Fixing the state’s underperforming school districts is not unlike pushing a boulder up a hill.
Delaware’s four most northern schools – which make up four of the six largest districts in the state – have data metrics that can tell a number of stories, all of which keep parents, teachers, administrators, and even students awake at night.
One story is about absenteeism. Another is about resources, another about the challenges of special student populations, and yet another is about expectations and family engagement.
“It’s clear that we have been facing a crisis in Delaware public schools for some time now, and even the better performance metrics are not good enough to give our children the best chance to be successful in their futures,” said P.J. O’Dwyer, chair of the Northern New Castle County Region Republican Committee.
Other educators and legislators did not respond to requests for comment this week.
Delaware Live compared performance and demographic data from four northern New Castle County school districts – Red Clay Consolidated (the state’s largest district), Brandywine (fifth largest), Christina (third largest), and Colonial (sixth largest) – in an effort to see the challenges facing the districts.
Red Clay/Brandywine vs Christina/Colonial
Green indicates best performance and red indicates worst performance. Data from the Delaware State Report Cards.
The two northern districts of Red Clay and Brandywine have performed better than their more southern counterparts in Colonial and Christina.
Brandywine seemingly has the most consistent performance, with the highest English Language Arts (ELA) and math scores, the highest attendance rate, and a close-second graduation rate. Colonial appears to consistently struggle the most of the four districts based on academic performance metrics.
ELA outperforms math by eight-to-10 points across all four districts.
Absenteeism
Attendance is also an issue for all districts. Chronic absenteeism is a metric that measures the percent of students who miss 10% or more of the school days in a given year, and Colonial (28%), Red Clay (21.1%) and Christina (20.5%) are higher than the state average of 19.5%.
Brandywine far exceeds the other three districts with attendance, as just 12.8% of students are chronically absent.
But, the two southern districts have more vulnerable populations that require additional resources.
“Our educators can’t provide instruction and other needed supports to an empty seat,” said Mark Holodick, Delaware’s secretary of education. “This isn’t new knowledge. For decades, research has shown that absenteeism is associated with lower achievement in reading, math, and general knowledge.”
Homelessness and frequent changing of residences certainly impacts student achievement, and leads to increased student stress and distraction as well as more frequent absenteeism, points out Tanya Hettler, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI).
Higher absenteeism as early as first grade can suggest a student is more likely to drop out of high school, Holodick said.
“Since the pandemic, we have seen higher absenteeism for various reasons,” he said, “but the end result is the same: Students are missing more instructional time, and that’s affecting their academic success.”
Coming out of a pandemic where people are afraid to get sick, no one is sending their student to school who has even just the sniffles anymore, which prior to COVID was happening quite often, said Brandywine Superintendent Lisa Lawson.
Her district has the best attendance of the four, and it isn’t by accident.
“We dug into the research and used Attendance Works, an excellent resource that we’ve used that has a lot of research-based information, but we started making visual charts that said if your child misses this many days per month of the school year, they won’t learn to read on time,” she said.
Putting that data in front of the community to let them know how important it is that their children come to school every day has been a proactive and preventive measure that has worked, Lawson said.
She said the district has also used resources from the state, like legislated mental health professionals, to work closely with chronically absent students and determine what they need to make it to the classroom.
Unique student populations
Christina faces the most complex educational challenges, with the highest rate of students with disabilities and are low-income, the second highest rate of English learners (14.28%), and the second largest population.
Students of these unique demographics consistently perform at a lower level due to a variety of challenges, including homelessness, foster care, troubled home life, and lack of proper nutrition.
Lawson pointed out that in Brandywine, English learners have the fastest rate of academic growth.
“Christina, which has the poorest performance, also has the greatest number of students living in poverty, students with disabilities, and English language learners,” Hettler said.
Schools that are concerned about equity, she said, should be providing professional development in the science of reading and direct explicit instruction instead of focusing on training on equity.
Setting high expectations
The so-called science of reading is defined as cognitive brain research that shows how students learn to read and will be a required part of the curriculum by the 2027-2028 school year, thanks to Senate Bill 4, passed in 2022, that requires schools’ reading curriculum to align with the science of reading.
It has six essential components: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, text comprehension, and oral language.
“Research has found that teaching explicit systematic phonics is the most crucial for students with the least exposure to books and being read to,” Hettler said.
This legislative effort is intended to boost the state’s dismal reading proficiency and Delaware educators appear to be a big fan.
“Big challenges are often best solved when different perspectives are represented while developing solutions,” O’Dwyer said. “Unfortunately, our General Assembly currently has such a strong majority for one party, that the people with the greatest likelihood to solve this crisis overwhelmingly hold similar perspectives.”
The truest form of social justice is education, CRI’s Hettler said.
Education experts also agree that family engagement with their child’s education is paramount.
“Some families in which parents have had negative interactions with schools during their own childhoods find interacting with schools and teachers threatening,” Hettler said. “Efforts by teachers to reach out to these families in a low-stress way and provide non-threatening activities at schools are helpful.”
Some schools, she said, even send teachers or other school representatives to visit families in their homes to lessen the fear of interacting with the school and teacher.
Hettler thinks community resources like churches, libraries, and community centers are all underutilized.
“These would be less threatening locations to hold family-focused activities plus they are closer to families’ homes and in the neighborhoods where they are already comfortable,” she said.
Clear standards of discipline and safety allow for an environment in which students can learn and teachers can teach, Hettler said, and strict standards for attendance and following up on students who are absent are necessary because if students are not there, they cannot learn.
No one can argue that when children have the support at home, whatever support that looks like, if the school and the family are working together. If that village is around a child or children, they are absolutely going to do better, Lawson said.
“Having come off of a pandemic where children, young people, were home for 18 months behind a screen, we saw quite the uptick in behavioral and social-emotional needs as children flowed back into school,” she said.
If a student’s mental health and behavior is not good, Brandywine’s Lawson said they are not going to be as focused on learning to read and computing math.
“High expectations make all of the difference,” Hettler said. “Research finds that when teachers believe their students can achieve and set high standards, students’ outcomes improve. As Dr. Burgos, the Wilmington Learning Collaborative executive director, stated at their last meeting, ‘the problem is not spending, the problem is expectations’.”
Raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Jarek earned a B.A. in journalism and a B.A. in political science from Temple University in 2021. After running CNN’s Michael Smerconish’s YouTube channel, Jarek became a reporter for the Bucks County Herald before joining Delaware LIVE News.
