Alabama State Schools Superintendent Eric Mackey listens during the Alabama State Board of Education’s regular meeting on February 9, 2023 in Montgomery, Alabama. Mackey said the new state report cards showed progress and that he is “excited” about English Language Arts scores. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
Alabama’s K-12 system received a B on the state report card system released Friday by the Alabama State Department of Education.
The 2023-24 grade is an 85, up from an 83 in 2023 and 84 in 2022, according to the uploaded data.
“We are seeing schools doing better all across the state, every geographic area, we’re seeing improvement,” State Superintendent Eric Mackey said in a Monday phone call. “Schools go up and down a little bit. I know we’ve got a few schools that lost a couple points here, a few schools that gained a couple points. But for me, I have to look at the overall trajectory of where everybody’s going, and it’s definitely in the right direction.”
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Mackey said that the scores show “some regression” in math scores in early grades.
“That is indicative of the fact that there’s only so much time today and only so much teachers can do with their time, so we got to work on that so that we are able to not lose any of our amazing reading gain, but also raise that math up,” he said.
The 2023-24 school year was the first in which the Alabama Literacy Act was fully implemented. The act, passed in 2019 with the intention of improving literacy in the state, has a portion that could lead students to being retained if they do not meet a certain score on a literacy test at the end of third grade. Mackey said that emphasis could have “caused us to regress slightly.”
He said that he’s “excited” about where they are headed, especially with English Language Arts.
“Math is obviously big and it’s upcoming, but we’ve been working through the old reading initiative, then the reinvented reading initiative under the Literacy Act for longer than we’ve been deeply engaged in math,” he said.
The Legislature in 2022 passed the Alabama Numeracy Act, which among other measures created a state task force to vet math materials, placed math coaches in each school and provided for summer camps for students struggling with the subject.
Mackey said that the math skills in second and grade matter because they form the basis for algebraic understanding for middle school and high school math.
“We’ve got to make sure that we get all those skills mastered early on,” he said.
Rep. Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, who chairs the House of Representatives Ways and Means Education committee, said in an interview Monday that he had not yet looked at the report cards. But he said that they do not want to see regression in any area when asked about a light regression. He said they expected progression with the Alabama Numeracy Act, “the sister brother of the Literacy Act.”
“We’ll certainly be supporting numeracy going forward,” he said. “We have very high expectations for the outcomes.”
Mackey said that he’s also excited about increasing the graduation rate and closing the gap between graduation rate and college and career readiness. The graduation rate for the 2023-24 year was 90.04%, up from 88.21% the year before. It had been at 90.68 in 2022.
College and career readiness is at 84.20, up from 79.07 the previous year. College and career readiness is based on the number of students in the four-year cohort who have achieved one college or career readiness indicator, such as a 3 or higher on an Advanced Placement exam or being accepted into the military before graduation.
“That’s kind of the main thing I’m looking at right now, because we have to get CCR rate up, or that will affect us long term because that’ll eventually be required to graduate,” he said.
Mackey said they have a staff that looks at the geographic and demographic trends, and there does not appear to be a geographic region or subgroup that is falling behind or accelerating beyond others.
“That piece is much more difficult to break out when you start looking at subgroups but again, there’s ripples in the chart, as there always are, but, in general, there don’t seem to be any negative trends where we’re concerned about a certain region or demographic going backwards,” he said.
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