My objective is to highlight from a private business perspective our challenge in public education, its connection to our well-being and the immense importance it has in determining our potential for economic growth and development. My perspective is that you, the public education system, have these young people for 12 years, but then we in the private sector have them as colleagues, employees and entrepreneurs for another 35 or more years in the labor force, defining our economy’s potential growth. Hence, the better the job you do in education, the greater the potential growth in our economy.
First, I want to remark that my comments are not directed as a critical evaluation of anyone. The complete and utter failure of our public school system to sustain accreditation and generate academic performance at a level no greater than at the bottom of all U.S. jurisdictions is no one's fault — because it's everyone's fault.
Second, I know, as we all do, individual students in our public education system who are achievers, who are going to top universities and as alumni are world-class players. In these cases, they succeeded in life in spite of the weaknesses in the educational system. My story is about the fact that, were the system functioning even in an average fashion, these standouts would be multiplied many hundredfold.
With the loss of accreditation, these children are and will be suffering quantifiable lost future opportunity because of this system failure. Many of these children will suffer real financial loss due to their more severely restricted post-high school opportunities. These, our children, will be graduating from unaccredited high schools for an officially predicted next several years. This will involve nearly 4,000 current and soon to-be-high school graduates. I submit that these families and children sadly deserve, although of little mitigating service, an apology from us all.
No matter how you slice it, our lost accreditation is not an "opportunity." It is a very public, embarrassing branding of a community that must rebuild itself from scratch to remain viable. Our reaction to this disaster is the opportunity. Will we succeed or fail? Our track record is not good.
The challenge goes beyond accreditation
Just what is our challenge? Accreditation, right? That answer is woefully incomplete. Attaining new accreditation three years from now will do little to address the bottom 90 percent of the iceberg called education failure. In point of fact, all we had to do to avoid losing accreditation in the first place was simply to do a better job with teacher and student attendance, substitute teacher rosters, library management and site management.
My point is that, given our current direction, we'll re-achieve accreditation maybe three years from now, yet our system would still be in a flat-line state, dead-on-arrival, because accreditation is not our adaptive challenge; it's all about education performance.
It is here that the other shoe has yet to drop, truthfully. Even before we lost accreditation: evidence that we're giving our children nothing to lose is shown by the following:
– Even before we lost accreditation, 80 percent of all Virgin Islanders taking military service entrance exams failed them at least the first time — the singular highest rate of failure under the U.S. flag.
– Even before we lost accreditation, a recent Virgin Islands public schools 4th grade science assessment by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed "below basic" skills for 74 percent of our students, a proportion at the very bottom, although mercifully not alone, with Guam and American Samoa being no different. The "below basic" average for all other jurisdictions was under 30 percent.
– Even before we lost accreditation, a recent Virgin Islands public schools 8th grade writing assessment by the NAEP revealed "below basic" writing skills for 39 percent of our students, the highest proportion for any location under the U.S. flag and at the bottom. As above, mercifully, combined with other facts of this assessment, Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Louisiana and Mississippi were at the bottom with us.
– Even before we lost accreditation, a recent Virgin Islands public schools 8th grade mathematics assessment by the NAEP revealed an average proficiency index in content alone without company at the very bottom of any jurisdiction under the U.S. flag. Our value for all tested areas was 222, compared with 266 for the U.S. as a whole.
– Even before we lost accreditation, average SAT scores for both Verbal and Math as achieved by Virgin Islands public high school students has been at the very bottom of all U.S. jurisdictions and combined groups of race and ethnicity in all years for which data are available, going back more than 15 years. The defined average for the U.S. as a whole is approximately 1000. In the V.I., the average has never exceeded 773, and that was in 1999. It was lower in the latest reported year. No other jurisdiction has sustained such a low average.
– Even before we lost accreditation, in recent years, a growing number of middle- and upper-class parents were (as they still are) sending their children to local private schools, even those who held positions as important decision-makers in public education.
Enrollment has been steadily declining
In the end, we vote with our feet. For that and other reasons, public school enrollment is at a three-decade low — about 25,000, lower than at any time since the federal court ruling that The V.I. community must educate all children who live here, no matter where they were born.
So you see, it's not that the system is too big. Enrollment has been declining for 17 years. We don’t need more bigger schools; we need fewer, smaller schools.
What is the connection between education performance and our well-being — that is, economic growth, economic development and public safety?
First, we live in a community with the highest proportion of permanent underclass residents anywhere in the country. As an aside, it is a fact that you’ve never heard the word poverty and a call for its eradication in any State of the Territory address in at least the last 21 years. Believe me, I know: I was asked to submit comments on the majority of them in my job. My thanks go out to the folks at the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands for their bringing this issue to a new level of community recognition. Yet, those living in poverty in our community are apparently not to be seen and not to be heard.
Second, we all know in absolute terms that the knife to cut the vicious cycle of poverty in any and every family and community anytime and anywhere is education.
Third, it is, without debate, the lack of a qualified labor force that holds back the rate of economic growth in our community. Due to the limited supply of skilled labor, our sustainable economic growth is one-third below what it potentially could be. We know from the 2000 census that nearly 40 percent of the territory's population over 25 years of age does not have a high school diploma. Yet we also know that the path to achieve even a middle-class standard of living in our post-sugarcane, post-manufacturing economy requires at least a four-year college diploma or specialized technical training. The jobs coming to these islands in financial services, in technology parks of all stripes, are jobs in technical services that no high school graduates, no matter what their rank, can qualify for.
Fourth, we graduate about 1,300 high schoolers each year, yet our economy generates only a few hundred jobs a year. During the 1990s, we've actually had negative job growth. We have fewer jobs now than 10 years ago. During the same period, we've graduated more than 12,000 of our children from Virgin Islands high schools.
V.I. market can't absorb all high school graduates
Our most valuable export has been and always will be
our children. We will never — I repeat, never — create enough jobs to keep two consecutive high school graduating classes here in the territory. If we don't prepare them to compete for good jobs in a world competitive labor market, we will accomplish only one thing: send members of our permanent underclass from the V.I. to become members of the permanent underclass wherever they migrate. This is a sad and sorrowful state of affairs.
Our adaptive challenge will require dedicated effort over the next 10 years to bring about sustained growth in education performance. Our past is littered with insignificant, inconsequential and — in the light of recent experience — failed attempts to transform the experience of a high school education from a survival test to one of enlightenment and opportunity.
There is one and only one means by which we can pay for all that must be done. And there are not enough federal grants to support this effort. We must grow the private sector. The symbiotic result will be a larger number of successful businesses, generating more tax revenue and creating jobs for what will be our sufficiently trained Virgin Islands work force.
Editor's note: The comments above were presented by Richard Moore, a former V.I. government economist now in private practice, at a forum on the territory's education crisis hosted by the Virgin Islanders for Democratic Action Club on St. Thomas on May 11, 2002.
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