School board president Chris Sprowls is right to be embarrassed and appalled by Marion High School’s failure to meet the state’s relatively low average score on the ACT college entrance exam.
He’s wrong to suggest, however, that the schools aren’t doing their job. Successful education requires more than dedicated teachers, administrators, and board members. It also requires concerned and involved parents and an entire community that values education more than it does entertainment.
Marion’s scores — and Centre’s, too — are not just meaningless numbers, representing what happened on a single test on a single day of classes. Rightly or wrongly, they very much help determine what future our children will be able to achieve.
Marion’s average of 21.1 and Centre’s average of 20.6 on the ACT Composite mean students graduating from those schools will find themselves near the very bottom of the incoming freshman class at virtually every college in the state — if they are lucky enough to be able to get in.
We’re not talking just KU and K-State, which have average scores of 24.7 and 24.3, respectively. We’re talking Baker (23.5), Kansas Wesleyan (22.1), Pittsburg State (21.9), Emporia State (21.0) and even Central Christian College (21.0).
At a selective university like the one where I teach, Illinois (27.8), ACT scores like Marion’s and Centre’s would qualify a student for admission only under a special remedial program for the disadvantaged — students largely from the deepest recesses of central cities, many times only if they also are world-class (not just all-state) point guards or defensive tackles.
In today’s economy, being able to start a good-paying, secure career — the type of career that might actually generate more jobs for a community — increasingly requires a college degree. If it’s hard for graduates leaving selective universities to find those opportunities — and it is — imagine how difficult it is for students who can’t even get into those colleges.
We all take justifiable pride in students’ exploits in athletics, music, drama, art and the scores of other entertaining activities schools sponsor. But we can’t help wonder whether at least some of the hundreds of hours spent lifting weights, swimming sprints and otherwise preparing to provide entertainment for community members might better be devoted to preparing for careers that don’t end when scoreboard lights are switched off.
It’s no small coincidence that communities like Hillsboro, with healthy local economies, tend to have schools that perform better. Education is an investment in economic development that goes beyond gate receipts at athletic contests.
Next time you see a fine teacher like Grant Thieroff, ask not about how his quarterback is progressing; ask about how his current history students are doing.
This past week, if his online lesson plans are accurate, they probably were studying America in the 1950s and ’60s, including the election of John F. Kennedy. Perhaps his students would appreciate hearing from someone who recalls what it was like to learn the news of Kennedy’s assassination or who went through “duck and cover” drills in anticipation of Soviet attacks.
If nothing else, students might appreciate knowing that people in the community care as much about what they do in the classroom as they do about what they do on the gridiron.
— ERIC MEYER