Insight: What’s behind the best improvement in any Persistently Low-Achieving School

We’ve been talking a lot about the lack of notable progress in Jefferson County’s large number of Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (PLAs). Although student enrollment there amounts to only around 18 percent or so of the statewide enrollment, 18 of the 41 PLAs, or 44 percent, are in Jefferson County. Sadly, the rate of improvement in those schools is so bad that Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday recently likened it to “educational genocide.”

While Jefferson County languishes, however, another PLAs school, the Lincoln County High School, is getting its act together. A recent news article, “Lincoln County High leading all PLA schools on improvement indicators,” in The Interior Journal points out, Lincoln is posting the best turn-around performance of any PLAs.

Lincoln Superintendent Karen Hatter says she:

“…believes her high school's turnaround was made possible by faculty and administrators who 'embraced the idea of transformation' after the school was designated PLA.

‘You can either accept your place and try to improve and look at it objectively, or you can make excuses,' she said. 'They didn't make excuses.’"

My, that’s a refreshing bit of honest educator acceptance of a problem!

How very different from the denial dance going on in Louisville.