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School board member Walter Masterson came to Tuesday’s budget session armed with facts and figures to haul down the recommended school budget to the minimum required for operations.
According to Masterson, Rappahannock school costs are steadily increasing at the rate of approximately $100,000 a year. At the same time, Masterson maintained, mastery of basic skills has been at a stand still.
Fact?
State Department of Education releases of SR A test results show that the performance of Rappahannock’s fourth graders on standardized exams has improved steadily over the past three years.
In 1975-76, fourth graders ranked in the 44th percentile on educational ability. In 1978-79, they’re still in the 44th percentile in ability. However, between 1976 and 1979, the fourth grade class had climbed from the 46th percentile to the 53rd percentile in reading, from 52 to 54 in language arts, from 46 to 52 in mathematics concepts, from 38 to 43 in mathematics computations, from 38 to 45 in mathematics total and from 49 to 56 in social studies. Similar increases show up at both eighth grade and eleventh grade levels for the same time period.
Masterson pointed to SAT test scores below both the state and national norm, to the 60 percent of elementary school students reading below grade level last year, to the high drop out rate at Rappahannock County High School and to the low percentage of RCHS graduates going on to college. He announced that median educational attainment was 12.2 years for the country as a whole, 11.7 in Virginia and only 8.6 years in Rappahannock. Are all these statistics justification for drastically slashing the school budget recommended by the superintendent? Do these statistics prove that county school personnel aren’t doing their jobs? Examine each of Masterson’s points separately. If he expects reading performances on standardized tests to improve, then we suggest he begin by persuading parents to unplug television sets and give kids books to read instead.
Reading is becoming a lost art—not just in Rappahannock but throughout the United States. Educational journals, newspapers, magazines and even television have been shouting the news for years. Kids don’t read anymore.
Practice makes perfect, as the saying goes. Practice means more than a couple of hours in school each day. It means reading during summer vacation, reading over the weekends and reading at home at night after school.
And if Masterson is willing to tackle the reading problem, maybe he’d also be willing to instruct Rappahannock parents in the use of the English language. When kids grow up with “ain’t”, “he don’t know nothing” and other equally atrocious grammatical errors, how can they be expected to tally above average scores on language arts portions of standardized tests? The high drop-out rate is a problem faced by . all rural school systems, not just Rappahannock. According to the latest issue of the Virginia School Board Association newsletter, rural schools have the highest drop-out rate in the nation, as well as the highest rate of illiteracy. The drop-out rate also ties into the low number of RCHS graduates going
89.6%