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The Search for Solutions
Public education in Connecticut struggles with rising enrollments and dwindling resources
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Business New Haven
7/8/2002
By: Karen Singer
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From rising enrollments to greater use of standardized tests, K-12 public education in Connecticut has undergone tremendous changes over the last decade.
The New Haven region has been a leader in a number of respects, including the growth and the diversity of its school choices, and an increasing emphasis on early childhood education. Yet despite glimmers of improvement, serious challenges remain in urban public schools.
In 2001, Connecticut legislators earmarked $1.84 billion for K-12 education, a four-percent increase in funding over 2000. Moreover, the 2001-02 school year began with some encouraging state statistics:
- Connecticut ranked fifth in the U.S. in pupil-teacher ratio, at 13:1.
- Average class sizes ranged from 18.6 in kindergarten to 19.9 in high schools.
- The number of students per computer dropped to five, down from more than ten students per computer five years earlier.
- The state's dropout fell from 16.4 percent in 1996 and 14.6 percent in 1999 to 12.2 percent in 2000.
More high school students took SATs in Connecticut - at least eight in ten graduates - than in any other state, and Nutmeg State students achieved the highest percentage of scores 600 or above on the math and verbal parts of the test.
Although Connecticut is a standout among states on many academic yardsticks, other recent trends mirror those taking place nationwide.
“The increase in students and aging physical plants have had a significant impact on educational landscape,” says state Department of Education spokesperson Thomas Murphy. In 1988, 465,000 K-12 students attended public schools; this year there were 572,000.
Along with the population explosion has come a building boom. Local communities, supported by state grants, are pouring billions of dollars into school rehabilitation and new construction projects. Eighty-nine new schools were built in the last few years, many of them in New Haven region.
Not only are there more schools, there's also a greater variety of them.
Expanded school choice has been around since the 1960s, but the movement really picked up steam in Connecticut over the last decade. Sixteen charter schools were operational in the 2001-02 academic year; the first opened in 1997. The number of interdistrict magnet schools grew from 13 in 1997-98, with 3,500 students enrolled, to 27 with around 8,500 pupils in 2001-02, and interdistrict enrollment (“Open Choice”) swelled from 450 students in 1997-98 to nearly 1,700 in 2001-02.
“We are seeing a significant change in the types of schools, with many more offering specialized criteria or instructional focus designed to meet the specific needs of students,” Murphy says. “New Haven has really been in the forefront, creating schools of high quality that are pumping new energy into the system.”
Moreover, “Many, many initiatives with urban and suburban schools have led to tens of thousands of kids now interacting to varying degrees,” adds Edward Linehan, director for school choice in New Haven.
The catalyst for the explosion of new types of schools was the state's response to the 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court decision in the landmark Sheff v. O'Neill lawsuit. The ruling required each school board to reduce racial, ethnic and economic isolation. Connecticut has 166 school districts, but 50 percent of all minority students live in seven, including cities such as Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport.
The recent economic slowdown, however, has placed a damper on many school construction projects, as education boards across the state encounter difficulties passing budgets, and cut expenses to preserve core curricula.
“It's bloody out there,” says Robert Rader, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education. “They're not getting referenda on buildings passed, budgets are getting slashed, gifted or talented programs being cut and there's a lot more pay for play [sports programs].”
In greater New Haven, the Amity budget failed three times this year. And in East Haven, budget reallocations have slowed high school officials' efforts to meet timelines required to maintain accreditation standards.
“We making progress, but not as much as we could have if the entire budget had been adopted,” says John J. Smith, the town's high school principal.
Even though the overall dropout rate has been falling in Connecticut, part of the explanation may be a new state law raising the age a student can leave from 16 to 18. State officials acknowledge the numbers remain relatively high in Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford.
But DoE spokesman Murphy points out the same numbers of those leaving school (around 4,500 last year) in the 18-25 year old group are taking courses to earn their general education diploma (GED). The New Haven region is “a big participant in GED,” he notes.
Meanwhile, another trend - growing reliance on testing - has caused cataclysmic changes in curriculum development in Connecticut.
Over the last decade, the implementation of statewide exams has “ratcheted up curriculum more than anything else,” contends Vincent Mustaro, senior staff associate for policy service with the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education. “It has had a tremendous impact in terms of what we were teaching and how we were teaching it, and has been the largest single factor in terms of changing and improving instruction,” he says.
Two standardized tests currently are mandatory; the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), covering reading, writing and mathematics skills in grades four, six and eight, and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT), administered in the tenth grade.
Students first took the CMT in 1985. A second generation was introduced in 1993, and a third in 2000. The CAPT has been administered to tenth-graders since 1995; it was updated and improved for 2001.
Although state officials stress scores on various versions of these tests are not comparable, results generally reflect improvement over time.
Not all students measure up - particularly those in economically distressed urban districts. Last year the state education department published a list of the 28 lowest performing schools, which included ten in New Haven, three in Bridgeport, two in Waterbury and 11 in Hartford, and allocated more than $750 million for each of them.
In a related effort, state and local funding for early-childhood education has grown substantially over the past several years.
“We have committed $40 million a year to improve preschool opportunities in our 16 largest school districts and some schools that serve neighborhoods with high-poverty kids, including many in the New Haven region,” says Murphy.
A more intensified focus on early childhood education is a major change in New Haven, and a positive one, according to Pat Lucan, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers. “Some of these children have been coming to school so deprived it's very hard for them to catch up,” she says.
After-school programs, including Saturday classes and a summer school at the Roberto Clemente Middle School, have led to better test scores for students, especially in the last four years, according to principal LeRoy Williams. “When we started this, three to four percent of kids were at goal; now it's 25 to 30 percent,” he says.
In Milford, an all-day kindergarten program has made “a great deal of difference,” says Schools Superintendent Mary Jo Kramer. “Thirty-five percent of students were reading at some kind of level when they left half-day kindergarten; that jumped to 90 percent when they left full-day kindergarten.”
State Education Commissioner Theodore S. Sergi has said closing the achievement gap should be the educational goal for the next decade.
But that gap may be widening, if forecasts about new federal proficiency testing standards prove accurate. In fact, Sergi has joined the chorus of statewide education organizations predicting that 50 to 70 percent of Connecticut public schools could be identified as failing to meet the yearly progress on the new federal Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA)“proficiency standard” for students.
The “No Child Left Behind” law requires testing third- through eighth-graders each year, eliminating score discrepancies between white, black and Latino students within 12 years and penalizing deficient schools. Sergi recently met with federal officials in Washington to discuss how to implement the legislation.
The emphasis on standardized testing has placed added strain on teachers and administrators already trying to cope with added responsibilities given little or no attention a decade ago.
“Clearly, school safety has come to the forefront and become part of the curriculum, not just because of [the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks] but also the high school shootings, particularly Columbine,” says Mustaro.
In-service teacher training now includes topics such as how to deal with bloodborne pathogens and other “things that have nothing to do with curriculum or education,” says the NHFT's Lucan.
Concerns about teacher safety have also escalated in recent years, according to Leo Canty, president of the Connecticut Federation of Educational and Professional Employees.
“There are lots of threatening issues, where teachers get caught in fights, and an increasing in level of violent tendencies,” he says. “Urban areas don't want to overplay it - and the threshold for being expelled for this kind of behavior is higher.”
Lucan has seen more sexual harassment charges against teachers in New Haven schools in recent years, although “most have been totally unsubstantiated.”
Another disconcerting trend has to do with expected retirement of around 45 percent of teachers and administrators over the next decade. Teacher shortages, already a problem statewide, are likely to increase, especially in inner-city schools, where such personnel have been leaving lately for suburbs offering better pay and benefits.
“There was a very big exodus last year in New Haven,” notes Michael Savage, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Schools. Fewer qualified individuals are likely to seek education careers, he warns, because of job pressures and lack of resources.
David Larson, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, also predicts “a pending dearth of candidates for leadership positions.”
Although there's little likelihood of a quick fix for inner-city school problems, there is mounting evidence that school choice is a promising path.
Progress made by magnet school students is one indicator, according to Barbara Beaudin, an associate math professor at the University of Hartford. Beaudin has spent the past year studying 22 magnet schools, including 13 in the New Haven area, for the state's Bureau of Evaluation and Educator Standards.
Preliminary findings indicate magnet students' scores on the tenth-grade CAPT test are relatively low, but have improved at a faster rate in the last five years than the statewide improvement average.
Beaudin also discovered that over the last three years, the New Haven magnet schools' cumulative dropout rate averaged around nine percent, compared to a statewide average of 14 percent.
Large proportions of magnet school graduates completed college preparatory courses and took Advanced Placement and college courses while in high school. Almost 94 percent of magnet school graduates took the SAT, and more than two-thirds enrolled in four-year colleges.
“The net effect of all this is a reduced drop-out rate and higher rate of kids going on to higher education,” says school choice director Linehan. “We also have an astoundingly high rate of graduates going on to some sort of secondary level of education because they've been encouraged to think of themselves as college material.
“Smaller, more personalized schools may well be part of the magic that's happening.”
More school choices have led to “a tremendous upsurge in the ability of students to cross district boundaries to get their education, whether it's for magnet schools, Project Choice or some vocational technical programs,” says Peter Young, executive director of Area Cooperative Educational Services. ACES manages 26 school districts in south-central Connecticut, including the Wintergreen Magnet School in Hamden. Young expects an even more variety of schools in the region over the next decade.
Currently, almost half of the 50 schools in New Haven “are being described a part of a system of choice,” Linehan says. “The challenge for the remainder of this decade is to expand the systems of options to include all schools.”
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