Make Education Priority in W.Va.
West Virginia children are much better off than they were just a few years ago, according to the respected KIDS COUNT organization and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In their annual rankings of the overall well-being of children, the two ranked West Virginia 39th best in the nation this year, up from 43rd last year.
Now for the bad news. The Mountain State’s ranking for education was 46th, up just one notch from four years ago.
In economic well-being of children, we are ranked 31st. In the family and community category, we are 33rd. In health, we earned 41st place.
So why can’t we do better in education?
It is easy to dismiss reports such as that issued by KIDS COUNT. Too often, the way various state-by-state comparisons rank West Virginia seems based more on stereotypes than reality.
But there is too much evidence to back up the KIDS COUNT conclusion. On virtually every measurement of public school quality in West Virginia, we fare badly.
That has been so despite many years of promises from the education “establishment” to do better. Catch-phrase campaigns come and go and little seems to improve.
Are our children not bright enough to be educated? Are our teachers uniformly bad? Of course not, on both counts.
It’s the system, stupid.
Something is wrong with how we educate our children and how we tell educators to handle them.
What we are doing in our public schools isn’t working. Are we as adults so resistant to change — to taking our schools back — that we fall into the trap of trying the same thing over and over again, even though it never works?
Apparently so.
That needs to change — whatever it takes.
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