A newspaper with a mission to seek uplift for the community is faced with a recurrent difficult decision. We expect that the negative news about our community will continue to be reported in other media, at times unfairly and in an exploitative manner. We also know our readers look to us for positive news in a community that is hurting, overall, by many measures: employment, health, safety, education. So the difficult decision becomes: how to deliver the positive news that our community expects from us without ignoring some of the dire realities.
Our chronic predicament was spotlighted this week by the release of very disappointing statistics about public schools in our region, just as we were preparing for our annual Salute to Excellence in Education awards gala. Culminating in the special tabloid section inserted in this week’s paper, we have been devoting dozens of pages of coverage to dedicated, effective educators and administrators in this area who are changing the lives of students and creating examples of progress in our community, yet the bare facts reported by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education suggest the opposite of progress. The preliminary data show the public districts that educate the majority of African-American students in this area are largely slipping in academic achievement and graduation rates.
One of our top 2010 awardees, Stellar Performer Stanton E. Lawrence, is superindendent of one of the districts (Normandy) that risks losing its provisional accreditation by the State of Missouri if it doesn’t improve in the areas measured by the Missouri Assessment Program. Yet preliminary 2010 data show that district students have improved in the areas of mathematics and communication arts over their 2009 scores. For example, in mathematics 19.2 percent of district students scored in the top two levels on the MAP in 2010, compared to 14.6 percent in 2009.
We might compare Lawrence’s position in the Normandy Public School District to that of President Barack Obama, who inherited a host of entrenched problems from the previous administration and, despite aggressively instituting needed reforms, is still being held responsible for a lackluster overall performance. Lawrence’s drastic overhaul of the district, including cutting what an objective analysis revealed to be an execessive number of staff including many poor performers, will not show results overnight. Normandy also is absorbing students from the failed Wellston School District, so Normandy is reporting grades and graduation rates of students whose education had not been its responsibility before this year.
These are plausible explanations, not unwarranted excuses. Lawrence offers no excuses. “We can make a lot of excuses for not making Adequate Yearly Progress – but we’re not,” he said. What he is doing is suggesting a formula for long-term academic improvement that is promising and sound. It also matches well with the mission of this newspaper: to engage the community at all levels to take greater responsibility for improving itself. Lawrence said, “The responsibility of educational leaders in these communities is to reach out to families, community leaders, businesses and faith-based entities to create solutions to challenges that our students face that may impede their progress in school.” That is the level of accountability we seek from all of our leaders.
