Ed Pratt-Dannals, superintendent of Duval County Public Schools, was invited to speak Monday at the meeting of the Rotary Club of Jacksonville and he delivered an overall report card.
He said the grades given to individual schools garner a lot of attention, but people should realize that overall, the state gives Duval County’s public elementary and secondary schools a “B” grade.
“A lot of our schools are performing at extremely high levels,” he said, and of the seven “intervene schools,” only one received an “F” grade.
In addition, over the past four years, more students are completing college-level courses in high school, he said.
At four of the county’s public high schools, students are given the opportunity to earn an associate’s degree before graduating and “every single high school has an accelerated academic program” available, he said.
Another major improvement has been in the percentage of students who graduate from high school in Duval County.
Pratt-Dannals said that figure has increased from 56 percent four years ago to the current 66 percent, “but we still have a lot of work to do.”
He described the high school education model as being “100 years old” and designed for an era when only one student out of four was expected to continue to higher education.
The current trend is to make technical training in more fields available to graduating high school seniors, but even that segment of the education market has evolved.
“Information technology, the medical fields and logistics are the technical jobs of the future. Students need the same academic preparation for those fields as those students who are going to college,” said Pratt-Dannals.
How students learn is leading to changes in how they are taught. Pratt-Dannals said the trend for virtual classrooms and Internet-based education is growing.
“It’s a performance-based program that’s about whether a student has achieved a certain level, rather than based on how much time they’ve spent in the classroom. I think that’s where we’re going,” he said.
A skill that is particularly important for any form of post-secondary education is reading.
Pratt-Dannals said the “Read It Forward” program to provide classroom libraries for schools will be critical for achieving the third-grade reading goal.
School funding is the challenge at the core of all the school system does, said Pratt-Dannals.
As superintendent, he’s responsible for ensuring improvement in results for students, but also has to maintain the system with the funds available.
‘We’re looking at operational efficiency as well as academic performance,” he said.
The school board has taken several steps to do the most with what’s available, he said, including hiring private security personnel to replace sworn police officers, retaining a consultant to reduce energy consumption by 25 percent systemwide and controlling the cost of student transportation.
Pratt-Dannals said the school system is looking at non-traditional ways to raise funds for education, including placing advertising inside school buses.
“You might one day be able to name a building at a public school after your business,” he said.
The biggest challenge facing the future of public education in Duval County is finding the best faculty, he said, and a change in public attitude could help.
“The hardest part is determining how to attract and retain high-performing teachers to teach in our challenged schools. We need to start talking positively about teachers,” he said.
“It’s an issue in this community and in the nation – teachers don’t have the resources they need, but more is expected of them each year,” said Pratt-Dannals.
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