Lawmakers Look At Closing Achievement Gap
by Christine Stuart | Feb 11, 2010 6:49pm
(5) Comments | Commenting has expired
Posted to: Education, State Capitol
Looking to build on a mission starting in New Haven, Black and Puerto Rican lawmakers want to put closing Connecticut’s achievement gap front and center this legislative session.
The state legislators issued their challenge at a press conference at the Capitol Thursday.
“We are putting forward what we consider to be landmark proposals,” Rep. Jason Bartlett, D-Bethel, said Thursday. “To close the largest achievement gap in the nation.”
The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that Connecticut’s achievement gap between white and minority students is the largest in the country by every measure. In the fourth grade, for instance, black students lag three grade levels in math behind white students, according to the report. By the eighth grade, the gap widens to 4.4 grade levels.
To close the achievement gap Bartlett said the group will put forward 10 proposals:
1. Link teacher evaluations to student progress.
2. Create alternative routes to certification for principals.
3. Create incentives for Advanced Placement courses.
4. Appoint a task force to assess the progress of closing the achievement gap.
5. Empower parents to create school change by giving them a 51 percent majority vote on the school’s future.
6. Enhance parent-teacher communication by requiring two conferences a year.
7. Create an online course recovery opportunity for potential drop-outs.
8. Give teachers a break on their income taxes.
9. Allow the money to follow students to adult education programs.
10. Census reform and allow school population figures to be taken in March instead of October.
Speakers at the press conference said they want to build on some of the experiments taking place in New Haven, which has undertaken a school reform drive. (Click here to read stories about that drive and here to read about one New Haven school that has succeeded in closing that gap.)
Connecticut, meanwhile, has struggled without success to close the achievement gap on the state level, partly through desegregating schools, at the urging of the state Supreme Court. The ordered the state to take steps to desegregate public schools in its decision in the landmark Sheff v. O’Neill case. But the state’s response has failed to make a dent.
“For too long we’ve talked about how bad Connecticut’s achievement gap is without taking the bold action needed to solve the problem, “ Danielle Smith, state director for the Connecticut Black Alliance for Educational Options, said.
Bartlett hopes the 10 proposals offered Thursday will become legislation and help the state compete for federal “Race to the Top” funds.
Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, D-New Haven, said the issue has been studied and now is about political will. “The achievement gap doesn’t exist on its own, we allowed it to exist,” he said.
Lewis Kelley of a parent advocacy group in Manchester said the school reform initiative needs to be done through statewide legislation because “some people are not going to do it until you legislate it.”
“We’re going to be very persistent,” Bartlett said. “We don’t think having 185 failing schools in Connecticut is acceptable.”
However, some of the proposals call for opening up collective bargaining contracts, which will be controversial to teachers unions.
And the proposal for greater parent involvement, if it’s modeled after the one adopted by California this January, will also raise some eyebrows.
In an effort to get its hands on Obama’s “Race to the Top” funding California passed legislation which includes a parent trigger law. The law allows a majority of parents attending a failing school to sign a petition to close the school, replace the principal or other staff, convert the school to a charter school, or implement professional development and evaluations for teachers.
“We agree that parents should be included in the decision making process on how we help schools to succeed,“ Sharon Palmer, president of AFT Connecticut said. “This needs to be done in a way that invites and empowers participation by all vested parties. Unfortunately, a ‘parent trigger’ limits that involvement to just a signature.”
(5) Comments
posted by: GoatBoyPHD | February 11, 2010 10:38pm
Read through each of the 10 proposals and ask yourself Four Questions:
1) Will this close the gap for 8th graders that are 4.4 years behind?
2) Is this addressing a different age group entirely such as adult education and AP students?
3) Will this result in students coming to class prepared and result in using the community to tutor at-risk students from at-risk home environments? In other words maximizing the contact time out of school with responsible adults, church programs, and tutors that work for a fraction of union teachers in the late afternoon and weekends?
4) Does this appear to increase the economic power base of minorites by allowing uncertifired teachers to become principals, qualified teachers to be removed, and to financially reward inner city teachers with income tax credits for no other reason than they teach in the inner city? Does it appear to have little or no learning merit?
Distill it down.
Take care of the learning disparities by 8th grade and the AP thing will take care of itself.
Make better use of community resources to tutor and foster learning values and minimize the contact time with home environments that aren’t conducive to learning.
posted by: City Hall Watch | February 12, 2010 10:15am
How will any of the 10 proposals decrease the achievement gap? Has anyone with education experience vetted these ideas for efficacy? What’s the metric for measuring success in the short term?
posted by: GoatBoyPHD | February 12, 2010 3:08pm
The click through to Davis Street 21st Century Mangent School has half the model. Parental involvement, nightly if necessary, produces results.
Studies in the 80s of Parochial School acheivement compared to Public schools first identified the role of parental involvement as the determinant to explain the learning gap.
In schools where parental involvement is limited the schools need to create a surrogate family our of a community of volunteers, faith-based organizations and peer tutors.
Self-esteem programs that create role peer models structured where the older students tutor peers and younger students are ingrained in the ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ system.
It’s a large learning biospehere that minimizes contact for the students from underdesirable elements which oftentimes includes the home.
Programs extend to 5:00 PM nightly and through the Summer. F/T teachers are not needed for the extended programs to work.
Granting teachers income tax credits? I haven’t seen a study in an Academic Journal yet that cites that as a learning determinant.
posted by: Tom Burns | February 13, 2010 12:05am
How about the very simple idea of identifying the minority students who lag behind academically and make them go to 1.)an after school program 2.)Saturday Academy and 3.)a summer program—-until they have caught up. They don’t have a choice as the BOE will make this THE plan to bring those that need extra help get it—-whether they like it or not——If any of you think for a moment that students who are presently behind will catch up with the present system of them attending school the same amount of time as those who are academically ahead of them, well I believe you need to wake up from that dream. I was a baseball coach who had some players that could field a ground ball easily, while other players couldn’t—well I can tell you that those who couldn’t—who chose to stay after practice to take 1000 more ground balls than their more capable counterpart—not only were able to field ground balls as well in the future—-but they could do it even better.
Whatever happened to extra effort and good old hard work instead of blame and excuses——When is the student held accountable for his own learning? When the aforementioned values become a part of the game—-everyone who wants to be a winner will have the opportunity—-Thats all—Tom
