Last month, as the Harrison County Board of Education held its first meeting under partial intervention from the West Virginia Department of Education, one official noted a statistic.
Thirteen children had left the HOPE Scholarship program and rejoined public school education.
With education so politicized, one camp might feel inclined to crow and the other to ignore it sullenly.
One must remember, however, that one of the stated goals of alternative education advocates of all stripes lay in using competition to push public schools to perform better.
And that has happened.
Five years ago, the West Virginia State Legislature passed the HOPE Scholarship to help support reforms that made the Mountain State the most libertarian state in terms of education options.
Five years later, as the West Virginia Board of Education reported last May, a “commitment to getting back to basics in reading and math continues to produce results in students’ academic recovery.” Nationally, the Harvard and Stanford University Education Scorecards ranked the state sixth in math recovery and eighth in reading recovery since the pandemic.
West Virginia’s embrace of Science of Reading and the “Ready, Read, Write West Virginia” initiative, as well as benchmark testing and support by organizations such as Communities in Schools, has helped push the state to the top. Successful school system central offices have adapted to the new expectations and worked to encourage and support teachers.
Building on that success, the West Virginia Association of School Administrators rightfully launched a program to capitalize on those successes. The “I Love West Virginia Public Schools” campaign seeks to bring back pride in community schools and focus on hard work performed in the classrooms.
And it has much to celebrate in the past few years.
Classroom success has not made as many headlines recently as misadministration in some county school systems, a small percentage of teachers accused of abusing students, and reports of pervasive discipline issues in some parts of the state. Students doing better in reading and writing don’t work quite as well as “clickbait” outrage articles to some in journalism.
West Virginia’s public schools felt pressure from the executive and legislative branches to improve performance, but they also felt competition from alternative education. Whichever impetus provided the most motivation, clearly the state’s schools as a whole are on an upward track.
Although with a lot more work to do, many school systems in West Virginia can rightly feel pride in progress made.
That said, the alternative opportunities offered under the HOPE Scholarship give parents and other caregivers more options. Many children who have been, for example, traumatized by abuse or other tragic circumstances cannot function in a typical school environment. For them, home or microschool environments with fewer people and less chance of overstimulation provide the least restrictive learning environments because of less stress and anxiety.
Other children must work to overcome certain disabilities or learning challenges and non-traditional models of education may benefit them more than a traditional classroom. Most kids can thrive in public schools, but a small percentage cannot. It just makes sense to support as many options as are both possible and reasonable.
All that said, the West Virginia public school system faces challenges that it has never seen previously. The requirement to provide each child that walks through the doors the best education possible has strained many systems’ resources to the limit. Hardy County, for example, has a significantly higher rate of special education and also foreign language challenges than any other county, due to the presence of relatively large numbers of foreign-born workers.
Yet they must face these challenges with the same ratio of resources as everyone else.
Sparsely populated counties had to consolidate schools, often with the strong encouragement of the State. Now they have ballooning transportation and other costs related to population and geography that more urban counties do not face, necessitating the “1,400 floor” that mitigates some of those issues.
Politics and fear have taken hold of the conversation of West Virginia’s newly richly diverse system of education. Frustration and anger on both sides have colored the discussion and made it too difficult to explore how these systems should work together. Funding problems for public schools have made HOPE a scapegoat for advocates of traditional education.
Public schools are the best way to educate the mass of students, but large scale institutions in general struggle to adapt to outlier situations. Non traditional homeschooling, microschools, and co-op arrangements can pick up where it is most difficult and costly for the public schools to educate, whether the students live in remote areas or have special needs.
It’s been proposed in this space before, but the best way to break the ice wall between public and alternative education is to enable and encourage public school support of the newer models and compensate the traditional system for that work. Siloing helps neither side when both traditional and non traditional education can work with and also learn from each other.
After all, the vast majority of those involved in the education of children do so to make a difference in kids’ lives. They also want to build a better future with people more prepared for the workforce and life in general. That shared passion should result in working together when appropriate and possible to create those better outcomes.
Someone has to lead the effort. Someone has to say how can the State come up with a comprehensive plan that helps to preserve the independence of alternative education, but also allow it to integrate with traditional schools when beneficial. And officials working on school funding must find a way to not allow HOPE to become, or appear to be, a zero sum game with traditional education in terms of how schooling is paid for.
Both the HOPE supported models and also the public schools are performing and improving outcomes, so let’s stop pitting them against each other.
That means that enrollment can no longer be the overwhelming determining factor in how schools are funded because so many other cost factors come into play, especially with challenging populations of students.
That means that creativity should be exercised in helping to not only preserve schools currently serving remote areas, but expand their number through partnerships with non traditional education models. This would seem to be an area of “low hanging fruit” in terms of creating cooperation between traditional and non traditional education in West Virginia.
That means that the traditional school system in West Virginia needs to be recognized for responding successfully so far to the challenges posed to it, including competition from non traditional schools. Public schools must be reassured to not see HOPE education as a threat to their own resources.
Though few may know it, or want to admit it on either side, the West Virginia Republican Party is the creator of public education in the Mountain State. Coming out of the Civil War, “free public schools” were seen as the perfect catalyst to educate children with focus on workforce skills, patriotic citizenship, and even military arts.
Establishing them served as one of the biggest priorities of the GOP before it was nicknamed the GOP.
West Virginia Republicans have an opportunity to build on both traditional schools’ success and also the creativity of HOPE supported programs to create a system both resilient enough to withstand the test of time and flexible enough to educate all students in all places.
Stop fussing, stop fighting, get your heads together, and use all of these diverse educational resources to make the system as a whole continue to work better.
