ConnCAN, Tori Truscheit, January 2010

Summary
ConnCAN’s annual look at Connecticut public schools ventures this year into the realm of policy, analyzing where the state stands in the Race to the Top, the success of our teacher preparation programs, and our standards for student performance. The results: Connecticut still has the worst achievement gap in the nation between poor students and their wealthier peers, huge disparities exist among teacher preparation programs, and even our highest-performing students trail their peers in other states, including Massachusetts.

CT Context
Our best shot at turning these statistics around is the federal Race to the Top grant program. Connecticut is eligible to win up to up to $175 million or more in school funding through the competition, and action on a few key reforms – measuring teacher and school effectiveness, world-class standards, strong principal leadership, and money following the child – can make a critical difference in our prospects. Race to the Top is Connecticut’s most exciting opportunity for education reform in years, and as the legislative session begins, reforms in these four areas will be essential.

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Summary
This report grades states according to how their public policies stack up on charter schools in four key areas: authorizing, accountability, funding, and facilities. Good state charter policies will allow charters room to make innovative decisions and hold them accountable for results, but charters need equitable funding and access to facilities to exist.

CT Context
Connecticut was named a “laggard” for its charter growth and school choice policies, ranking 22 out of 40 overall. The report calls Connecticut’s charter caps “some of the most restrictive in the nation” and gives the state a 1 out of 4 for inequitable charter funding. Neighboring Massachusetts was just one of three states ranked as leaders in charter funding.

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Summary
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international test that allows for comparison of academic skills between countries, has revealed major disparities in how 15-year-olds perform around the world. This study connects student performance on the PISA and a country’s economic growth, showing that boosting PISA scores by 25 points over the next 20 years would boost OECD countries’ collective Gross Domestic Product by $115 trillion over the course of this generation’s lifetime.

CT Context
In difficult economic times, long-term investments can often slip off the radar, but this study illustrates that an investment in education – and even small improvements in student achievement – can have a serious impact on economic growth. This is a wake-up call for Connecticut, a state with one of the weakest rates of job growth in the country and the nation’s largest achievement gap. In the midst of a recession, education reform is a powerful engine for generating the long-term growth that will make Connecticut thrive.

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Summary
In this study, the Education Trust examines achievement gaps in greater detail so that policymakers can use the best data in their efforts to improve educational equity. If we’re serious about closing the gap, the report argues, we should focus on four specific aspects of student achievement: progress in closing gaps over time, whether all groups of students have improved their performance over time, the current size of the gap, and how well groups are performing compared with their peers in other areas. Emphasizing one or a few of these areas but neglecting the others will still leave children underserved.

CT Context
In the report’s third area, current gap size, the report singles out Connecticut’s worst-in-the-nation gap between poor and non-poor students, pointing out that five states have gaps that are half the size of ours. The Race to the Top federal guidelines, with their emphasis on gap-closing reforms, provide a template for what Connecticut can do to close the gap. Powerhouse reforms such as measuring teacher and school effectiveness, developing world-class standards, cultivating superstar school leaders, and ensuring that money follows children to charter schools will help Connecticut rise through the rankings and close the gap.

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Summary
As a follow-up to a national study of charter performance released in June 2009, this study examines New York City charter schools in more depth, concluding that charters have a significant, positive impact on student achievement in New York compared to traditional public schools with similar populations of students. Results were especially positive in math, where more than 50 percent of charter schools outperform traditional schools, a third perform the same, and about 16 percent perform worse. In reading, about 30 percent of charter schools outperform their traditional school counterparts. New York’s charter schools show better scores than charter schools nationally, suggesting that local policies have created a better environment for them to thrive.

CT Context
New York has become a magnet and incubator for high-performing charter schools in recent years because of charter-friendly policies that remove the barriers to success. Connecticut, already home to several of the country’s highest-performing charters, could match New York in this area, but restrictive caps and an inequitable, outdated funding system have prevented similar growth. In the current system, public charter schools only receive about 75 percent of per-pupil funding that districts receive, while “hold harmless” provisions in the state’s Education Cost Sharing formula mean that the state continues to pay districts for students that leave to attend charters. Instead of using that money to equitably fund the student’s public charter schools, the state pays twice – once to the district that no longer educates the child, and once to the charter school, but at an inequitable rate. A system where money follows the child, as in Massachusetts, could make Connecticut a leader instead of a national laggard – and help Connecticut win the Race to the Top federal grant competition.

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Summary
The Race to the Top federal grant competition allows states to compete for money based on their reforms – and plans for reforms – in four key areas. One of these areas, entitled “Great Teachers and Leaders,” makes up more than a quarter of the points for the competition, meaning that states must score well in this area or find themselves lagging in the race. Strong alternate routes to certification for teachers and principals, rigorous evaluation systems for teachers and principals that use student achievement data, an equitable distribution of highly effective teachers, and accountability for teacher preparation programs will be major factors in states’ success or failure in the competition. The report details what types of policies in these areas might help states win or lose points.

CT Context
With key reforms during the upcoming legislative session, Connecticut can become a contender for points in the “Great Teachers and Leaders” category. In the area of accountability for teacher preparation programs, we can point to recently released data from the new Foundations of Reading test that shows a discrepancy in how well our institutions of higher learning are preparing our teachers to teach reading. To move forward in this area, Connecticut should accelerate development of a teacher identifier system that links student achievement data to teachers and then links teachers back to their preparation programs.

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