THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 24, 1994 TAG: 9406240500
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940624 LENGTH: Long
But progress has been slow and spotty throughout the South, the study by the Southern Regional Education Board in Atlanta concludes, and there's plenty of room for improvement - from expanding preschool programs to better assessing how well colleges prepare their graduates to compete in a global economy.
{REST} For Virginia schools, the report offers both encouragement and reason for concern. For instance, while fourth-graders ranked first in the Southeast in reading, high school scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test dropped between 1988 and 1993.
The two-volume report, named Educational Benchmarks 1994, attempts to track the South's efforts to meet regional and national education goals set for the year 2000. It gauges progress by examining such indicators as student achievement, dropout rates, teacher salaries and college readiness.
By most measures, Virginia in recent years has outpaced the rest of the Southeast and has made some classroom advances that place it in the forefront nationally, officials of the regional education board said.
Neighboring North Carolina, while making gains, still remained in the middle of the pack in the region and lagged further behind on national rankings.
Some highlights:
On national assessment tests in reading, Virginia fourth-graders ranked first in the South in 1992.
More high schools in Virginia - 91 percent - offered advanced-placement courses in 1993 than those of any other state in the South. The same year, 65 percent of students taking the classes scored high enough to earn college credit, ranking third behind Maryland (70 percent) and Texas (67 percent).
Virginia's dropout rate tied with Oklahoma's as the lowest in the region. From 1980 to 1990, the number of 16- to 19-year-olds without a high school diploma or equivalency certificate dropped from 13 percent to 10 percent in Virginia.
The average $33,128 annual salary paid to Virginia's teachers in 1993-94 was second only to Maryland's average pay of $39,937 in the South. Virginia still lagged behind the national average teacher salary of $35,958.
This is no time, however, for Virginia to rest on its laurels, the report suggests. The downside:
While Virginia eighth-graders ranked second in the region on a national math assessment test, nearly four out of 10 students scored at levels that indicated a lack of basic knowledge.
Combined math and verbal scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test, a measure of college readiness, dropped 8 points in Virginia between 1988 and 1993 - from 902 to 894.
In 1993, only 31 percent of the 34,600 3- and 4-year-olds living in poverty in Virginia enrolled in Head Start, a federal program designed to prepare economically disadvantaged children for school.
The report comes at a time when Virginia Gov. George F. Allen wants to refocus the state's educational efforts on academic rigor and on teaching basic skills in the classrooms. Allen earlier this year appointed a commission to explore how to do that.
``Any lasting achievement in these areas is going to be over time,'' William C. Bosher Jr., state superintendent of public instruction, said Thursday of the report's results. Virginia's goals are going to focus on academic expectations in courses and grade levels.
``One of the insidious things is that young people come from different backgrounds, and we say we don't want to heap more on them,'' Bosher said. ``A standard everyone can pass is not a standard at all - we want to teach them to reach.''
Mark Musick, president of the Southern Regional Education Board, said the primary purpose of the report is to stimulate thinking about ways to speed progress.
``What we're really suggesting is that people take this report and ask the right questions,'' Musick said. ``We hope people in each state will dig in, set goals, measure their progress and present the results in clear terms to the public.''
{KEYWORDS} SCHOOLS VIRGINIA STANDARDIZED TESTING STUDY REPORT CARD
by CNB