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Education Needs To Be the Priority

In one of his first actions as West Virginia’s new governor, Patrick Morrisey ordered an economic “Backyard Brawl” with our neighboring states. That’s a great goal, as the least we can do is be competitive with our border states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kentucky and Virginia — when it comes to both retaining and attracting residents and businesses.

But perhaps the place to start if we want meaningful comparisons with our border states would be in public education. According to the latest results from the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, as administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, West Virginia continues to fall further behind in mathematics and reading not only against our neighbors but nationwide.

NAEP, every two years, releases its report card for the nation’s public schools. The results from the 2024 testing — select classrooms in each state in fourth and eighth grade take the test, giving a snapshot across demographic and socio-economic lines — show the Mountain State’s fourth and eighth graders, while making some gains, continue to struggle.

West Virginia’s fourth graders in the testing scored 232 for mathematics while the national average sat at 237. For reading, those students scored 206, also below the national average. The math scores for fourth graders improved from 2022 but the results still showed 37 other states performing “significantly higher,” according to NAEP. Only three districts scored significantly lower.

For fourth-graders in reading, 41 states scored significantly higher while only one was significantly lower. West Virginia’s reading scores were in line with 2022.

The gap remains in the eighth grade where West Virginia’s math and reading scores were essentially unchanged from 2022. In both math and reading, those students averaged about 10 points below the national average.

“The news is not good,” Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said. “We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic, and when we are seeing signs of recovery, they’re mostly in math, and largely driven by high-performing students. Low performing students are struggling, especially in reading.”

West Virginia also has much work to do when compared to our neighbors. All five of our border states, on average, scored higher in reading and mathematics in both the fourth and eighth grade than West Virginia. The fourth-grade scores in math for West Virginia are close to our neighbors but by the eighth grade the gap widens.

Being competitive with our neighboring states is about more than just a more attractive business climate, or lower taxes. We need to do the work to increase educational achievement here at home, as well. Morrisey would do well to remember that –and also to challenge lawmakers next week during his inaugural State of the State address to both properly fund public education and also continue to look for new and innovative ways to improve educational attainment. First and foremost, that means keeping lawmakers out of the classroom and allowing teachers to teach.

As it stands now, West Virginia’s system of public education is not doing its job as well as it should. That can’t continue.

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