Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ On February the 5th the State Board of Education will release the latest State Education READY Report where every public school in North Carolina will be graded for their test performance based. These performance grades provide A through F letter grades to each school in every district. It’s highly likely the Rowan-Salisbury Schools will grade poorly on the READY Report. It should not be a surprise if we paid attention to the various performance reports the Rowan-Salisbury Schools received over the past six years such as the ABC Report Cards and last year’s State READY Report which graded the public school performance inside of Salisbury as pretty abysmal. The county schools performed better.
Our Salisbury Schools may posses capable teachers and administrators doing their utmost. Yet if your student body is largely made up of youngsters coming from impoverished backgrounds, where reading and academic achievement take a distant backseat, the probability is extremely high that your school’s performance grades are going to reflect this. The quality of students DOES make a difference. Schools, with students coming from impoverished backgrounds, are generally not very good. Anywhere. Not just on end of year test score performance, but the quality of education suffers from excessive absences, classroom disruption, gang activity, kids stymied by their inability to read and write, bullying, or being drug impaired during class. It’s also hard to pay attention in class when you go to school hungry, you’re down to one parent or none), the people raising you are sky high, and your extracurricular activity is meeting up with fellow gang members.
In considering all the variables that go into school grades and the performance testing I’d say are as accurate as they can be.
It would be a miracle if this year’s testing proved even minimally better than last year’s READY Report Stomping. None of the Rowan-Salisbury School’s new initiatives were fully implemented such as the 1 to 1 digital initiative or the literacy programs. It’s likely going to take several years for school system’s programs to start providing worthwhile results if at all. I say “if at all” because more families will move out of the area due to Salisbury’s crime, poverty, and problematic school environments, making it difficult to raise school performance.
