Dave Heineman: Change needed to plug achievement gap

Here are excerpts from a speech that Gov. Dave Heineman delivered in Kearney on July 30 to the Nebraska Council of School Administrators.

For our students to be successful in this global, free-market environment, they should be challenged to achieve the highest standards of academic excellence. We must provide our students a world-class education, and I believe we can do it.

Nebraska’s public schools are already among the very best in America — thanks to you.

I want to highlight several experiences that are very meaningful regarding the educational opportunities that you provide to our children. In the past two years, we have honored more students for achieving a perfect score on the ACT or the SAT than ever before.

Arthur County Schools had eight high school juniors who were the team that won the stock market competition this past year. The “Arthur Eight” are a very impressive group of young students, and I was pleased to recognize them for their accomplishment.

Working with the Nebraska Association of School Boards, we started the Governor’s Award for Parental Involvement to recognize school districts for their innovative approaches to increasing parental involvement. During the past two years, we have recognized six school districts — Loup City, Garden County, Madison, St. Paul, Papillion-La Vista and Grand Island — for their parental involvement programs.

I want to note that Garden County Public Schools, one of the smallest school districts in the state, has allocated its financial resources in a manner so that every junior and senior in high school has a laptop computer.

Now, let’s talk about the numbers.

ACT statistics confirm that Nebraska’s schools are very good. In 15 states where more than 70 percent of the students took the ACT, Nebraska students scored the highest, with an average score of 22.1. That’s the good news. However, there is an academic achievement gap that needs to be addressed.

Over the past five years, Nebraska ACT scores for Native Americans, Asian-Americans, Caucasian Americans and Hispanics have all improved. Native Americans’ scores increased from 18.7 to 19.1; Asian-Americans’, from 21.5 to 22.9; Caucasian Americans’, from 22.0 to 22.5; and Hispanics’ from 18.7 to 19.5.

Unfortunately, African-American scores went from 17.7 to 17.5.

This academic achievement gap cannot be ignored. This past week, we found out that the African-American academic achievement gap in Nebraska is even worse than we thought.

The National Center for Education Statistics reported that black student achievement in Nebraska is lower than anywhere in the Old South. In eighth-grade math, the average score among Nebraska’s African-American students was 240 on a 500-point scale.

If you are a school district in this state with a large African-American student population, the status quo is not working. Changes must be made now. We can’t afford to lose another generation of African-American students or any student population with an academic achievement gap.

I believe very strongly that we can address this academic achievement gap in a meaningful manner, but it requires change. The status quo is unacceptable.

A core curriculum is essential and necessary for the students of the 21st century. Whether you want to become a welder or an electrician, a teacher or an administrator, a doctor or a lawyer or a business or labor leader, you need a core curriculum of four years of English and three years of math, social studies and science.

A second issue is teacher quality. Last week, I met with the Greater Nebraska Superintendents, and they shared with me a white paper they wrote titled “Teacher Preparation.” I read it.

This white paper states:

“Many in education have assumed that factors in a student’s background, such as income, parent’s level of education and other family issues, are the primary forces that impact student achievement. However, a number of studies indicate that the expertise of a classroom teacher has much, if not more, of an impact than individual student demographics.

“As a result of this research, it is imperative that educators improve the quality of teachers in the classroom to help students educationally at risk or prone to fail.”

Additionally, the report confirms that “in an information-driven and technology-rich global society, schools cannot afford to turn off students through excessive dependence on lecture and a teacher-controlled learning environment.”

Finally, the Greater Nebraska Superintendents said: “It has been documented that teacher quality is the single most important factor in a student’s academic success.”

At that same meeting, leaders with the Nebraska Council of School Administrators also gave me a McRel Report titled “School District Leadership That Works.” In a nutshell, the report concludes that good leadership from principals and superintendents can positively impact student achievement.

What all of this means is that we need to hire the best teachers, the best principals and the best superintendents that we can. It means that the best teachers need to be teaching in the most challenging learning environments if we are going to improve academic achievement.

We can make progress by focusing our attention and our efforts on three items:

— We need to emphasize a core curriculum of four years of English and three years of math, social studies and science.

— We need to improve teacher quality because teacher quality is the single most important factor in a student’s academic success.

— We need to assign our best teachers to the most challenging learning environments.

There are also other issues that need to be addressed, from early childhood programs to parental involvement to the length of the school day and the school year, but I’ll save those for another day.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we can win the national championship on the football field and the volleyball court, we can win the national championship in the classroom. Effective school leadership from superintendents to principals and teachers can significantly increase student achievement.

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