By Chris Powell
Another state election campaign has prompted candidates to pander to parents and teachers about the wonderfulness of Connecticut’s public schools. Of course neither parents nor teachers want to hear that their schools are not really so wonderful. Instead parents want to believe that, as in Lake Wobegon, all students are above average. While teachers know different, they don’t want parents to know, lest questions be raised.
But this week a rude blast about education in Connecticut was delivered by the new test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, “the nation’s report card.”
According to the NAEP report, which measures the performance of fourth- and eighth-graders, only 35% of Connecticut’s students in those two grades are proficient in English, and only 37% of fourth-graders and 30% of eighth-graders are proficient in math. Compared to the results of the most recent previous NAEP tests, taken in 2019, Connecticut’s new scores for English are down 6% for both fourth- and eighth-graders, and for math down 8% for fourth-graders and 9% for eighth-graders — sharp declines.
Of course everyone will think these declines were caused mostly by the interruption to schooling during the virus epidemic of the last two years. But no — for Connecticut’s scores were [ITALICS] much [END ITALICS] higher in 2011 and had fallen sharply by 2019. That is, educational performance in Connecticut, as measured by the NAEP, began a sharp fall [ITALICS] nine years before [END ITALICS] the epidemic.
Worse, the decline in the state’s new math scores as students advance from fourth to eighth grade — dropping from 37% proficiency to 30% — suggests that the performance of Connecticut students actually [ITALICS] deteriorates [END ITALICS] with their advancement.
Why? Maybe because after a few years in school students realize that, under the state’s only absolute educational policy — social promotion — their effort has no bearing on their advancement.
The NAEP report also finds that the performance of Connecticut students has fallen relative to students in other states.
Education experts and elected officials boast about Connecticut’s slowly rising high school graduation rate. But the rising graduation rate correlates with falling proficiency. Indeed, graduation rates may be rising precisely [ITALICS] because [END ITALICS] proficiency is falling. For social promotion has made graduation much easier, almost effortless, requiring no learning, just some attendance.
The state’s infamous racial and ethnic gaps in student performance endure in the new NAEP results, but so does another gap disclosed in the data but overlooked — the gap between the performance of students eligible for free lunches and students not eligible. This gap is almost unchanged since 1998, indicating that the racial and ethnic performance gaps result mainly from household poverty.
Since household poverty is largely a matter of a lack of parents and attention given to children at home, and since that failure cannot be discussed in polite company in Connecticut, presumably the gaps can never be closed.
Education experts and elected officials will construe the new NAEP report to mean only that Connecticut should keep increasing spending on schools. Since he got to Washington, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, formerly Connecticut’s education commissioner, has been little more than a shill for the teacher unions, often calling for raising teacher salaries. But that is where most increases in education spending long have been going, teacher unions being so influential politically. Connecticut teachers have obtained nearly the highest salaries in the country.
Ironically, because of the reflexive impulse to spend more in the face of educational failure, teacher unions profit more from failure than success. But spending more on education is what Connecticut has been doing since enacting the Education Enhancement Act in 1986, which began 35 years of raising spending and tinkering with financial aid formulas with little effect on student performance and the racial and ethnic achievement gaps.
Since the NAEP data shows that student performance in Connecticut was declining steadily long before the virus epidemic, is there any [ITALICS] educational [END ITALICS] rationale for spending more on education, or just a political rationale?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut’s government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 