Community members pressed Kentucky Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt for clear answers Monday about how the state and Jefferson County Public Schools plan to ensure equity is at the forefront of education reform efforts in the age of the new Every Student Succeeds Act.
“Our children are failing,” Louisville Urban League President Sadiqa Reynolds said. “What are you going to do different?”
Closing the achievement gap – a persistent problem in Kentucky and across the country – is going to require policymakers to look beyond test scores and address the lack of educational opportunity experienced by low-income and minority students, Pruitt said.
“I think an achievement gap is the result of an opportunity gap,” he said. “We have an absurdly, embarrassingly small number of our students of color who are taking advanced coursework … and that’s got to stop.”
Disparities also exist in regular level coursework, he said, with the watering down of courses and inadequate instruction contributing to the problem. But Kentucky – which is developing a new system for measuring the success of schools under the Every Student Succeeds Act passed last year – can do something about it.
Kentucky’s new accountability system should hold school districts accountability for the opportunities available to students, he said.
The two-hour discussion was organized by the Louisville Urban League, the Louisville and Kentucky chapters of the NAACP and the Prichard Committee, focused on how the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Last December, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind and promised to give states more control over academic standards, how to deal with failing schools and other issues previously left up to the federal government.
Since then, Kentucky education leaders have been sorting out exactly what this means for the state’s roughly 655,000 public school students. In the past year, Pruitt has sought input for a new accountability system – which includes standardized testing and the state’s measurement of school success – from communities across Kentucky. He has expressed interest in a dashboard approach to accountability that would highlight areas in which school are both excelling and struggling.
Though the system is still in development by a committee of shareholders, Pruitt said Monday he wants to see some sort of “opportunity indicator” included on the accountability dashboard – a challenge, he said, given that opportunity has never been measured before in Kentucky.
Both Reynolds and Raoul Cunningham, president of both the Louisville and Kentucky branches of the NAACP, called on community members to be more engaged in the development of the state’s new accountability system. It’s particularly important, they said, that parents participate in the ongoing conversation.
“This is such a new process for us all … it’s crucial that we and every aspect of all communities partake and participate,” Cunningham said. “It’s not just for African-Americans. It is for everyone, and we must be at the ground level for this effort.”
More information about the conversation surrounding the Every Student Succeeds Act can be found at the Kentucky Department of Education’s website.
Reporter Kirsten Clark can be reached at 502-582-4144. Follow The Courier-Journal’s Education Team on Facebook at Facebook.com/SchooledCJ.
