Politics & Government

Riverside County Supt. Gives State of Education Address

Kenneth M. Young, Riverside County Superintendent of Schools, opened his annual State of Education address Thursday with remarks about the governor's proposed budget.

Riverside County Superintendent of Schools Kenneth M. Young delivered the 2012 Riverside County State of Education Address Thursday, February 16, 2012, to nearly 400 education, business and community leaders at the Riverside Convention Center.

The address was hosted by the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce and the Workforce Investment Board.

County Superintendent Young began his remarks talking about the projected impact the governor’s proposed state budget would have on K-12 public education. He said the state has “reduced the amount schools receive per-student by approximately 21 percent. But because the state is spending public education's money on other government operations, it delays, or defers payment on $10 billion from the remaining 79 percent until the following school year. School districts must then borrow that $10 billion amount each year in order to pay their bills.” He also warned that “whether or not a tax initiative passes in November, the 2012-13 school year will see more cuts to public education.”

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Regarding the county’s students with limited ability to speak English, Superintendent Young said, “There is ample research to show that learning a second language increases a student's cognitive abilities and improves their academic achievement. Our ELL (English Language Learners) students who become fluent in the English language often perform higher academically than their mono-lingual counterparts.”  He also said that “in most other developed countries children are taught more than one language from kindergarten through high school.” But in the United States “we largely withhold second language instruction, other than English, until a student enters high school—when it's generally more difficult to learn a second language than in elementary grades.”

On the county’s economy and the role of public education, Superintendent Young said, “The economic stability and regeneration of employment are critical to our region's quality of life, and enhanced education, along with technical training, are vital keys to solving this grinding, long-term problem.” After providing data on Riverside County’s unemployment, poverty and adult education levels, he stated, “There is a direct correlation between education and employment as well as personal income.”

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He used data from the 2010 Federal Census to demonstrate “huge lifetime earnings differences between those who complete postsecondary education and those who stop once they receive a high school diploma, ranging from $380,000 to $2.8 million.”

With regard to what the public at-large looks at to gauge how public schools are doing with the tax dollars they receive, Superintendent Young said, “The outside world is most interested in educational outcomes that have relevance to the world our students enter when they leave school. They want to know about high school graduation rates, and how our students are scoring on the college entrance tests. They want to know if our students are getting the skills they need to prepare for the modern workforce.”

Superintendent Young shared that Riverside County graduated more than 27,000 students from high school last year, and the county has the 4th highest graduation rate of comparable counties in the state. “Not bad, but not great,” he said.

Then he added, “There was a time when a high school diploma qualified a graduate for employment with a comfortable income. But this isn't the 1960s and a diploma in today's world can no longer mark a student's finish line.”

Superintendent Young discussed the need for career training among high school students.  He said, “Every high school in Riverside County offers Career Technical Education and Regional Occupation Program courses to their students. Most of the skills students need to be successful in any job, including those requiring advanced college degrees, are taught in the applied learning opportunities available in CTE and ROP courses.”

In the area of preparing students for college, he said that “of the 109,000 high school students in our county, only 12,246 are enrolled in the AVID program. Yet their graduation rate is 99.6 percent. Their completion rate of classes needed for entrance into college is 95.8 percent. Twenty one percent of their graduates enroll at the community college level, 75 percent at the university level and the retention rate for AVID students after two years at the university is between 80 and 90 percent. It goes without saying that every school district should have a strong AVID program to help their students be successful.”

Superintendent Young concluded his address by stating, “Riverside County has spent the last 10 years leading the state in increasing student scores as measured by the state Academic Performance Index and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) laws. We have proven we know how to go from ‘Good to Great’ in those areas. But those areas are not producing the results our county now needs.

“We must spend the next 10 to 12 years focused on getting our students ready for postsecondary education and the workplace from the day they enter kindergarten, if not before, until they turn their tassels on graduation day. If we are going to make significant changes in these results then we must change our county's culture about college and career education. Along with remaining fiscally solvent, it must become our highest priority. It is a moral, societal and economic imperative. We cannot continue to send so many children off to a future where they will live in poverty.”

—Submitted by Rick Peoples, spokesperson, Riverside County Office of Education


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