Connecticut

Mastery testing still show large gaps
The Connecticut Post on Line

Connecticut's latest Mastery Test scores do not offer encouraging news for the state's major urban centers, including Bridgeport.

Significant performance gaps remain between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts, despite concerted state efforts in recent years to bolster urban school districts and their programs.

Black and Hispanic students — who comprise more than 90 percent of the public school population in the state's urban centers — lagged far behind in the three subject areas tested: math, reading and writing.

Asian students scored the highest on the Connecticut Mastery Tests. They outperformed whites, blacks and Hispanics in each subject except reading, in which white students matched their performance.

Clearly, however, state lawmakers and education officials must do more to provide greater resources and strategies to urban centers such as Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven and New Britain. In some of the subject areas at specific grade levels, less than one in five students scored at or above the state goal.

This year for the first time since the Mastery Tests began in 1986, some 250,000 students in all grades from third through eighth were required to take the tests because of the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Law.

How can the state help local schools districts?

One large step would be to dramatically expand pre-school programs, especially in the urban areas.

There's more than sufficient research data available that demonstrates pre-school offerings can dramatically improve young students chances for learning and for succeeding in the future.
In the last decade, Govs. John G. Rowland and M. Jodi Rell, along with state lawmakers, finally advanced initiatives to boost early childhood education.

The General Assembly, for example, earlier this year approved funding to open pre-school slots for about 1,000 students. But that number is a far cry from what's needed to meet the demand in locales such as Bridgeport.

Many school districts have also found that targeted and focused testing of students throughout a school year helps to determine progress and allows immediate remedial steps to be taken.

Another area for improvement is to boost state funding to distressed districts such as Bridgeport, which has been shortchanged under the state ECS formula in the past decade compared to several other urban districts.

Furthermore, the state Department of Education and state Board of Education need to be more aggressive in assuring that local municipalities are contributing their fair share to public education.

We're not saying that more money is the cure-all to closing this achievement gap, because it's not. But the recent flap over the state's Minimum Expenditure Requirement concerning Bridgeport education funding, showed a state education bureaucracy with little spine to truly aid an underfunded district and its 21,000-plus students.

In addition, municipalities and the state must find more ways of involving parents in the education process of their own children.

This can pose a formidable task in urban areas where the percentage of single-parent households is high, a foreign language may be the predominant family tongue, and families below the poverty line suffer from a complex string of socio-economic problems.

As outgoing state Education Commissioner Betty J. Sternberg observed last week in sizing up the problems, "We've got teenage parents who themselves don't have the literacy skills they need."

Decades have passed since the landmark Horton vs. Meskill and Sheff vs. O'Neill desegregation court decisions were handed down.

Few can argue that public school education hasn't improved during the past quarter century.
However, the annual Mastery Test scores make it all too clear that our schools continue to fail a large percentage of our students and that the state has not done enough.

Comment: Education will come most easily to those children who come from parents who love education. It's the example of education at home that most influences a child. There are cultures within our own who place little if any value on education. And at the same time, teachers are learning less and less and walking into classrooms clutching the book because without the guidebook, they couldn't really teach. It's a terrible combination.

And because primary and secondary education aren't working, the new star is the preschool star. Let's throw billions into that so we can come up short in ten years. Education must be made desirable to children. It has to have a draw; today it has little if any draw. It's dull, it's too many hours, to early in the morning, and it has little if any immediate rewards. We've taken parties, food, in school visits, recess, plays, and field trips away from the classroom and given the children workbook pages.

So who is going to thrive? The children of parents who read, who write, who can do a math problem, who focus on the home as the center of the world.