By CHRIS POWELL
According to the recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given to students in fourth and eighth grades throughout the country and styled “The Nation’s Report Card,” Connecticut’s students are performing worse in reading and math than in 2019, before the national virus epidemic, which disastrously interrupted schooling nearly everywhere.
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Connecticut’s scores remain slightly above the national average, but the scores of many states now are higher than Connecticut’s. The Yankee Institute’s Andrew Fowler reports that Connecticut’s fourth-graders rank 18th in math and eighth in reading, while the state’s eighth-graders rank 17th in math and fifth in reading.
Only 42% of the state’s fourth-graders are “proficient” in math and only 36% in reading. Among eighth-graders, only 36% are “proficient” in math and only 35% in reading.
It seems unlikely that Connecticut’s students will ever catch up. So why can’t the state improve?
Maybe it’s because the most damaging aspect of the epidemic wasn’t the interruption to schooling caused by the closings that were demanded by teacher unions and conceded by feckless municipal officials. Maybe the most damaging aspect of the epidemic was the advertising it did for Connecticut’s only consistent policy of public education: social promotion.
That is, nearly every student who lost a year of education found himself advanced to the next grade or graduated anyway. This was a proclamation to unmotivated students and neglectful parents that there is no need to learn.
Of course long before the epidemic students got hints of social promotion if they noticed that their most ignorant and disruptive peers were being advanced along with them. But the mass advancement of the uneducated emphasized that academic and behavioral standards had been abandoned.
Neglectful parents surely noticed this before conscientious parents did, since schools had relieved them of responsibility for their children. This explains the sharp increase in the chronic absenteeism of students, especially in impoverished cities. For why go to school when education doesn’t count even in school itself, when school is used mainly for babysitting? So chronic absenteeism is worst among older students, who can fend for themselves outside school.
But by now even many conscientious parents may have noticed the phoniness of public education in Connecticut, what with the scandal of the Hartford Public High School graduate who last September confessed to the Connecticut Mirror that she is illiterate. Now she is suing for $3 million in damages.
Originally Hartford School Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez said she would investigate and report about the illiterate graduate’s case, but she has decided to retire instead. The most recent word about the case from the commissioner of the state Education Department, Charlene M. Russell-Tucker, was that the Hartford school system was obstructing her own investigation.
The Education Department has expressed no great concern about the long decline in student performance. The department and most state legislators seem more concerned about keeping illegal immigrant children in school.
Even impoverished Louisiana is trying harder than Connecticut. In recent years Louisiana has risen in national education rankings and now is endeavoring to stop social promotion at third grade with intensive tutoring. Most educators in Connecticut don’t even think social promotion is a problem.
Student underperformance and chronic absenteeism are, with poverty, most severe among minority groups in cities. Yet, astoundingly, three state representatives from impoverished and heavily minority cities propose to make underperformance and chronic absenteeism even worse.
The legislators — Reps. Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven; Christopher Rosario, D-Bridgeport; and Geraldo Reyes, D-Waterbury — have introduced a bill to give all Connecticut students a holiday on Three Kings Day, a festival popular with Puerto Ricans.
Some Connecticut school systems already take a holiday on Three Kings Day, including those in Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, East Hartford, Manchester, and Windham — municipalities where chronic absenteeism is already high, student performance is low, and much more schooling, not less, is badly needed.
A serious education system might link school holidays to student performance, granting them only when earned by proof of learning, not distributing them as ethnic patronage.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 