At long last, the Connecticut State Department of Education appears to have noticed that long after the Hartford school system was designated a “partnership district” and given additional state money to implement a special plan to improve student performance, performance has not improved and the school system itself is crumbling, with a $40 million budget deficit leading to hundreds of layoffs.
That is why the Department of Education has decided audit the school system.
This will most likely take a few months, some minor glitches will be alleged, and a state grant of tens of millions of dollars will be secured to close the shortfall and rehire laid-off employees. The nominal hope will be that student performance begins to improve this time. The real hope will be that student achievement will once again be ignored.
As the Department of Education decided to audit Hartford schools, the Hartford Courant reported that in 1989, 74% of the city’s eighth graders could not read at grade level and today the eighth grade reading failure rate It is five points worse, 79%. So what has the Department of Education been doing about Hartford in the intervening 35 years? Nothing made more difference than what the school system did.
And why should the Department of Education now be so concerned about Hartford in particular? Student achievement is terrible in all Connecticut cities and some of them also have large school budget deficits. In most other municipalities student performance is not much better.
Additionally, when the Department of Education was deciding to audit Hartford, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which advocates for children, reported that only 35% of Connecticut fourth graders were performing at grade level in reading and only 30% of eighth graders perform at their level. level in mathematics.
Twenty percent of the state’s students are chronically absent: missing 10% or more of their school days.
The Department of Education knows all this. He also knows that student performance was worsening even before the recent virus epidemic, which has now become everyone’s excuse.
As Connecticut schools have significantly increased their spending over the past four decades, it appears the student achievement disaster has little to do with school spending.
Chronic absenteeism provides a clue. Schools cannot teach students who do not show up. But Connecticut educators still have to ask themselves: Where is the incentive for students to show up and learn, and for parents to make sure they do?
In Connecticut there is no longer discipline against students or parents for chronic absences. In fact, there is no longer any penalty for not learning. The main educational policy in Connecticut is social promotion, that is, the abandonment of standards. All students advance from grade to grade and graduate from high school no matter what, as if simple graduation equals education.
Surprisingly, in Connecticut there are proficiency tests in the lower grades, but none for graduating from high school. Because educators are terrified that there might be a comprehensive, definitive measure of their schools’ performance. 8th grade test results are pretty scary. Do failed students ever catch up? No one in authority wants to know, at least not if the public should know too; not that the public necessarily wants to know.
Poor results on a graduation exam could lead people to question the ever-increasing amounts spent in the name of education, most of which goes toward salaries. In fact, the graduation test results could shatter the long-standing but flawed premise of public education in Connecticut, the premise enacted by the Education Improvement Act of 1986: that teacher salaries determine student performance. students.
What if people realized that teacher salaries only correlate with teachers union members’ job satisfaction and their willingness to serve in the majority political party’s military?
In addition to policies that have destroyed the incentive for students to attend and learn, student performance has been affected by the country’s worsening poverty, its burgeoning underclass, the collapse of the family, and subsequent child abandonment. Schools cannot cope with it and politics does not even recognize it.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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