time but only 75% of them were college or career ready.
Superintendent Ellen Weaver stated, “We have to make sure that our diplomas are worth more than the piece of paper that they’re written on.”
I know we can do better than that, but it is going to require significant changes in our efforts and commitments to all children — not only from our citizens but our leaders as well.
There are so many issues out there but educating our youth is probably the best chance we have to improve their lives and our country.
Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
