Efforts to improve public education haven’t achieved desired result

In the latest round of state testing, Florida students continued to lag with one of every four third graders scoring the lowest mark possible on reading assessments. Locally, for the fifth straight year Alachua County third graders performed lower than the declining state average.

In fairness, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on early learners at a critical age for reading development. Many of them started their public education just as the pandemic began to spread.

Given this backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that the performance of too many already-behind Black students worsened to 37% — an increase of 7 percentage points from 2018-19. While the latest statistics indicate only a slight widening of the achievement gap between white and Black students, don’t be misled. The ‘‘improvement’’ is a direct result of white students’ performance dropping from 71% in the 2018-2019 school year to 65%.

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Clearly there is a problem among all Florida students based on the latest test results. But there should be no dispute that the problem is especially acute among Black students whose test scores were worsening long before the pandemic.

Twenty years ago, the hope was that President George W. Bush’s overwhelmingly bipartisan No Child Left Behind federal initiative would not only help turn the tide for Black students but also help improve the quality of American education in general by employing accountability, flexibility and choice. It didn’t happen for myriad reasons ranging from inadequate funding to pure politics.

So, under President Barack Obama, a new effort was undertaken in 2015 called the Every Student Succeeds Act, which rejected the overuse of standardized testing and empowered states to develop their own strategies. The ESSA law is still on the books and states such as Florida have adopted new strategies.

Coming in the fall, from the Panhandle to down South, there will be no more high-stakes standardized testing in Florida. Instead, the new wonder drug will be periodic progress reports based on a student’s individual growth.

It’s generally accepted that No Child Left Behind, as well as preceding and subsequent efforts to improve public education, haven’t achieved the desired result. That’s even more pronounced given the lack of appreciable gains among Black students.

While there has been no shortage of new strategies, there have been few that have specifically targeted students who most need help. Such neglect is why Gainesville For All, with the help of community partners, is launching the Gainesville Empowerment Zone Family Learning Center this fall on the campus of Metcalfe Elementary School.

For too long, our public schools have been saddled with not only having to meet educational needs but hit with the additional burden of providing social and economic remedies. With the family learning center, we will utilize existing community resources to help stabilize challenged families. Using our more focused approach, we believe we can dramatically improve the classroom performance of their youngest children.

We will provide prenatal referrals to expectant moms and accept children as young as 6 weeks old through age 5. These children will be provided with a high-quality early learning curriculum that will not only prepare them for kindergarten academically but socially and emotionally as well.

That simply isn’t happening now as it should. Too many children from low-income households arrive without such basics as knowing their colors and shapes. Then there are the growing ranks of kindergartners and first graders who are being suspended for disruptive behavior.

Too many children are still being left behind.

Our approach is worthy of the widespread community support needed to be successful. To learn more, email us at gnv4all@gmail.com.

James F. Lawrence is executive director of GNV4ALL.

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This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: James Lawrence: Alachua County 3rd graders scored under state average