In the average Black Belt county, just 11% of K-12 students scored well enough on state assessments to be considered ‘proficient,’ according to data compiled by the Education Research Center.
Students in Alabama’s Black Belt - one of the poorest regions in the United States - perform significantly worse in math and science than students in other parts of the state, despite Alabama’s already low math and science rankings nationwide.
“The scores, they are dismal,” said Julie Swann, a long-time educator in the Black Belt and Alabama Education Association UniServ Director of District 31, who spoke at a press briefing on the issue held by the Education Policy Center on Monday. “The biggest challenge we face in our Black Belt counties if qualified math and science teachers, and relying on people who are on emergency certification who are teaching math and science who don’t have a background in math and science,” Swann said.
Overall, more than 7% of Black Belt teachers fall under this emergency certification umbrella, compared to just 2% in non-Black Belt counties. But the problem is worse in the STEM field specifically, and more so in certain counties. For instance, in Perry and Marengo counties, approximately 80% of math and science teachers were emergency certified in 2018.
Swann said schools systems in her district and others are getting creative to address the issue, installing STEM classrooms adding robotics teams, but ultimately, in order to fix this problem, Alabama has to find ways to recruit qualified teachers to the region, and then keep them there. This results in a cycle, where poverty in the region leads to bad test scores and no scholarship money, which means students can’t gain access to high paying STEM jobs in the future.
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