Why should Delaware care?
Although Delaware’s youngest learners made post-pandemic gains in math, reading scores remain an area of concern for younger and older students. Delaware’s new Education Secretary Cindy Marten is calling for sustainable, long-term solutions for test results, rather than quick fixes.
For years, Delaware’s public schools have been weighed down by low scores on standardized tests.
That same problem plagued the San Diego Unified School District in 2013 when Cynthia “Cindy” Marten became its superintendent.
But over the course of six years, her California school district steadily recorded higher and higher test scores. The improvement occurred after the state changed the way it funded education, sending more dollars to school districts with larger numbers of disadvantaged students, such as those who were learning English or those from low-income families.
The change also gave school districts greater flexibility to decide how to spend their money.
More than a decade later, many in Delaware are hoping Marten – who last month was confirmed as the state’s new education secretary – could oversee another transformation using similar methods.
But Marten believes those hopes should be reined in, saying that “hope is not a viable strategy.” She also said she doesn’t believe in dropping “outside solutions” from San Diego onto Delaware to address this state’s struggles with reading and math.
“You can’t just do all these things that, ‘OK, well, those worked in San Diego. And now let’s tweak it for Delaware,” Marten said in an interview with Spotlight Delaware.
Instead, she’s calling for systematic changes for Delaware’s public schools, including adopting a new funding formula, investing in professional development for teachers, and addressing the non-academic needs of children, such as mental health concerns and hunger.
She also said she agrees with Gov. Matt Meyer’s position that the state needs to follow many of the recommendations from the American Institutes for Research, which most notably called on Delaware to massively increase its education spending by as much as $1 billion annually.
While many hope that Marten and her ideas will succeed, she is likely to face resistance from Delawareans who believe that the state’s education department has too much money already.
State Sen. Dave Lawson (R-Dover) expressed a version of that view during a state budget hearing Wednesday, saying he doesn’t believe the department’s operations impact students on “the ground.”
“If it were up to me, your budget would be half of what it is today,” he said.
The COVID slump
For nearly a decade, Delaware’s fourth and eighth-grade reading and math scores gradually dropped on the standardized tests given in two-year increments as part of the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress program – also called NAEP, or the Nation’s Report Card.
That drop accelerated during the COVID pandemic, particularly with reading scores.
While the pandemic marked a clear disruption in the reading and math comprehension for young Delawareans, it also occurred amid a nationwide decrease in fourth and eighth-grade reading performance since 2017, said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.
And overall test scores today are still below pre-pandemic levels, particularly in reading, she said.
Adjusting the public education funding formula
Throughout his campaign, Meyer vocalized his support for changing Delaware’s current unit count-based public education funding system to one that uses weights for specific student groups, such as those with disabilities or multi-language learners.
The unit count funding system distributes money to districts based on the number of students enrolled, without considering the additional factors.
Meyer also expressed that the state’s public education funding system should be better aligned with the American Institutes for Research’s recommendation to increase spending by as much as $1 billion annually to meet its 2030 educational proficiency goals.
Marten agrees with those sentiments.
Her leadership experience at San Diego’s school district started when California switched to what it called a Local Control Funding Formula.
That formula creates funding targets based on student characteristics and provides greater flexibility to use these funds to improve student outcomes — another example of a weighted funding formula that Delaware may use as a model to implement its own changes.
Marten said it took her school district “a few years” to turn around its NAEP results, but she sees a direct relationship between increased funding to schools and higher test scores. She called this a sustainable effort, and noted that her former district has nearly reached its pre-pandemic test scores.
San Diego schools also have outperformed Delaware in fourth and eighth-grade reading and math by as much as 14 points in one recent assessment.
Organizations like Rodel – a nonprofit that has studied public education for decades in Delaware and has worked with educators – agrees that the plan to address test scores should be tied to a system that directs more dollars to disadvantaged students. In a statement, Rodel called that a “transformational shift” in how schools are funded.
“These shifts are central to meeting the unique needs of our students, especially those who are traditionally disadvantaged,” Paul Herdman, CEO of Rodel, wrote in a statement to Spotlight Delaware. “We look forward to working with and learning from Secretary Marten as she has a strong track record of moving on issues like this.”
Increasing investments in Delaware’s educators
Aside from the state’s updated public education funding system, the San Diego Unified School District saw success from its efforts to invest in high-quality professional development.
Although Delaware has struggled to retain its educators, organizations like the Delaware State Education Association, the state’s teachers union, works to build supports and resources through professional and leadership development programs.
Marten believes administrators should have a “menu of options” to invest in professional development opportunities for their staff to meet educators’ needs.
“If the State Department of Education just mandates some sort of, ‘Everybody just do this and you’re going to be fine,’ that is not differentiation, and no teacher would do that in their classroom, and no state agency should be doing that either,” she said.
One program Marten said is effective is student-centered coaching cycles.
The strategy requires a literacy or math coach to come to a school for four to eight weeks to work with teachers in determining a lesson’s objective, carrying out that lesson, assessing which students didn’t learn and ultimately helping educators improve their instructional skills.
Marten also praised former Gov. John Carney’s decision last summer to add $3 million to the state budget for statewide literacy coaches.
Addressing student achievement barriers
In November, a state education task force charged with examining student behavior made several recommendations to lawmakers around the state can better address student behavioral concerns.
The group – the Student Behavior and School Climate Task Force – was formed after teachers reported that absenteeism and students behavioral issues were on the rise. Those problems caused a loss in available instruction time, poor teacher retention rates, and lower test scores for students, according to the task force and teachers.
At the same time, teachers have told Spotlight Delaware they experience high levels of burnout because they must consider all the needs of a student — like whether they’ve eaten or if multi-language learners have the correct class materials.
Often these concerns also serve as barriers to students’ achievements, but they’re also beyond the scope of a teacher’s training, Marten said.
After her tenure as San Diego’s school superintendent, Marten in 2021 was appointed to serve as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education within the Biden Administration. There, she said, the administration promoted meeting the needs of the whole child, including examining emotional maturity and mental health.
The administration also emphasized what Marten called wraparound services in schools, such as ones that provide basic healthcare and assistance with shelter and nutrition.
Marten pointed toward these wraparound services as a possible solution to Delaware’s test score troubles, but said the state must have “funding streams and mechanisms” that can be invested into and replicated to address the “whole-child approach.”
