La. school district struggles to close student achievement gap

By LARRY BIVINS
Gannett News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. — When a local education advocacy group looked at why test scores were consistently low among students in East Baton Rouge Parish, it discovered the students were part of a disturbing national trend.

Poor and minority students in this college town were far more likely than their more affluent, white peers to be taught by inexperienced and unqualified teachers, the two-year study by the Academic Distinction Fund found.

About 25 percent of the teachers at high-poverty schools had no more than three years' experience, compared with 13 percent of teachers at more affluent schools, the nonprofit group reported in October. And 23 percent of the teachers at high-poverty schools lacked state certification, compared with 12 percent of the teachers at low-poverty schools.

''The report is not a pretty picture,'' said fund director Jan Melton.

But this troubled school district is striving to make the grade in a new era of education reform in Louisiana. Principals at two inner-city schools achieved dramatic improvements in student performance by bringing in new teachers and specialists to work with staff and students.

Similar efforts are under way at other schools throughout the district. The efforts are financed largely by $600,000 that the school board gave Superintendent Clayton Wilcox three years ago to recruit teachers and buy state-of-the-art teaching software.

''Nobody's happy with where we are,'' Wilcox said.
Melton and Wilcox viewed the two-year study, released in an October report titled ''Teaching Matters," as a wake-up call to policy-makers and civic leaders.

The story of the East Baton Rouge Parish school system is typical of most urban school districts across America. Sixty-nine percent of its 54,246 students are black, 28 percent are white. Two-thirds of the students qualify for the federally subsidized school lunch program.

''In Louisiana, there's a high likelihood that if you're poor, you're black,'' Wilcox said.

Teacher turnover is a major problem for local school officials — about 15 percent of the teachers in the parish leave each year. In 2000, officials hired 448 uncertified teachers, representing 11 percent of all district teachers, the report noted. The district ranked 48th among the state's 66 jurisdictions in the percentage of certified teachers.
In addition, the East Baton Rouge Parish school system is embroiled in the longest-running school desegregation case in the country. The suit, which goes back 45 years, has limited what Wilcox can do to redistribute the district's teaching talent.

The performance of the district's students has been among the lowest in a state that has ranked at the bottom nationally on virtually every scorecard. In 2001, four out of 10 East Baton Rouge students failed to demonstrate a basic skill level in reading and more than half were unable to perform basic math functions, the report showed.

One school's success

One bright spot is Polk Elementary School, where fourth-grade reading and math scores zoomed up after Principal Lee Dixon used $1.3 million in federal and state grants to hire three math experts and three reading specialists to work with students and teachers.

In addition, 11 Polk teachers received grants totaling $25,000 from the Academic Distinction Fund to attend teacher workshops. The fund was created in 1989 to spur private-sector involvement in public education.

Dixon also purchased new, cutting-edge teaching materials and encouraged teachers to share ideas in weekly study groups geared toward language arts.

''We've seen so much growth in the teachers it's unbelievable,'' said third-grade teacher Donna Brown, who teamed with four colleagues to form a writing-skills study group.

Dixon's focus on teacher training has produced impressive gains in student performance.

In 2001, 13 percent of the school's fourth-graders scored below satisfactory on the state's math test, compared with 63 percent in 1999. On the English language arts exam, 13 percent of students tested unsatisfactory in 2001. Two years earlier, 43 percent had tested at the unsatisfactory level.

Polk's overall school-performance score jumped to 52.6 out of 100 in the 2000-2001 cycle, up from 36.5 in 1999. The state average is 79.9.

Polk earned ''exemplary growth'' distinction from the state because the school's performance score exceeded its growth target by more than five points.

''We're not exactly where we want to be, but I can see the progress,'' Dixon said.

One of Dixon's innovations was a zero-tolerance policy for teachers who did not believe that all kids can learn. When he arrived at Polk eight years ago, he persuaded the district's then-superintendent to transfer about a quarter of the school's teachers.

``That's not to say that they were incompetent," Dixon said. "It's just that their philosophy didn't coincide with my philosophy.''

Albert Turner said he encountered a similar attitude two years ago when he took over as principal at Prescott Middle School under a state-mandated reorganization prompted by the school's poor test scores. Prescott's 2001 school performance score was 29.5.

Like Dixon, Turner said he went to school officials for help in getting rid of teachers who didn't share his faith in the innate ability of all kids to learn. He established a new administrative team, hired 25 new certified teachers and brought in a master teacher provided by the state.

The result: Prescott's score on the performance reports released in November showed a 54 percent increase to 45.4. The state average grew to 82.1.

''We got a long way ahead of us, but at least we all recognize our issues and our problems,'' said Melton of the Academic Distinction Fund, which has awarded $1.6 million to East Baton Rouge teachers since 1991 for professional training.

It's all part of a concerted effort to beef up teaching in East Baton Rouge schools, superintendent Wilcox said. There's nothing mysterious, he said, about turning around failing schools like Prescott and Polk.

''It happens because of great teaching,'' he said. ''There's no magic to it. We clearly know that black kids are just as smart as white kids."