At last the Connecticut State Department of Education seems to have noticed that long after Hartford’s school system was designated an “alliance district” and given extra state money to execute a special plan to improve student performance, performance has not improved and the school system itself is falling apart, with a $40 million budget deficit causing hundreds of layoffs.
So the Education Department has decided to audit the school system.
Most likely this will take a few months, cite some minor failings, and arrange a state grant of tens of millions of dollars to close the deficit and rehire the laid-off employees. The nominal hope will be that student performance will start improving this time. The real hope will be that student performance will go back to being overlooked.
While the Education Department was deciding to audit Hartford’s 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 is five points worse, 79%. So what has the Education Department been doing about Hartford in the intervening 35 years? Nothing that made any more difference than what the school system did.
And why should the Education Department now be so concerned about Hartford particularly? Student performance is terrible in all of Connecticut’s cities and some of them have big school budget deficits too. In most other municipalities student performance is not much better.
Also as the Education Department was deciding to audit Hartford, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which advocates for children, reported that only 35% of Connecticut’s fourth-graders perform at grade level in reading and only 30% of eighth-graders perform at grade level in math.
Twenty percent of the state’s students are chronically absent — missing 10% or more of their school days.
The Education Department knows all this. It also knows that student performance was worsening even before the recent virus epidemic, which has become everyone’s excuse now.
Since Connecticut’s schools have greatly increased their spending in the last four decades, it seems that the disaster of student performance has little to do with school spending.
Chronic absenteeism provides a hint. Schools can’t teach students who don’t show up. But educators in Connecticut have yet to ask themselves: Where is the incentive for students to show up and learn, and for parents to ensure that they do?
In Connecticut there is no longer discipline against students or parents for chronic absence. Indeed, there is no longer any penalty for failure to learn. The main policy of education in Connecticut is social promotion — that is, the abandonment of standards. All students are advanced from grade to grade and graduated from high school no matter what, as if simple graduation equates to education.
Remarkably, there are proficiency tests in the lower grades in Connecticut but none for graduation from high school. For educators are terrified that there might be a comprehensive and final measure of the performance of their schools. The eighth-grade test results are scary enough. Do the failing students ever catch up? Nobody in authority wants to know, at least not if the public is to know too — not that the public necessarily wants to know.
Awful results on a graduation test might prompt people to question the ever-increasing amounts spent in the name of education, most of which goes for salaries. Indeed, graduation test results might shatter the longstanding but mistaken premise of public education in Connecticut, the premise put into law by the Education Enhancement Act of 1986 — that teacher salaries determine student performance.
What if people realized that teacher salaries correlate only with the job satisfaction of teacher union members and their willingness to serve in the majority political party’s army?
In addition to policy that has destroyed the incentive for students to show up and learn, student performance has been sunk by the country’s worsening poverty, its burgeoning underclass, the collapse of the family, and the resulting child neglect. Schools can’t cope with it and politics won’t even acknowledge it.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.