ConnCAN's Education News Roundup

ConnCAN in the News

Monitoring Each Student’s Progress Endorsed Over NCLB Strategy
By Audrey M. Marks, The Day, October 5, 2007

Washington — With the No Child Left Behind Act up for reauthorization, New London Superintendent of Schools Christopher Clouet wants Congress to change how education progress is measured without eroding the standards of quality education.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., introduced a bill in April that would assess results by tracking the progress of each student through the school system in addition to calculating how well students do as a whole based on the standardized tests. The number of students in advanced placement courses and the dropout rate also would be considered when judging a school's progress.

The Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, an education advocacy group known as ConnCAN, also is endorsing the idea of assessing student progress over multiple years but cautioned that the change shouldn't create more problems with the program.

“We need to be cautious about how we change standards of accountability,” said Alex Johnston, executive director of ConnCAN, in an interview. “We need to be sure we don't create situations where kids can fall through cracks.”

Learning Gaps Sully Our State
By Stan Simpson, The Hartford Courant, October 3, 2007

By now, Connecticut's distinction as the state with the widest academic achievement gap in the country is pretty much common knowledge.

What's not widely known is that the gap between the state's poor and non-poor students and between its white students and their African American and Latino peers is widening.

"If low income students [in Connecticut] did as well as they did in Massachusetts, we'd have the third-smallest achievement gap in the country, instead of the largest," said Alex Johnston, executive director of Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, a statewide organization whose mission is to close the achievement gap.

Magnets: Show Us Results
By, Rick Green, The Hartford Courant, September 28, 2007

Standardized test scores show that magnet schools, however much they make us feel good, aren't altering the overall differences in student performance that leave white children far ahead of minority children in reading, math and writing.

"People have taken their eye off the ball, which is achievement," said Mark Porter McGee, research director for the corporate-funded school reform group ConnCan. "Integrating schools is not by itself a solution to the problem."

Editorials and Op-Eds

The Adomski Gambit
The Hartford Courant, October 8, 2007

Controversial though it may have been, a comment by Hartford Superintendent of Schools Steven Adamowski at a state Board of Education meeting last week points to an underlying change in the nature of the Sheff v. O'Neill dilemma.

The focus of resolving the Sheff case has been on racial balance. Almost nothing is said of economic integration, yet that seems to be an increasing part of the problem.

Public policy should embrace both challenges. The interdistrict magnet schools should be going after suburban kids, white and minority.

Segregation Has to End
By, Elizabeth Horton Sheff and Eugene Leach, The Hartford Courant, October 7, 2007

Eleven years ago, the Connecticut Supreme Court stated an urgent truth: "It is crucial for a democratic society to provide all of its schoolchildren with fair access to an unsegregated education." Progress has been fragmentary and slow, but a great many parents, educators and other citizens remain dedicated to achieving the goal.

That's why it is so troubling to learn that Hartford's school superintendent, Steven Adamowski, apparently doubts the validity of the court's mandate.

Education: A Shared Responsibility
By, Staff, The New Haven Independent, October 7, 2007

Every year New Haven seeks additional well-qualified teachers, especially in areas such as math and science. Let's attract, develop and retain these colleagues. We all can be ambassadors in this -- and for the cause of improving the foundational skill of reading, among people of all ages.

The Independent's series on parents' involvement in education is welcome. Everyone, parents or not, can reinforce the high expectations our community should have for ourselves and our educators, as well as for students.

Accountability for tax dollars is a universal concern. Achievement gaps are, too -- urgency is the right word with kids' futures at stake. New Haven students on average have both significant needs and immense potential.

The Worry Behind The Numbers
The New York Times, October 7, 2007

Connecticut passed a milestone recently: it added enough jobs so that more than 1.7 million residents are now employed, a record. About 16,600 jobs have been added since August of last year.

A closer look at the types of jobs that the state has gained inspires more caution than celebration. Nearly half of all the new jobs added to the Connecticut economy since 2000 are low-paying service jobs, including casino workers, security guards, nursing aides and food service workers.

It seems clear that education is the key to the state’s future prosperity. Connecticut must improve its literacy rates and its K-12 educational system, especially in the cities, home to many of its least-educated residents and poorest, most struggling schools. The state must also strengthen its four-year and community colleges, which will play an increasingly vital role in providing the advanced education that is the true foundation of high-paying jobs. It is a big challenge, one that the employment numbers don’t convey.

Get Congress Out of Our Classroom
By Diane Ravitch, The New York Times, October 3, 2007

DESPITE the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998.

No Child Left Behind can, however, be salvaged if policymakers recognize that they need to reverse the roles of the federal government and the states. In our federal system, each level of government should do what it does best. The federal government is good at collecting and disseminating information. The states and school districts, being closer to the schools, teachers and parents than the federal government, are more likely to be flexible and pragmatic about designing reforms to meet the needs of particular schools.

Our Schools Must Do Better
By, Bob Herbert, The New York Times, October 2, 2007

What’s needed is a wholesale transformation of the public school system from the broken-down postwar model of the past 50 or 60 years. The U.S. has not yet faced up to the fact that it needs a school system capable of fulfilling the educational needs of children growing up in an era that will be at least as different from the 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th.

The first is teacher quality, a topic that gets talked about incessantly. It has been known for decades that some teachers have huge positive effects on student achievement, and that others do poorly. The positive effect of the highest performing teachers on underachieving students is startling.

The second area to be mined for potentially transformative effects is the wide and varied field of alternative school models. We should be rigorously studying those schools that appear to be having the biggest positive effects on student achievement. Are the effects real? If so, what accounts for them?

Education Pitfalls in Standardized Testing
The Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2007

Letters in response to Guy Darst’s September 22 article “Mass Testing”

News Articles

Comment Raises Eyebrows
By Rachel Gottlieb Frank, The Hartford Courant, October 4, 2007

Hartford Superintendent of Schools Steven Adamowski told state officials Wednesday that magnet schools - the cornerstone of ongoing desegregation efforts in the region - are falling short of their goal and that "there is no research to suggest that minority students will do better by sitting next to a white student."

"We're disappointed that it's 2007 and the superintendent wants to debate whether it is a bad thing for Hartford's minority children to be taught in racially segregated schools," said Matthew Collangelo, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who is representing the plaintiffs in the Sheff v. O'Neill desegregation lawsuit.

He said it is the state's job to create both rewards and punishments to encourage what he called suburban "fiefdoms" to engage with Hartford to end racial and economic isolation of city students.

Shake-Up Proposed For Hartford Schools
WFSB, October 3, 2007

HARTFORD, Conn - Superintendent Steven Adamowski offered to the state Board of Education a grim assessment of student achievement, and introduced an ambitious plan for reforms in the school system.

Currently, the Capital City has the greatest achievement gap in the country: Only 30 percent of students make it to their high school graduation.

Adamowski presented the board with two initiatives that would involve change. One option would advocate the state funding a student, not a school, in an all-choice system, meaning that parents can choose where to send their children to school.

A second option Adamowski suggested involves an all-balanced reform that would transform low-performing schools via district intervention, redesign or closure.

College is New Charter School’s Target
By, Linda Conner Lambeck, The Connecticut Post, October, 3, 2007

The city's latest charter school, developed by the creators of Amistad Academy in New Haven, opened Aug. 29.

Principal Debon Lewis said Achievement First Bridgeport Academy has begun to establish a distinctive culture. Students are referred to as scholars.

Grace Mwine, 10, a former Barnum student, said she misses her old school and friends, but is glad she's at the new school. At Barnum, the focus was "on getting us to the next grade. Here, they're focused on getting us to college," she said.

Special Education: When Should Taxes Pay Private Tuition?
By John Hechinger, The Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2007

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments to resolve the central question of the case: Must parents of special-education students give public schools a chance before having taxpayers reimburse them for private-school tuition? How the justices respond will have broad implications for school budgets and the movement toward "mainstreaming," or educating disabled children in regular classrooms. Mr. Freston, pledging to donate any proceeds, has said the fight is about principle, not money.