Saying that black and Latino kids are falling behind peers not just in New Haven but in Greenwich, business leaders unveiled a statewide plan to close the achievement gap over 10 years through extra tuturoing, mandatory pre‑K, and longer school days. among other ideas.
The recommendations came Tuesday from a statewide panel appointed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell to tackle the state’s achievement gap between low-income and non-low-income students. After studying the gap for eight months, the Connecticut Commission on Educational Achievement released a report with 65 recommendations at a press conference at the state Capitol.
The state has the worst achievement gap in the nation based on fourth and eighth grade scores on national standardized tests.
Melissa Bailey Photo
“The winds of change are in the air” for education reform, said Steven Simmons (pictured), who chaired the commission, citing President Obama’s “Race To The Top” program for education reform. “We think there’s a window of opportunity here to begin to narrow the gap.”
Simmons predicted if the recommendations are implemented in the next decade, the state’s struggling students will catch up to their peers.
Those struggling kids come from all sorts of places, not just major cities, the group found: Low-income students in Greenwich fall 37 percentage points behind their local peers on fourth-grade state reading tests. In West Hartford, that gap is 39 points. By comparison, New Haven’s gap is about 21 points, mostly because its non-low-income group has lower scores.
On average, low-income students are three grades behind their peers, according to the panel.
Most of those low-performing students are students of color, Simmons said. The group’s recommendation target interventions for low-income students, ways to make teaching better, and what to do with “failing schools.”
Recommendations include:
• Requiring districts to provide pre‑K for the 9,000 low-income students who are not getting it.
• Provide remediation for about 40,000 students who are falling behind. Interventions include extending the school day, adding tutoring, or sending them to Saturday sessions.
• Require students to pass the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) in order to graduate.
Much focus was put on the schools that don’t produce results on the tests. There are 120 “failing schools” out of 1,100 statewide, according to federal No Child Left Behind guidelines, said commission member Ramani Ayers, a retired CEO of The Hartford. The state should rank schools into five tiers and create a “School Turnaround Office” to handle revamping the lowest performers.
The group called for “significant latitude” to create new charter, magnet and “other innovative” schools, as well as a new “money follows the child” system for students who attend charter or magnet schools.
The recommendations mirrored New Haven’s citywide reform effort, which also aims to tier and “turn around” low-performers in part by turning them into charter schools.
When it came to adding accountability for teachers, the group looked to New Haven as a model, said commission member Will Ginsberg (pictured), head of the Community Foundation For Greater New Haven. The foundation acted as a fiduciary to collect over $200,000 in private donations to support the panel’s travel and research, he said. He and a fellow New Havener, outgoing NewAlliance Bank CEO Peyton Patterson, looked into best practices in teacher preparation.
“New Haven as much as anything around the country was our model” for new guidelines for teacher evaluations, Ginsberg said. The city gained national accolades for the collaborative way the union and administration crafted a new evaluation process that grades teachers based on student performance.
They advocated rewarding teachers with school-wide, group-wide or individual bonuses for their performance. New Haven is pursuing this, though not on an individual level.
As New Haven plans to do, the panel called for evaluating teachers, principals and superintendents based on student progress.
The panel also called for getting rid of tenure as an obstacle to removing ineffective teachers.
Asked to prioritize the 65 recommendations, Simmons declined to do so. He also declined to offer a pricetag to the reform package, which would be phased out in the next decade. Some recommendations — such as helping districts share services — would create a savings; some policy changes would be free; and others would cost the state. For example: Providing remediation for 40,000 low-performing students would cost about $40 million, Simmons said.
He said the solution may not be to spend more money on education, but to spend differently. He advocated reexamining how the state uses $600 million in categorical grants, as well as creating a new weighted formula for distributing the state’s $1.9 billion in Education Cost Sharing grants.
Whether these reforms get implemented amid a fiscal crisis is now up to the legislature. New Haven State Sen. Toni Harp set up a separate reform committee that met for the first time Monday to tackle these same questions. The group aims to start with the commission’s report and produce actionable proposals to the legislature by the year’s end.
The ultimate choice will lie in the hands of the next governor, noted Alex Johnston, a New Haven school board member and CEO of the school reform group Conn-CAN. He applauded the panel for “such a sweeping and strong set of recommendations.” The fact that a commission with extensive resources arrived at many of the same conclusions as New Haven has “affirms” the city’s reform drive, he argued.
Johnston argued that the next governor may see need to invest in educational reforms despite the fiscal crisis, because improving education has broader consequences of wealth-creation and job-creation. Just as school reform is “a critical economic development issue and a critical public safety issue” for New Haven, the same is true for the state, he said.