Hartford’s school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, says she’ll investigate the case of the girl who, the Connecticut Mirror reported a few weeks ago, graduated this year from Hartford Public High School without being able to read or write or do more than rudimentary addition and who then somehow was admitted to the University of Connecticut.
No investigations of the girl’s case seem to be forthcoming from the state Education Department and the General Assembly, whose carefree allocations of state money finance most of Hartford’s school system. Such investigations would risk breaking open a scandal: public education’s longstanding failure not just in Hartford but throughout the state.
Torres-Rodriguez told the Hartford Courant that the school system is “deeply concerned” about the case, will examine its “entire chronology,” and address any mistakes. “We have an expectation that if anyone sees something of concern, you say something,” the superintendent said.
But the president of the Hartford teachers union, Carol Gale, says the girl’s failure to learn wasn’t the fault of union members. “Teachers advocated for this student all along her journey,” Gale says. According to Gale, the problem is — you guessed it — a lack of money.
How tedious the superintendent and the teachers union president are.
Hartford’s schools are full of employees receiving more than $150,000 annually in salary and benefits. In the last 12 years could no money be found for tutoring for the girl?
Could no one have noticed by even seventh or eighth grade that she couldn’t read and write and then do something about it? And if, as the teachers union president says, teachers did notice and were really “advocating” for the girl against an indifferent administration, why did no one start screaming to the school board and press?
Will the superintendent’s investigation identify all staff members who had contact with the girl throughout her years in school, detail what they did or didn’t do about her illiteracy, fix responsibility, and hold staff members to account?
Of course not. For the girl’s case is different only in degree, not principle, from the cases of most public school students in Connecticut, who are advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas without ever performing at grade level — a policy of social promotion.
Connecticut just doesn’t want to know. That’s why the state has no proficiency testing to determine advancement from grade to grade and graduation.
Three weeks ago the Danbury News-Times reported that 70% of the city’s students in Grades 3 through 8 are not performing at grade level. The report went unnoticed outside the city, and why not? The student proficiency disaster is similar nearly everywhere else, and deliberately ignored.
That is, even journalism shares responsibility by treating the failure of public education as the natural order of things, along with the especially disgraceful racial performance gap among Connecticut’s students, even as government throws more and more money at education without ever making any difference.
Even without being formally articulated, the message Connecticut sends throughout schools and society is still powerful: Educational results don’t matter. Students mustn’t be required to learn anything and will suffer no consequences if they don’t — no consequences in school anyway. There will be consequences when they must start to earn a living, but even then what matters most in public education will be only to keep the people on its payroll happy.
Ending educational failure and the social promotion that guarantees it couldn’t be done overnight. That would empty the upper grades and stuff the lower ones.
But gradual reform might begin with proficiency tests given in every grade at the end of every school year, with the scores entered on the permanent records of all students and then affixed to their high school diplomas. Potential employers could be encouraged to ask to see an applicant’s diploma with its yearly test scores.
Eventually word would get around that education was starting to matter again, and maybe after 15 years or so ordinary grade-level proficiency could start to be required for advancement and graduation.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.