By Jennifer Jett Prezkop
Education is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The varying sizes and shapes of the pieces represent the tools and resources available to teachers and students. When those pieces are worked together, the result is a well-rounded education system in which all students are prepared for success by addressing the challenges.
The Mountain State’s education system is no stranger to challenges. Both K-12 and higher education struggle with attendance, program relevance and degree completion on top of the social and emotional challenges of a struggling economy and opioid epidemic. The difference today is the partnership that has developed between both educational segments, thanks to Dr. Steven Paine, the West Virginia Department of Education’s superintendent of schools, and Dr. Sarah Armstrong Tucker, chancellor of the West Virginia Community & Technical College System (CTCSWV) and interim chancellor of the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission (WVHEPC).
This dynamic duo is pushing for change in West Virginia that will alter the face of education. By creating an interagency leadership team, Paine, Tucker and their collective staffs are delving into the problems of today—such as the low number of individuals who attain high school diplomas and higher education degrees, unfavorable math scores in a STEM-driven world and the immense teacher shortage—while anticipating the challenges of tomorrow like up-and-coming degree programs and how to address West Virginia’s insufficient skilled labor force.
As individuals, these two education leaders are implementing changes and promoting tools and opportunities to help students be successful in school and in life like dual credit programs in high school, career pathways and more affordable higher education. Together, driven by their shared passion for the success of all students and the state as a whole, they are fitting the pieces together for the prosperity of all West Virginians.
Dr. Steven Paine, Superintendent of Schools,West Virginia Department of Education
WVE: Tell us about your background in education.
SP: My teaching career began in Clarksburg in a status offender facility known today as Pressley Ridge. The kids were basically incarcerated for chronic truancy, and a couple of them were in there for attempted murder, armed robbery and breaking and entering. I then worked in a social studies classroom before serving as an assistant principal, principal and curriculum director in Upshur County. I had been a district superintendent of schools in Morgan County for five years when Dave Stewart, the then-state superintendent of schools, called and asked me to be his deputy superintendent. Dave stayed another two years, and then the board hired me as superintendent in 2005.
WVE: What are your responsibilities as state superintendent?
SP: My role is the general supervision of all the schools in the state.
WVE: How has this varied background helped you better understand the needs of the state’s students?
SP: In my first teaching job, I learned a lot about the kids who were troubled. It was probably the best experience I could have had at the beginning of my career. I understood which of their needs were not being met and what caused them to act out. Today that helps me have a heart for those who are struggling, and we have a lot of students who are struggling right now. We are now dealing with an unbelievable increase in the number of kids in foster care. We are dealing with homelessness, which can be hard to identify. We are dealing with neonatal abstinence syndrome and trauma. I think the number of our kids who have gone through, by definition, one traumatic experience in their lives is in excess of 50 percent, and that one traumatic event is life altering.
I want to be very clear: we don’t use those issues as excuses when it comes to educating our kids. We already know more than we need to know in order to successfully teach all of them. We know how to deal with trauma-affected students and kids who come from families that are victims of opioid addiction. We just have to work smarter and harder with our heads and our hearts with those kids and not use excuses because this society probably isn’t going to get much better. It’s time to face up to the facts of who we are dealing with and what our challenges are and do the very best job we can.
WVE: Tell us about the challenges you see facing K-12 students today.
SP: The first is socioeconomic status. Education is so much a function of socioeconomic background, and in West Virginia, we need to work really smart and really hard for those kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds to make sure they are all successful. To address this, we have to be focused on the learning needs of each and every child, and we have to use strategies that work with kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. A lot of this begins in higher education with the way we train teachers.
The biggest challenge I am facing as the state superintendent is figuring out how to show improvement in student achievement results. We have to overcome a lot of obstacles like finding a way to reach difficult kids. We are thrilled that with House Bill 206 the Legislature provided $30.5 million to be advocated directly to all of our school districts so they can work with student advocates in meeting the social, emotional and mental health needs of kids. We want to reach the kids who have experienced trauma, who come from opioid-addicted families and who are homeless or in foster care so we can provide them with support while simultaneously teaching them the core skills they need in mathematics, reading, English and the arts at an early age. That is a critical need.
WVE: Speaking of student achievement, how are students currently assessed?
SP: What gets all of the notoriety, unfortunately, is two standardized tests. One is the state assessment for third through eighth graders and 11th graders. The other is the NAEP assessment—the National Assessment of Educational Progress—which is misused a lot. It is not intended to be used to rank states against other states. It is an auditing tool to see how well you are doing in your state relative to a national standard. What I would really like to see are more authentic assessments related to project-based learning where we can not only assess the content knowledge of our students but also the way they are able to apply that knowledge in real-life situations. We have a program in our career technical education classes that’s called Simulated Workplace. In it, the classrooms are conducted like businesses that are run by the students. They take responsibility for their own learning, they structure their own classrooms, they create the rules, and they produce the products. They will appoint a CEO, a marketing person and quality control people, and they have everything you would normally find in a business or industry. It doesn’t teach them the content—they still have to take the content courses—but it is a hands-on strategy that really works well. Currently, that starts with junior-year students, but we would really like to push that down into ninth and 10th grade.
WVE: What are your goals for the 2019-2020 school year?
SP: Math, math, math. That’s number one. It’s an area we must tackle in this STEM world. That doesn’t mean reading and science aren’t important. What it does mean is we are really going to turn up the effort. Twenty-five percent of our Algebra I and geometry classrooms are taught by non-certified math teachers. We can’t get people to teach those subjects anymore, so we are providing alternative pathways where we will offer anyone who’s willing the opportunity to do the training because our feeling is that we have to get out of the box and think of different ways to prepare teachers, especially in those areas. In the meantime, our kids are being taught by teachers who are extremely well-intentioned and very willing to accept the challenge but don’t have the math background they need to be the best they can be. If I am a parent and I have a student in one of those classrooms, I want better than that.
Another goal for this year is to figure out how to get more teachers in the profession. One strategy that has potential in the long term is creating within our schools a school that helps kids who want to be teachers understand the challenges of being a teacher and then accelerate their learning. They would receive some dual credit for courses they could take in high school, and then when they go to a two-year or four-year institution, they could take what we call their pedagogue—where they can learn how to be a teacher. The Legislature and House Bill 206 provided some incentive for this initiative through the restructuring of the Underwood-Smith Teacher Scholarship Program. Now there are 25 scholarships for kids who want to commit themselves to becoming teachers.
WVE: Do you feel that the challenges with education reform and the resulting teacher strikes in the last couple of years have created a stigma that is keeping students from going into teaching?
SP: I don’t have any data that suggests that, but my gut feeling is yes, there is a stigma that has been attached because public education has incurred a large amount of criticism in the past couple of years especially. It’s not a new phenomenon, though, and it’s not limited to West Virginia. It is nationwide.
WVE: What were your thoughts on the omnibus education bill and the struggle to pass it?
SP: I actually think it was a very good bill. The elephant in the room with the omnibus bill was the charter school provision. I have been very clear: whether or not you like charter schools, they are not the silver bullet that is going to raise student achievement statewide to the level that many desire. If they were, we would have created charter schools all over the state by now.
The information we received from the student voice forums we did around the state when the Legislature challenged us all to go out and listen told us that 76 percent of our parents and community members feel positive about their schools. That level of satisfaction doesn’t really lead to an equation where there is a need for charter schools in my mind.
WVE: What kinds of challenges do you face with school building infrastructure?
SP: We have a challenge to replace outdated facilities. A lot of people don’t realize that a new facility will typically bring, according to research, a 10-point student achievement gain, and we have some facilities in the state we need to replace. The real challenge I see today is how to make sure we go the last mile with the internet so every rural community has the same access we have in Charleston. That is one of the greatest equalizers out there. We need to make sure as we build buildings that there is consideration for that kind of infrastructure.
WVE: Tell us about your relationship with Chancellor Sarah Armstrong Tucker.
SP: You know, I didn’t know Chancellor Tucker until we accepted our current roles. She is an incredible talent and a very bright thinker. She is knowledgeable and sincere and authentic,
and she has shown more empathy for pre-k-12 education than anyone I have ever worked with from higher education. She and I have some areas we have agreed to work on together. She recently brought her leadership team together with ours, and we all sat down for a couple of hours to look for some common areas where we can collaborate.
For instance, one area is how we prepare our teachers, and we have created a subgroup to focus on teacher preparation. We are working on what’s called a residency model where we increase the amount of time teachers spend doing their student teaching experience. We find that our current models are short-changing our teachers. These residency models have a great track record of results for students who make it through the first three years of their employment because it is in that timeframe that a teacher is going to quit. By increasing the amount of time they spend learning how to teach and teach well, it really helps them understand the challenges of teaching, and they are better equipped once they get that first job. As a result, more of them are lasting after those first three years and are staying in the profession, and that’s exciting to us.
WVE: How do you think K-12 education can help address the shortage of skilled workers West Virginia is experiencing?
SP: We have the ability to do that within our career technical education programs. We have pathways that, upon graduation from high school, can lead to gainful employment.
Another responsibility we have is to make sure students understand they may not stay in that one job. They may decide they want to go back and further their training. When they have finished all we have to offer within K-12 or the career technical education programs, they need to know Chancellor Tucker and her institutions have other programs to build upon the skills they have already learned.
Dr. Sarah Armstrong Tucker Chancellor, West Virginia Community & Technical College System, and Interim Chancellor, West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission
WVE: Tell us about your background in education and which experiences prepared you for your current roles.
SAT: My background is in research, and I’ve spent a number of years researching higher education, college completion, which barriers students face when they hit college and whether or not we can stop some of those barriers from blocking their paths. I also looked at access in education—who has access to education and who does not and how we can provide access to those who do not, particularly for rural students. Through that, I got into some policy work. Eventually I became vice chancellor of the CTCSWV and then was named chancellor. Now I am serving in a dual role as chancellor of both the CTCSWV and interim chancellor of the WVHEPC.
WVE: What are your responsibilities in this dual role?
SAT: We have nine community and technical colleges and 10 public, four-year institutions in West Virginia that are located throughout the state. As far as the community colleges are concerned, we coordinate a lot of joint work between the institutions. We also facilitate a number of workforce initiatives with those institutions. With the four-year institutions, we do a lot of support around their academics as well, trying to make sure they have programs that are needed in the state. We also do a lot of work around student support services.
WVE: What do you anticipate for the future of education?
SAT: I think we are looking at a lot less at brick and mortar. IT has really changed the way students are going to school and moving through school, and that is a good thing. We are also seeing a draw back toward some sort of internship and apprenticeship model and hands-on learning. Experience is becoming more and more important. Our students are graduating from college, and employers are saying they know the material but they don’t know how to use it. We have to give our students opportunities to know how to use what they are learning.
I think access is increasing across the state. Certainly, Senate Bill 1 has helped access significantly, but we are also at a time when people are questioning the value of college. I find that a very interesting conversation because any economic projection you show, the more education a person has, the more money they make, and it ticks up with every single level of education. I think maybe the question shouldn’t be about the value of education because it is incredibly valuable—it is incredibly important to our economy, to the national economy and to our state’s economy. Maybe the question should be about how we are advising students as they go through that process and whether we are giving them the information they need to truly be successful.
WVE: What are the biggest challenges in higher education in West Virginia today?
SAT: I don’t know that I would say it is the biggest challenge, but we have a real retention problem in West Virginia. We can get students in the door, but we have a hard time keeping them there. We need to figure out why that is. We also have a college matriculation problem. Forty-five percent of recent high school graduates don’t go to college, and that just does not match up with what the economy needs in West Virginia or in the nation. So where is that 45 percent of students going?
I think we are also seeing an increasing number of social and emotional issues with our students, and K-12 has seen that too. We recently added someone to our staff to help our institutions deal with the behavioral health issues we are seeing. We have students who have significant food insecurities. Many of our colleges have started food banks to help those students. We have students who have been touched by the opioid crisis, and there are a lot of issues around that. We are seeing those things trickle down into higher education, and we are trying to deal with them.
WVE: Tell us about how the West Virginia’s Climb program will help address the completion rate problem.
SAT: States around the country have taken on challenges to get their citizens re-educated, and West Virginia’s Climb is West Virginia’s initiative. Its purpose is to try to get everyone—community colleges, four-year institutions, private institutions, the K-12 system and business and industry—on board to raise the percentage of our population with some kind of post-secondary credential from 34 percent to 60 percent by 2030. We know 34 percent is not what our state’s economy needs. I work with employers every day, and they all need to hire people, so it’s not that there are not jobs in West Virginia. The issue is that we do not have people who are trained to fill the jobs that exist.
WVE: What do you see as the main driver for this shortage in credentials?
SAT: I think there is a mobility issue. I think we have—and this is true of not only West Virginia but all of rural America—a preference for intergenerational closure where students want to stay in their homes and their communities because that’s where they live and that’s where their parents and grandparents lived. What we haven’t done a good job of is showing individuals who feel strongly about staying in their communities that there are jobs they can take and still be able to live in their communities. If you look at the IT field, for example, you can go get a degree in cybersecurity or anything related to IT, and you can stay at home and do that job as long as you have access to the internet. Another example is health care throughout Southern West Virginia, which is in desperate need of employees, so there are a lot of opportunities in the health care field. There are also jobs that allow you to travel but remain at home like electrical linemen who go on the job for several days and then come home for several days. There are jobs out there that would allow someone to stay home in these very rural areas. I’m not sure if we do a good job of reaching out to those individuals and letting them know those jobs exist, but certainly this idea of wanting to stay close to home and not being able to see a lot of jobs being reflected in that home is a real problem in West Virginia.
WVE: During West Virginia Executive magazine’s recent statewide college campus tour, one of the topics that kept coming up was that community and technical college success is measured differently than the four-year colleges because the goals are different. What can you tell us about this challenge?
SAT: Historically in higher education, we focused on graduation rates, and graduation rates do not necessarily reflect those who only need a few classes or a certificate. You look at all the students who start and then in four years you see how many of them have earned their degree, and for a lot of students, that is not their goal in going to college. Maybe they just need a couple of classes to get their promotion or they just want to know some additional information about, as an example, how to better use social media for communications purposes. If that student were to show up in a graduation number, that would be a failure, but they did exactly what they came to do. We still keep any eye on graduation rates, but that is not how community colleges are measured anymore. They are measured by looking at the number of students who entered into non-credit programs and got skill sets. Did they complete this bundle of courses they were taking? We look at certifications a lot. Did they get a one-year certificate? Did they get a two-year associate degree? We look at all of those things. We are still never going to be able to account for the person who wanted to take the one class and be done, but we do look at completion definitely.
WVE: What are your goals for the 2019-2020 school year?
SAT: One of my goals is to work more collaboratively with K-12. We need to work better together to help solve some of these problems. We have been siloed a lot in the state of West Virginia, and Dr. Paine and I do not think that is very smart. We are trying to change that and make sure our staffs work together on solving some of these problems.
A major issue we are facing in West Virginia is teacher education. We don’t have enough qualified math teachers, so how do we incentivize that? I think in this coming year we are going to focus a lot on that so hopefully we can change the face of education.
We are going to push hard on the open educational resources (OER) initiative this year. You can see when you look at the beginning cohort of students that start in the fall, there are a number of them that drop off when they have to purchase books because they cannot afford them. These artificial barriers are just that—artificial. We can change them if we want to. They don’t have to be hard stops for our students. The OER initiative will essentially eliminate the burden of astronomically priced textbooks and replace them with free or nearly free online materials for instruction. Instead of buying an expensive textbook, the instructor would have a free online resource for the students to use. For example, if you have an economics textbook that costs $400 and there are 100 students in the class, if the instructor chooses to use an OER rather than the textbook, you just saved your students $40,000.
WVE: Tell us about your close working relationship with Dr. Paine.
SAT: We think similarly about education, and we want the same things for our students. We want our students to be successful, and we want our state to be successful. I think those common ground things have helped us build a really positive working relationship. As he and I would just sort of sit and spitball about education, we realized we were working on the same things. There was a lot of overlap between what he was doing and what I was doing and what our systems of education needed, and it didn’t make sense for us to work on them independently. We both have terrific staff who are very smart who are working hard on these issues, sometimes together and sometimes not, and we need to elevate that work and make sure people are working together.
WVE: Tell us more about the interagency leadership team the two of you co-created to improve communications.
SAT: That was the result of bringing our senior staff together. We came up with some areas in which we felt there was overlap on what we need to work together on in the next year like teacher education. We are in the process of developing the new Perkins Plan for the state of West Virginia that involves career and technical education training. We have a group that is looking at social and emotional issues for students and how we deal with the changing needs of our students. We are also looking at what common data points we may have—things we have to look at together to talk about what is happening with our students, where are they going, whether they are being successful and what that looks like. These are all areas of pretty significant commonalities.
WVE: Tell us about the Underwood-Smith Teacher Scholarship Program that was revised this year to help recruit students into teaching programs.
SAT: That is a scholarship and loan forgiveness program for teachers. We kept the loan forgiveness part of it as it has always existed, and for the scholarship portion, this fall we provided a cohort of 25 college freshmen with scholarships to go to college if they go into high-need teacher education fields. Specifically, we are probably looking at math and science right now, but that could be opened up to include other fields. We are going to take that cohort and give them $10,000 scholarships every year they are in college for a total of $40,000. That is in addition to any other money they may receive. We are going to mentor them throughout their four years. They have to work in the field and become a teacher in their subject content area in West Virginia for five years after they graduate. We want to heighten the profession of teaching. We want our teachers to know how important we think they are and how important we think the work they are doing is. This is the beginning of making that happen.
WVE: In terms of the social, economic and emotional impacts, are your college professors experiencing the same challenges as K-12 teachers?
SAT: Yes, it is exactly the same. They are having to do a lot more things than they use to have to do—things they are not trained to do. Part of us hiring a new behavioral health director
is trying to help the institutions wrap their heads around these new students and how to handle them and make sure we are meeting them where they are. It is a significant challenge on our campuses, and we are trying to acknowledge that and help them figure out how best to work with the population they have.
WVE: How did we get to where we are with the problem of high school graduates not going on to postsecondary education?
SAT: Historically, our state has had a lot of opportunities for families to be very successful working in jobs that didn’t require higher education. That has changed, and we haven’t kept up with that change. It is going to continue to change, and that means people are going to need additional certifications and trainings. It’s a real challenge, but it is one we can overcome. We are going to have to have a cultural shift in our in state with our people about the type of education and training they need.
WVE: This year, you launched West Virginia Invest, and that was a result of Senate Bill 1. Is it too early to talk about what kinds of results you are seeing?
SAT: We had more than 1,200 students who applied and did not actually need any money from West Virginia Invest. These are students who already qualified for federal and state aid that was in excess of the tuition and fees at the community colleges, but they did not know it. We had 833 students who did receive money this fall, so as far as I am concerned that is more than 2,000 students who are going to college for free in the fall. I think we will continue to see those number tick up all year long.
WVE: How do you ensure you are up to date on the needs of the business community so you know you are offering the right programs?
SAT: We get the information from a lot of different places. It comes from business and industry directly, and that is a lot of boots-on-the-ground time on my part. We also have a workforce director who gets a lot of that information for the community colleges. Our community colleges all have workforce directors who work very closely with business and industry in their areas. The four-year institutions have a myriad of ways they reach out to business and industry and try to make sure they are offering the programs that are needed. I also work very closely with the West Virginia Department of Commerce. I am frequently in meetings when companies are considering coming to West Virginia. I am in this sort of constant feedback loop, and it is a line of communication I work very hard at keeping open.
WVE: What kind of feedback do you hear when they have these meetings with companies and businesses they are trying to bring to West Virginia?
SAT: It depends on the company. Companies look at where to invest their money and where they want to move. One of the things companies look at is how educated our workforce is, so they get very nervous about the 34 percent number. I get asked how deep our bench is a lot. If we get the first layer of folks, what is underneath that layer? How can we build that workforce, and how can we make sure there is a constant pipeline? Those are very real questions we have to ask ourselves and projects we have to work on very hard.
