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| New Haven, Achievment First students 2016 |
COVID and the political response to it in Connecticut – Governor Ned Lamont and the Democrat dominated General Assembly shut down public education in the state – has lifted the lid on the state’s pedagogical Pandora’s Box.
Some literate students in Connecticut, increasingly
diminishing in number, may recognize the reference. Pandora’s Box contained all
the evils of the world. Once its lid had been removed, the evils rushed out to
feast on suffering humanity. Only Hope remained in the box.
The “Nation’s Report Card,” the National Assessment of
Educational Progress, has now been sent home to parents.
The results, a story in the Washington
Examiner tells us, “weren’t pretty. The average fourth grader’s
reading score dropped 5 points since 2020 — the most significant drop among the
age group in over two decades. The math test results were even worse as the
average 9-year-old faced a 7-point drop, making it one of the most
disappointing results in the test’s history. Moreover, lower-performing and
disadvantaged students encountered greater test score losses than their peers,
further widening the achievement gap.”
The Examiner recommends that parents of public education
should agitate for more charter schools. But charter schools are encumbered
with needless regulations imposed by politicians who are, for obvious
reasons, exceedingly obligated to public school union honchoes.
However, “If the restrictions held against the establishment
of new charter schools were removed, this free and open educational opportunity
would play an essential role in getting students back on track. Charter schools
in New York City, for example, already have a history of great success. A study
published earlier this year reported around 90% of charter schools authorized
in the city scored higher on the standardized math and English language arts
exams than their local traditional public school counterparts in 2019.”
Why should it be impossible to give success a chance?
For every pedagogical problem there is a solution – regarded
balefully by union-bought politicians as wrong and, not incidentally,
unnecessarily disabling to union heads and politicians who rely on union
contributions and foot soldiers to assist them in their re-election efforts.
Achievement
First charter schools in Connecticut are among the best in the
nation. According to its site, “When Amistad Academy Middle opened its doors in
New Haven in 1999, it proved what’s possible when potential meets opportunity.
From there, we grew to 10 outstanding schools in New Haven, Bridgeport and
Hartford. At all of our schools, our students are outscoring local districts,
and they are often performing better than their peers across the state and in
wealthy communities.”
The appraisal is much too modest. In “A
Pedagogical Flower Blooms In New Haven,” this writer noted, “Consider:
The unemployment rate among students with less than a high school education is
11 percent -- but only 2 percent among those who have acquired more than a high
school degree; 100 percent of the students enrolled in an Achievement First
public charter school will gain acceptance to a college or university; 97
percent will matriculate; 50 percent are projected to graduate from
college. This last figure may seem slight to some, but in fact the percentage
is larger than that of college graduates who had attended schools at some of
Connecticut's most prestigious and successful high schools.
“In Connecticut – but significantly not in New York and
Rhode Island – state financing is set about 17%
lower than public school financing. And that is why Achievement
First will not in the future be expanding in Connecticut.”
Obsequies
were pronounced over the last Catholic elementary school in Hartford, Connecticut’s
Capital city, several years ago.
Large corporations have long ago learned that the easiest
way to avoid embarrassing competition is to buy out successful competitors or,
better still, to prevail upon the reigning political power to eliminate those
competing for the same dollars.
A comparison with other nearby states of Connecticut
students’ math and reading proficiency from 2012-2013 would show a steady
decline in math and reading scores.
Problems, of course, can always be fixed, but not if the
problem solvers – ideally, teachers allied cooperatively with parents – are
focused on wrong solutions. American education today is sagging under the
burdens imposed upon it by the omnicompetent administrative state. The
quickening and cancerous growth of a pedagogical administrative overlay cannot
be arrested by the distant impositions of administrators.
A graph taken from a Department of Education table listing
“Staff employed in public elementary and secondary school systems, by type of
assignment” provides an illuminating snapshot, of the growth of administrative
overlay to teachers from Fall 2000 to Fall 2017, according to Education
Next: The graph shows an increase of School District Administrate Staff
of 74.9%, an increase of Principals and Assistant Principals of 33.4% and an increase of Teachers of
7.7%.
At some point, sooner rather than later, it may be well
worth asking what, precisely, the pedagogical tax dollar is purchasing.
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