The recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores showed Alabama made slight progress in elementary level student achievement.
However, The Nation’s Report Card showed that Alabama public school students were still lacking in math and reading proficiency compared to other states.
In a recent appearance on Alabama Public Television’s “Capitol Journal,” Gov. Kay Ivey said her administration would “focus on education in a big way” during her second term in office.
“We’ve got to have our students learning at high standards. During my first term, we set strong standards and aligned our assessment system to those standards, and it paid off,” said Ivey. “It showed we were focusing on reading and math … Alabama did not lose ground. We held our own while other states dropped.”
State leadership will venture into uncharted waters in their efforts to bolster public education, according to the governor.
“We made some progress, but the NAEP results clearly show there’s a lot more work to be done here in Alabama and we’re going to get on that in a very specific way,” she said. “So, stay tuned for our package that’s going to come out. It’s going to be a package, like I say, where we’ve never gone before in education. We’re going to equip our teachers to be sure that they can guide our students to [in-demand jobs] in the future.”
When asked by host Todd Stacy if school choice could be addressed legislatively through Ivey’s education package, Alabama’s chief executive noted that “everything’s possible.”
“[W]e’re going to have a complete focus on improving education, whether that means birth to workforce,” she said. “We’ll be scrutinizing what we can do to really sincerely make a difference in what our students learn and how well we learn it, because these students are our future.
“The whole future of our state and world depend on the quality of education our students get. We’ve got to get this right. Education needs to be addressed, and we’re going to do that in my second term.”
Dylan Smith is the editor of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @DylanSmithAL
