Studer Community Institute

We set standards for third-graders. What about us?

August 24, 2014
/ Randy Hammer
/ studer-community-institute,report-pensacola-metro-2014

We are tough on children. Sometimes I think we’re tougher on children than we are on ourselves. We throw down the gauntlet before them in the third grade, making sure they know we’re going to test them and rank them to see how good they are at reading and math. Later, we will start assessing their writing and science skills. We pretty much let them know it’s going to be this way until they graduate from high school. And, indeed, every spring the Florida Department of Education announces to the world how well the third-graders did … how many were “proficient” at reading, how they ranked in math, and how their scores and their school’s scores compared to other third-graders in the district and state. We don’t cut the third-graders any slack either. If their school earns an F because of their test scores, it gets printed in the newspaper, broadcast on TV, posted on Facebook and aired on the radio. What happened to everybody gets a trophy? A few months ago the state released last year’s results of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Here’s some of what we learned:

In Santa Rosa, 73 percent of third graders were proficient in reading; 71 percent in math.
In Escambia, 55 percent were proficient in reading; 49 percent in math.
By the time fourth-grade writing and eighth-grade science scores were added in, the state announced Santa Rosa earned an A last year; Escambia a C.

Now here’s my question: What kind of year did the Pensacola City Council have? What about the mayor? How about the Santa Rosa Commission? Escambia County Commission? Our state legislative delegation? What kind of year did we as a community have in terms of economic development? If we believe it’s important to develop standards to measure the performance of our third-graders, shouldn’t we also have a way of measuring the performance of our commissioners and mayors, a way of telling whether we as a community are moving forward or backward, just as we do with public schools? What do I mean by forward or backward? When I moved to Pensacola in the early 1970s to attend the University of West Florida, the average worker in the Pensacola metro made 50 cents more an hour than the average state worker. In 1970, we not only had one of the best economies in the state, but one of the best in the Southeast. But 30 years later, in 2001, we made $1 less an hour than the average Florida worker. Today? We make $8,000 less than the average American worker, which hurts because back in 1970 we made about the same as the average American. That’s what I mean by backward. In 2001, the Pensacola News Journal teamed with the University of West Florida to study what had happened to our wages and living standards since the ’70s. The two staffs gathered and analyzed key economic and social indicators for Escambia and Santa Rosa counties to produce a 60-page report. The Studer Institute has now partnered with Rick Harper and his Office of Economic Development and Engagement staff at UWF to refresh that 2001 report. According to the numbers, we’re seeing signs of a rebound. It’s definitely not as much as we would like, but it is a move forward. So why is the Institute doing this? First, we want to help people understand our community. The goal is to provide fact-based, thoughtful analysis of issues we need to address to move our community forward. We plan to do this by establishing key benchmarks and indicators that we believe the community needs to follow to see if we’re making progress. We all seem to understand the importance of annually keeping an eye on the reading and math scores of our third-graders. The Institute believes it is also important to have a way to measure the performance of our community and its leaders. And just as we do with FCAT scores, we need to regularly provide a summary of how we’re doing as a community. For example, if Escambia County is truly serious about improving our wages and our economy, then as a community we need to work together to improve the high school graduation rate. Jim Clifton, the chairman of Gallup, has spent years developing ways to benchmark the socioeconomic performance of cities. The high-school graduation rate is one of the best indicators of a community’s economic prospects, he says. When companies explore moving to a community, one of the first things they look up is the graduation rate. In Escambia, just 64 percent of our high-schoolers graduate. For black students, it’s 51 percent. As Shannon Nickinson pointed out in an episode of “Progress + Promise” earlier this year, these figures are morally reprehensible and economic suicide. “Not only for these students, but the rest of us, too,” she said. Clifton writes about graduation rates in his book “The Coming Jobs War.” He says kids drop out of school when they lose hope they will graduate. And they lose hope when they aren’t excited about what comes next in their lives. It’s upsetting to think we have so many children who feel this way in our community. And this is a problem teachers and principals can’t fix alone. We as a community have to make this a priority for all of us. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a goal — a benchmark — that lets us know every year whether or not more than 64 percent of our students are graduating, or less than 64 percent. Are we moving forward or backward? We all have heard the excuses about why we can’t fix the graduation rate — poverty, single-parent homes, drugs, poor parenting, lousy schools, video games. You name it, we’ve blamed it. But there was a time in history when we didn’t make excuses. Instead, we made things happen. John Appleyard points this out in his book “1887.” Our economy was so dominant in the state that Florida’s first chamber of commerce opened its doors here on Government and Jefferson streets. Milton and Bagdad were the timber capitals of the world. Pensacola was the red snapper capital of the world. A decade later, the tallest building in the state would be built on Palafox Street, which today is called Seville Tower. The Pensacola Metro was not only the economic center of the Panhandle in 1887, but also the economic center of Florida. We had an economy and community everybody else wanted, but slowly over the decades beginning in 1970, we lost our momentum and our standing. Appleyard, who founded the Appleyard Agency in 1959, has written dozens of books and pamphlets about Pensacola and West Florida’s history over the years. He has a line in “1887” that I think is relevant for us today: “In the life of every community, there are certain periods during which fate, major decisions and unusual people generate great change.” Look around our community. Look at how much we have changed since the devastation of Hurricane Ivan 10 years ago. Look at what has risen on our waterfront. Look at Palafox, named one of the top downtown streets in America. And look at AppRiver in Gulf Breeze, which started with two employees in 2002 and now has 208. In the stories and pages that follow, you will read a lot about that progress. But you also will read about the challenges. And there are many. You will see in this report that a lot of good people are making a difference today, pushing us to have better schools, better health, better jobs, a better community, and, yes, a better graduation rate. And it is this army of people who have pointed us toward the metrics and indicators that we are putting together so that all of us can understand year-in and year-out if we’re moving forward or backward as a community. Yes, we have problems. But I sense we’re moving in the right direction. And my hope is that John Appleyard is right, and today could be another one of those periods of great change in the life of our community.

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We set standards for third-graders. What about us?

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