Closing the Gap: Louisiana's school work unfinished
Print
Email
Save
Share
Del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Reddit
- Page 1 of 7
- SINGLE PAGE VIEW
In the late 1990s, Gov. Mike Foster launched an ambitious system of accountability for public elementary and high schools.
Annual testing, along with penalties and rewards, was supposed to spur higher student achievement.
Despite notable improvement over the past nine years, Louisiana still has among the lowest high school graduation rate and student achievement in the country.
Louisiana fourth- and eighth-graders have improved significantly over the past decade on the National Assessment of Education Progress, often referred to as the “nation’s report card.” The biggest gains are in math.
The state, however, still lags 43 states in the subject in both grades.
The high school picture is bleaker.
ACT scores have improved, but the state still trails the rest of the country on the college placement test. Only Mississippi and South Carolina fare worse.
Meanwhile, an estimated 40 percent of Louisiana public school ninth-graders don’t complete high school in four years. Only 2.2 percent of public high school students passed Advanced Placement exams for college credit last year, the lowest rate in the nation.
And despite some improvements, more Louisiana families are opting to send their children to private schools, eroding support for public school systems.
Between 1990 and 2000, the private school attendance rate grew 2 percentage points, to almost 17 percent of all school-age children. That gives Louisiana the highest rate in the nation.
State Education Superintendent Paul Pastorek credits accountability with the progress Louisiana has seen in its public schools, but said it’s just a first step.
“Accountability is a tool that has gotten us a lot farther in academic achievement than we were before, but it will probably not be able to address the chronic problems that we have,” he said. “We need some other big tools.”
The announced candidates in this fall’s governor’s race have yet to say much about what those next “big tools” might be.
