Report: Educational achievement still lagging for county minorities
The Summit Education Initiative released its annual report on educational attainment in September, and while slight gains have been made, the disparity between white students and racial minorities in the county is still significant with no signs of letting up.
And, despite the organization’s targeted efforts to increase kindergarten readiness, that number has been on the decline the past two years — a trend they attribute to the opioid epidemic.
These revelations, and the initiatives in place to target both, were revealed at the organization’s seventh annual event recently at Greystone Hall in Akron to flesh out the data to educators.
“Our families across the county have been struggling with drug-related crises at unprecedented rates, and therefore, we face even greater systemic challenges to increasing kindergarten readiness now and in our coming years,” said Laura DiCola, the early childhood strategy leader for the Summit Education Initiative (SEI), during the event. “We will need every intervention, resource and partnership in order to combat the downstream challenges created by the opioid epidemic.”
Each year, the Summit Education Initiative releases data on county attainment in six key milestones of a child’s education called “leading indicators of success” that are proven to predict success later in life. Those indicators are kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading proficiency, eighth-grade math proficiency, ninth-grade academic success, college readiness rates and college enrollment/persistence.
SEI began breaking data out by race to the public for the 2015-16 school year to highlight the disparities between minority students and their white counterparts, many of which are as high as 40 percentage points.
Since then, minor gains have been made in some areas to close those gaps. Since last year, for example, black students improved 8 percent, Hispanic students improved 19 percent and Asian students skyrocketed 24 percent, all in eighthgrade math. Ninth-grade success also saw modest gains for minorities since last year, with black and multiracial students each improving 3 percent and Asian students improving 8 percent.
College enrollment and persistence has the smallest gaps among minorities. But as a whole, large gaps remain — especially between black and white students — across the board.
“It’s alarming,” said Derran Wimer, the executive director of SEI. “It’s absolutely something we have to pay attention to and we have to act on.”
While the achievement gap is an ongoing battle, SEI’s data this year revealed the beginnings of a newer battle entering the education sphere: the opioid epidemic.
Despite increased, concerted efforts on kindergarten readiness in the county, the rate of children entering their first year of formal school ready to learn plummeted 5 percent in just one year.
Now at 60 percent countywide, kindergarten readiness is measured using the language and literacy portion of Ohio’s Kindergarten Readiness Assessment. The indicator is highly correlated with future reading achievement in third grade and academic success in later years.
Children across racial groups felt the fall, especially white and Hispanic students. SEI correlates the decline to the opioid epidemic. DiCola said children entering kindergarten in 2017-18 were born around 2012 — the same year heroin overdoses rose 58 percent.
SEI leaders emphasized that solutions to both major issues need to be addressed by the entire community and the systems within it, including health care services, social services, job and family services and more.