By CHRIS POWELL
Whoopee! Last week the state Education Department cheerfully announced that Connecticut public school students in Grades 3 through 8 showed marginal improvements on the most recent state proficiency tests in English and math.
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Students from poor households, who constitute 44% of the student population, had an increase of seven-tenths of a percent in English and four-tenths of a percent in math. Students from non-poor households increased their proficiency by four-tenths of a percent in both English and math.
There were similar marginal gains for Black and Hispanic students but the performance gaps between them and white students remain huge.
The Education Department’s chief performance officer, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, said that while the improvements seem small, “they translate to thousands of students statewide who are performing at a higher level.”
But celebrating these marginal improvements just distracts from the disaster that the new proficiency levels are.
For among the students from poor households, only 32.5% now meet grade-level proficiency in English and only 27% are proficient in math.
Even among the non-poor students, only 66% are deemed proficient in English and only 62.5% in math. That is, even among the non-poor students, more than a third are not proficient in either subject.
Of course this is a distressingly old story and explains why state government administers so few proficiency tests to students. National tests sometimes given to Connecticut students report similarly appalling results — that most students are proficient in neither English nor math even when they graduate from high school.
The closing of the state’s schools during the Covid-19 virus epidemic in 2020 is widely blamed for the decline in educational performance since then, though performance was declining much earlier.
“Covid was such a gut punch for a lot of these kids,” the president of the state’s largest teachers union, the Connecticut Education Association, Kate Dias, said in response to the new test scores. “They came out of Covid a little more cynical about their education.”
Indeed, and why shouldn’t they have become more cynical about education? For if they hadn’t already discerned it, the closing of schools during the epidemic emphasized that they didn’t have to go to school to keep being advanced from grade to grade and graduate from high school even if they were generally ignorant. That policy — social promotion — was in force in Connecticut long before the epidemic and it remains in force.
Chronic absenteeism of students from school in Connecticut recently was reported to be down to an average of 16%, and Dias predicts that proficiency test scores will rise if chronic absenteeism continues to fall. But correlating with household poverty, chronic absenteeism remains far higher in the cities — between 25% and 33% there — probably in large part because social promotion remains policy and demoralizes children and parents into doubting the idea of going to school at all.
The marginal increase in test scores prompted performance officer Gopalakrishnan to declare: “Success is possible in any district and for any child. All students should be achieving these standards.”
He wasn’t asked: So why do most students not meet proficiency standards, and why don’t schools require them to meet those standards as a condition of grade advancement and graduation? What is the policy incentive for students to meet proficiency standards and for their parents to get them to school and value their education?
If even the state Education Department has so little regard for its product and its results are so marginal, why does the product cost so much and keep costing more every year?
For the money keeps flowing in. Last week Governor Lamont and Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker announced the state’s receipt of a $10 million federal grant to train teachers to teach reading better in kindergarten through third grade. The grant’s implication is that the teachers aren’t so good at it now because they use mistaken techniques.
The awful new proficiency test results suggest that one of those mistaken techniques is simply social promotion.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 