ConnCAN's Education News Roundup

ConnCAN in the News

School Basics: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Real Estate
By C. J. Hughes, New York Times, June 17, 2007

In fact, every 12-percentage-point difference in scores on the Connecticut Mastery Tests, the standardized exams that students in Grades 3 through 8 take every year, is worth $5,065 to those buying or selling a home, according to the study, called “School Choice in Suburbia: Public School Testing and Private Real Estate Markets.”

“The information is in the marketplace on one side of the transaction or the other,” said Alex Johnston, the executive director of the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, a two-year-old group whose mission is to close the academic achievement gap in Connecticut.

Making it worse is that top-ranked school districts are often available only to those students who can afford to live there. “Geography,” Mr. Johnston said, “shouldn’t be the driver of access to a quality public education.”


Report: Graduation rates lower than reported in state
Chris Gosier, Stamford Advocate, June 16, 2007

Connecticut's high school graduation rates overstate the percentage of students who get diplomas, a new report says.

The report by ConnCAN, a nonprofit advocacy group, gives new graduation rates purporting to show how likely students are to finish high school in four years.

The report says Stamford's rate was 77 percent in 2004, compared to 90 percent reported by the state, and Norwalk's rate was 70 percent vs. the state figure of 88 percent, according to the May 30 report.