By CHRIS POWELL
According to the state Education Department, people in Connecticut should rejoice that the state’s four-year high school graduation rate has just exceeded 90% for the first time since the 2010-11 school year. But the data is nonsense, just as it was in 2011.
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That’s because, contrary to the Education Department’s suggestion, mere graduation does not signify education. The department compiles all sorts of data about students but not the most important data — data showing what if anything students have learned and will carry with them when they enter adulthood.
For there is no statewide academic proficiency test for high school graduates, just as there are no statewide academic proficiency tests for advancement from grade to grade from kindergarten to 12th grade.
Instead advancement and graduation are entirely functions of the state’s foremost educational policy — social promotion. That is the only thing Connecticut’s high school graduation rate is measuring. Two years ago the state’s graduation rate included the Hartford Public High School student who, after graduation and admission to the University of Connecticut, revealed in a sensational interview with the Connecticut Mirror that she couldn’t read or do basic math and complained that the school system had let her down.
Of course she was probably not the only illiterate and innumerate student graduated that year in Connecticut and was certainly not the only student graduated despite lacking high school level academic proficiency.
To be fair to the state Education Department, it must be noted that the collapse of standards in public education is a national phenomenon. Two decades ago 27 states had academic proficiency tests for graduation; today only six do. Connecticut’s neighbors Massachusetts and New York are among those that recently stopped administering a proficiency test for graduation. Connecticut has never had one.
One complaint about graduation proficiency tests is that they are racist. But that students from racial minorities do less well on the tests is not an indictment of the tests but of the education they receive and their poverty and parental neglect at home. Educators and elected officials increasingly believe that this failure is best ignored and concealed and that students should be left to discover their ignorance not when it might be practical and efficient to correct it but only when they try to enter the workforce and their job options are confined to menial work and crime.
Fairness to the state Education Department also requires acknowledging that most parents in Connecticut probably don’t want to know about their children’s educational deficiencies. Most people seem to want to think that their children’s schools are wonderful, that their parenting is wonderful too, and that, as in Lake Wobegon, all their kids are above average.
There is no constituency at the state Capitol for establishing academic standards in public schools since there is no constituency for it among the public. Most families who want academic standards already send their children to private and religious schools.
Of course an immediate return to academic standards would explode public education in Connecticut and shock deficient students and parents. But might small steps be politically possible?
After all, more proficiency tests could be administered in every grade without determining advancement — a test in senior year in high school would be most telling — and the scores could be imprinted on each student’s diploma. No student would have to be required to present his diploma for review to a prospective employer, though employers might do well to ask to see an applicant’s diploma.
At least then schools would acquit themselves of any complaint that they had deceived students about their ignorance.
If academic proficiency was ever required for high school graduation, the embarrassment of a student’s academic failure might be reduced by giving ignorant graduates certificates of attendance rather than regular diplomas. In effect that’s what many diplomas are today.
Given how public education in Connecticut works now, with high school diplomas signifying no particular learning, the state might as well minimize paperwork by distributing diplomas with birth certificates.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
