Wanted: Guards and teachers
Typically, the Mississippi Department of Corrections prefers to avoid disclosing its problems. So its announcement last week of a significant staff shortage is one sign that this problem is a serious one.
It certainly sounds that way. Corrections Commissioner Pelecia Hall said that more than half the inmates at MDOC’s prison in Leakes-ville are on lockdown due to a shortage of security officers.
The Leakesville prison, which houses 3,000 inmates, has a staff vacancy rate of 48 percent. Two other large sites have a similar problem: 42 percent of the jobs at are unfilled at the state penitentiary at Parchman, as are 46 percent of those at MDOC’s Rankin County prison.
Last week’s news release said MDOC has a total of 671 security jobs vacant. While that includes more locations that the three prisons, it’s a pretty telling signal that more people have decided that the safety risks of working in a prison aren’t worth the relatively low pay.
Hall wants the Legislature to spend $7 million to raise the entry-level salary for prison guards from just below $25,000 to the $28,000 to $31,000 range. She may get her way on that, as the tough-on-crime Legislature would undercut that stand if it refused to raise pay to a level needed to recruit more guards.
Lawmakers are likely to step delicately, even though it’s an election year, when they are more prone to raise pay for state employees. If the Legislature set the starting correctional officer’s salary at $30,000 a year, that’s probably not too far from what public school districts pay their first-year teachers.
Teachers appear due for a raise this year too. However, there are plenty of unfilled education jobs across Mississippi, too. The pay certainly is one reason for this. In both fields, and probably a few others, the state is going to have to come up with some extra money for its workers.
JackRyan, Enterprise-Journal
Test critics fail the logic test
Here’s a multiple choice question. Some Mississippi state lawmakers and a bunch of Mississippi high school teachers and administrators want to do away with the required subject-area tests because:
A. The tests are too hard.
B. The tests are keeping otherwise good students from graduating.
C. The tests waste time that could be better spent earning college scholarships.
D. None of the above.
The correct answer is D.
Even though opponents of the required tests in algebra, English, biology and U.S. history might cite some of those other reasons, it’s nonsense.
All four subject-area tests have a low bar for a passing score. The state has already watered down graduation requirements — mostly with alternative paths to a diploma for those who can’t pass the four exams — that 84 percent of seniors graduated this past year, the highest ever. If a student can’t pass those four tests, it is illogical to think that the same student could score high enough on a college entrance test to get a merit-based scholarship.
Still, some of this nonsense got a forum at the Capitol this past week thanks to state Rep. Tom Miles, D-Forest, who has been pushing to further de-emphasize the subject-area tests.
Miles apparently wants to return to a time when social promotion was rampant in this state, when it was much easier than it is today for weak schools to graduate students who couldn’t read or do math past an elementary-school level. He would like to replace the objectivity of standardized tests with the subjectivity of classroom grades to measure whether a student knows enough to get a diploma. Or if not that, use the ACT college entrance exam instead as the graduation barometer.
“It’s a sad world we live in today that a child can go all the way through school but because they have test anxiety they’re unable to graduate,” Miles said.
That test-anxiety excuse is laughable. The only students who have reason to be overly anxious about the subject-area tests are those who have acquired so little knowledge over 12 years of schooling that they are clueless as to what is being asked. Plus if they’re anxious about subject-area tests, they should be just as anxious about the ACT.
What is truly sad is what one of the educators, presumably called to bolster Miles’ case, had to say. The 10th grade English teacher in the failing Jackson School District claimed that her students on average read at a fourth-grade level. She doesn’t see how she can be expected in one year to get them ready to pass the English test the state requires.
This teacher understandably may be feeling pressure, but the problem is not the test that’s coming up for her students next year. It’s all the tests — if they were even given tests by their teachers — that they must have failed and were still promoted to the next grade year after year.
If the 10th grade English teacher is not able to perform a miracle, should these students be awarded diplomas anyway?
A. Yes.
B. No.
C. Not just diplomas but also college scholarships.
D. Depends on their level of “test anxiety.”
The answer should be obvious.
Tim Kalich
Editor and Publisher
Greenwood Commonwealth
