Jennifer Alexander spent four hours watching a Connecticut judge on TV demand the kind of overhaul she’s been seeking for years in Connecticut schools.
Alexander, who runs the New Haven-based educational advocacy group ConnCAN, was watching the CT‑N feed Wednesday of Judge Thomas Moukawsher reading a 254-page landmark decision in a decade-plus-old lawsuit seeking to change the way Connecticut funds its public schools.
Moukawsher declared that the state’s current educational system “unconstitutionally” deprives kids in poorer districts like New Haven of equal opportunities for education. He gave the state 180 days to fix how it distributes money, evaluates teachers, graduates “functionally illiterate” teens from high school, and funds special education.
In the process, Moukawsher seconded arguments Alexander has advanced about improving public education.
“This decision exceed expectations in terms of its sweeping … condemnation of our educational system, which puts politics and the status quo over the best interests of the” children, Alexander said in an interview on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program. She said she hopes the decision leads to “bold and systemic change.”
“[T]he state is torn between the need for communal and objective standards and the apparently irresistible pressure for the idiosyncratic status quo,” the judge wrote in his opinion. “Instead of the state honoring its promise of adequate schools, this paralysis has left rich schools to flourish and poor school districts to flounder … To keep its promise of adequate schools for all children, the state must rally more forcefully around troubled schools. It can’t possibly help them while standing on the sidelines imposing token statewide standards. And while only the legislature can decide precisely how much money to spend on public schools, the system cannot work unless the state sticks to an honest formula that delivers state aid according to local need.”
Read the judge’s decision here.
The judge noted in his opinion that evaluations almost always rate Connecticut teachers as effective. He called for that to change. He acknowledged arguments by the teachers union that teachers shouldn’t be held responsible for the extra problems many impoverished students bring into urban classrooms. But he also argued that the schools can deal with that challenge and still evaluate teachers more reasonably.
Alexander seconded that sentiment. Her group, a pro-charter school advocacy organization often at odds with teachers unions, calls for incorporating test scores into evaluations — but, she said, they can be used to measure students’ progress over the course of a year. “Student outcomes have to count in how we hire and promote teachers,” she argued. Poverty does impact learning, she said, but can be addressed through high expectation.
She also seconded the judge’s criticism of the legislature’s use of politics in, say, shifting millions of dollars from a poor performing district like Bridgeport to a wealthy suburban district like New Canaan, rather than adhering to the original vision of the Educational Cost-Sharing process. In responding to the judge’s order over the next 180 days, she said, the state should ditch ECS and the 11 different formulas it uses for funding schools and arrival at one formula based on addressing student learning needs where they’re greatest — in schools, for instance, with higher poverty rates, more England language learners.
Judge Maukawsher did not rule that the state has to spend more money overall on schools. Alexander said that she believes that “money alone is not going to solve our educational problems.”
She also repeated a call, which is bound to remain controversial in Hartford, that the state more fully fund charter schools. Advocates of traditional public schools accuse charters of draining needed public dollars from strapped schools left to deal with higher populations of low-performing and special-education students. Charter advocates deny the charge. “We have to spend our dollars where they’re going to work for kids,” even if that means parents have decided their kids will learn better in charters or magnet schools, Alexander argued.
Click on the audio file at the top of this story to hear the full interview with Alexander on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven.”