In every Connecticut city and town, public education is by far the largest budget item. When terms such as “layoffs,” “closures” and “belt-tightening” are tossed around, the education industry may not be the first that comes to mind. That was true until this year, anyway.
In July, 82 Wallingford teachers learned they’d keep their jobs after months of job threats. Only 19 were actually laid off. In March, 54 West Haven teachers were handed pink slips and Milford schools laid off 21 non-tenured teachers.
When reduced to its most fundamental elements, public education is cold, hard business.
Will Clark, New Haven Public Schools’ chief operating officer, looks at running the city’s schools the same as running a business. At $173 million annually, education is by far the biggest line item in the city’s budget.
“It’s a multi-million dollar operation, and if you do not have in place systems and protocols that take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies and business techniques, you’ll ultimately have a system that does not allow itself or lend itself to the maximum amount of resources going into the education side of business,” Clark explains.
An urban district that has historically had issues with resources and funding, New Haven has been at this fight for finances for quite some time.
As Clark explains: “Now, the playing field is a bit more leveled as financial struggles are hitting across the board. But we’ve been in this position for a long time and it’s become a matter of practice.”
New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) are actually seeking to hire math, science, music, English, Spanish and history teachers. Aside from advertising in local and state publications, the Board of Ed reaches as far as Puerto Rico to find qualified candidates.
“We try to be as competitive as we can be with the salary, but we’re so reliant on the state and the city for budget that when they start cutting, we have to tighten our belt further,” Clark says.
An entry-level teacher with a bachelor’s degree makes $40,000 and a teacher with a sixth-year degree is paid $45,000 at hire. The average salary (entry level and tenured included) for public-school teachers in Connecticut is $58,688.
NHPS are run through a combination of state and city resources and occasionally some federal funds that are come through the state.
“When you look at, as a pile of money, everything we’ve got, it looks like a big pile, but a large percentage of that money comes with strict conditions and is not ours to spend as we wish,” Clark explains.
For example, NHPS was just awarded a five-year federal Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grant totaling $1,277,202 for a Chinese and Arabic culture and language program.
“If you don’t use the money exactly how it was intended, you run the risk of losing it,” Clark explains. “There is not a lot of flexibility. Over 90 percent of our budget is locked in before we even start — locked into personnel, transportation, special education, medical benefits, pension benefits, utilities — all of the things that go into running the show.”
Clark does believe that what keeps New Haven from laying off teachers and closing schools is a history of challenges.
“When we reworked our contract with the teachers last year, the focus, the numbers and the provisions we put in are strikingly similar to a lot of the things [U.S. Secretary of Education]Arne Duncan, Barack Obama and [former president of the United Federation of Teachers] Randi Weingarten are talking about. We have positioned ourselves right in the epicenter of where the funding should be going,” he says.
Enrollment in New Haven’s 49 schools has been flat at almost 21,000 for the past few years, but a blip of growth is expected soon. The growth is not expected to require more than the 1,600 teachers New Haven now employs.
“We’ll probably see some student increase based on new housing developments over the next few years,” Clark says.
“Because of our size and nature of the beast, we have a decent level of attrition every year and we’re very cognizant of tracking who’s leaving and who’s staying along with the student population moves,” he adds. “We’ll redeploy teachers and work that attrition number as best we can. We generally lose around 50 teachers per year. The real trick is redeploying internally and not re-filling all of those slots.”
Choices in Education
When it comes to public schools, families generally have three choices: the school in their district, a magnet school or a charter school.
Charter schools are chartered by the state and governed by an independent board — a non-profit structure with a board of directors that function independently from the local school district.
“That governing structure is not in itself a guarantee of the school’s success, but what we do see in Connecticut is that as a cohort, charter schools are very high performing and are achieving success in helping to close the achievement gap,” says Alex Johnston, chief executive officer of the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN), a statewide education advocacy program with a goal of building support for changing policies that work toward closing the state’s achievement gap. Johnston also serves on the New Haven Board of Education.
Students from a specific geographic area are accepted to charter schools on a lottery basis. They are tuition-free.
“Charter and magnet schools are schools of choice and the parents and students who choose to attend are making a decision on what educational environment they find most attractive,” Johnston says.
In New Haven, the Elm City College Preparatory School and Amistad Academy run elementary, middle and high schools. Also in New Haven, Common Ground is a college preparatory high school with an environmental studies theme.
New Haven has nine interdistrict elementary magnet schools, two middle schools and six high schools.
Under state statute, magnet schools intend to create a diverse learning environment that’s capable of attracting students from surrounding districts and to work on reducing the racial, economic and ethnic isolation in the core cities.
Their second purpose, according to William Magnotta, who oversees the state’s magnet school program, is to create a curriculum that’s unique and capable of attracting a population of students from various backgrounds.
He says there are huge waiting lists of kids in urban areas in New Haven, Hartford and Waterbury. Bridgeport has a new elementary magnet school that will open in September and Magnotta says the wait list for that school is also long.
“Generally when you apply to a school that has a particular focus that you are interested in as a student, you’re more excited about what’s going on and the program can be made more rigorous and challenging because it’s something you look forward to doing,” Magnotta explains.
Magnet high schools tend to have curricula with a particular focus. For example, the Sound School focuses on agri- and aquaculture and the city’s new Metropolitan Business Academy focuses on commerce.
“When you’re exciting a child about what they’re learning, whether it’s the arts, science or business, the kids have something else to be excited about and come to school for,” says Clark. “That excites them to be learners and that translates into test scores.”
Race to the Top
Closing the achievement gap as measured by test scores is directly tied to additional funding that schools may receive, but according to Johnston, the additional funding won’t come without some new policy in place.
In May Gov. M. Jodi Rell signed into law S.B. 38 (An Act Concerning Education Reform), a bill that, in addition to other changes, requires school boards with low-achieving schools to create school governance councils made up mostly of students' parents or guardians. The councils would be empowered to advise the principal on the school budget before it is submitted to the superintendent, interview candidates to fill principal vacancies, and vote to reconstitute low-achieving schools using models included in the bill.
The new law increases the number of credits required for high school graduation and requires students to pass exams in core subjects such as math, history, biology and English, while empowering parents, school boards and the state to step in when schools are failing.
“This new law raises academic criteria, boosts requirements for graduation and puts a much-needed emphasis on core areas of study such as math, science and technology,” Rell said during the signing ceremony in East Hartford.
The new law was intended to enhance Connecticut’s chances to secure up to $175 million in federal “Race to the Top” grant funding that rewards states for taking bold steps in education reform.
In January, the federal government launched Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion education reform fund, made available by the U.S. Department of Education as part of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
Says ConnCAN’s Johnston: “Whatever happens with Race to the Top, this legislation lays some very solid foundation for the next governor, commissioner and board of education to continue making bold changes that are going to continue impacting students. Nobody really expected Connecticut was going to win in Round One, but some people were taken aback to finish 25th out of 41 states.”
Connecticut was not among the 18 states chosen to share the $3 billion in the second round of funding, either, but hopes are high that the state will win in the third round. New Haven Public Schools would have received $10 million in the second round of the competition.
Thomas Murphy, a spokesman for the office of state Education’s Commissioner Mark K. McQuillan, says the new reform is directly tied to the Race to the Top competition, but will take the state further than funding.
“Only Tennessee and Delaware were funded in the first round, but we believe this legislation will help strengthen our position in future rounds,” Murphy says. Before the state was notified that it did not qualify for the second round of funding, Murphy says, “We are relying on that second round and if the funding is not forthcoming, we will not be able to do these things — certainly not on the schedule that we’ve outlined on the grant application. We just don’t have the dollars in state and local government to make it all happen.”
Connecticut has the largest achievement gap in the nation, according to the National Assessment on Educational Progress, sometimes called “The Nation’s Report Card,” which shows that low-income students in Connecticut are achieving more than three grade levels behind everyone else in the state in math. There is a similar gap for reading.
“It’s a serious problem and there’s no single cause or source of the problem, but there are many solutions in terms of state policy,” Johnston says. “Twenty years ago, Connecticut was leading the nation in student achievement and was on the cutting edge of education policy. We were one of the first states to implement statewide standards along with a system of assessments linked to those standards. That’s what we know as the CMT. We’ve lost our edge in policy while other states — like Massachusetts and Florida — are far more innovative.”
For example, academic achievement by students of Latino background in Florida and Massachusetts had a remarkable upswing in the past ten years.
Johnston believes Connecticut’s education-funding system needs to change in some fundamental ways, and calls the existing system a hodge-podge not connected with student learning or achievement.
“We’re working very hard to shift funding to a student-centered approach,” Johnston says.
Murphy says it will take a combination of efforts and support to receive the return on investment the state makes in education dollars.
“The business community has been very supportive of the state’s reform plan and its application for Race to the Top funds,” he says. “CBIA and several chambers of commerce have written in support of the application. The business community is especially supportive of the secondary-school reform initiative, which calls for increased emphasis on math and science, new requirements for world language and higher standards for graduation. They believe, as do we, that these things will better prepare our students to succeed in the international economy and make our state more competitive in the world.”
Regarding the return on investment New Haven makes in its students and their future, Will Clark says: “We have consciously made the choice to work in a collaborative model with our local union, the federal government and the state of Connecticut in positioning ourselves as what we think is the best urban district in the nation. To some extent that’s a slogan, but to a large extent, it’s a lot of hard work, focus and a really well thought-out plan.”
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